Trump Welcomes A.P.’s Photographers. Its Reporters? Not So Much.
The White House now has conflicting approaches for Associated Press journalists as it fights the news service in court over access to presidential events.
“I’m pretty grumpy,” Evan Vucci, the chief Washington photographer for The Associated Press, said in federal court in March. It was “rough,” he said, for a news photographer like him to “sit around and not do anything.”
Mr. Vucci was testifying as part of The A.P.’s legal challenge against the White House’s decision to bar the wire service from events covered by the press pool, a small contingent of journalists dispatched to chronicle the president’s actions at limited-space events.
Arguments in that case continued on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At stake is whether the president is entitled to curate the crew of reporters who cover official events in the Oval Office. Can he boot those whose work he doesn’t like?
Related Knowledge Center: The White House vs. the press
Whether it’s the Des Moines Register’s publication of an unfavorable election poll, a routine edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, or the Associated Press’s decision in its authoritative stylebook to continue to use “Gulf of Mexico,” Donald Trump and the White House have used executive authority and legal reprisals in an effort to punish and suppress press coverage that runs contrary to the administration’s preferred narratives.
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