The Trump White House shut out the AP. They keep showing up anyway.
For the past month and a half, Associated Press journalists who cover the White House have existed in a state that one reporter likened to Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment about a cat that is simultaneously dead and alive.
“The AP could be spotted in the parking lot directly across from the entrance to the club, continuing Schrödinger’s Pool Duty at a safe remove from we the official ones,” Washington Post reporter Michael Birnbaum wrote in a March 8 pool report.
Since Feb. 11, when the administration punished the wire service for continuing to use the term “Gulf of Mexico” after President Donald Trump renamed it the “Gulf of America,” the AP has been barred from official White House events and left out of the pool of journalists that cover the president and publish dispatches when space for press access is limited.
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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