White House Access Press Shrinks Like Feckless Daisies After AP Kicked Out Of Briefing Room For Rejecting ‘Gulf Of America’ Name Change

You probably saw that one of Donald Trump’s early executive orders was to demand that the Gulf Of Mexico be renamed the Gulf Of America. It’s pointless pseudo-productivity, and an obvious effort to excite his base’s nationalist and racist tendencies. Amoral cowards at Google got right to work making the change in their map products, causing Mexico to threaten ambiguous legal action.

Media giants, keen to have their big shitty mergers approved, also got right to work making the change. Except for the Associated Press, which said it would continue to continue using the 400-year-old original name, in part because it has a global audience, and in part because the United States doesn’t actually own a large swath of the territory it’s attempting to rename.

This caused an immediate tizzy at the White House, which decided to ban AP reporters from the White House briefing room. Julie Pace, AP’s senior vice president and executive editor, wrote to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to complain about the trampling of the agency’s First Amendment rights:

“The actions taken by this White House were plainly intended to punish the AP for the content of its speech,” Pace wrote. “It is among the most basic tenets of the First Amendment that the government cannot retaliate against the public or the press for what they say.”

There’s been a not too surprising lack of solidarity for the treatment of the Associated Press by the White House access press, who are clearly concerned that demonstrating any sort of collective backbone might result in them no longer being invited to the White House Christmas party. The White House Correspondents Association has numerous paths for collective action. They’ve chosen fecklessness.

That includes CNN’s high six-figure “media critic” Brian Stelter, who responded to one BlueSky user by insisting that the best course of action for DC reporters is to shrink like wilting daisies:

There’s a lot of wrong packed into such a small space.

Firstly, journalism should be hostile to authoritarians trying to dismantle the United States. There have been endless conversations about this built on experience from reporters in kleptocratic regimes around the world for generations. Journalists aren’t just soulless observers; the fascist dismantling of governance and democracy is a direct threat to human survival. Journalists are, surprisingly enough, human beings living in a democracy. Being a “dispassionate observer” to your own destruction is cowardice by another name.

Stelter’s claim that journalists should remain clinical observers while their country is dismantled and sold for scrap by billionaire manbabies is all the more hollow because most of these access journalists aren’t “neutral.” Most work for large, right-wing billionaire-owned media conglomerates, whose news orgs demonstrate a clear center-right, corporatist bias already.

These are journalists who aren’t really objective when it comes to unskeptically parroting the latest corporate merger talking points, press release, or lie-packed CEO statement. They’re not particularly objective when it comes time to normalize the law-breaking of the GOP. Most outlet execs (like Brian’s boss Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav) have already responded to authoritarianism by hiring more Republicans and softening their coverage of Republican policy positions.

But human existence and First Amendment rights are imperiled, and suddenly guys like Stelter pretend to be the poster children for sacred, clinically-objective journalism. It would be a more compelling argument if there was evidence of this ever really being standard operating procedure at places like CNN. The fact that CNN’s top media critic understands none of this is demonstrative of the point.

Another problem with Stelter’s claim is the Trump administration is going to be hostile to journalism either way. It’s going to steadily kick real journalists out of the briefing room and replace them with the propagandists at right wing bullshit mills like OAN, NewsMax, Breitbart, The Daily Caller. The Pentagon is already doing that. This doesn’t just magically stop if you’re quiet and polite to Donald Trump.

And finally you don’t need to be present in the White House briefing room to do quality journalism. Most of the best journalism of this era is already being done by smaller outlets and independent reporters with a fraction of the financing, access, or staff of the major players. And it’s not like most White House access reporters are genuinely using said access to creatively or meaningfully challenge King Donald anyway.

The treatment of the AP (and the Trump FCC’s bullying of media giants that refuse to kiss the ring) is just a small part of a generational GOP quest to destroy real journalism and informed consensus. Journalists are already in this fight for survival whether they like it or not. And they’re losing, badly. They might as well demonstrate some solidarity and backbone.