As a former White House occupant might have put it, “c’mon, man.”
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled the Trump administration violated the vaunted principle of freedom of the press when it barred the Associated Press from certain White House events because the news agency refused to go along with its decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America.
Because, as you might have noticed, Americans have been absolutely starved for coverage of the Trump White House without the AP’s presence at fundraising dinners President Donald Trump might attend — or the motorcades he uses to get there.
“Under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,” District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, wrote in stentorian tones. “The Constitution requires no less.”
When it comes to battles between presidential administrations and news organizations, the AP v. Trump tussle isn’t exactly the Crown vs. Zenger case, the jury ruling in colonial New York that helped establish the ideal of press freedom in what would become the United States of America.
Heck, it’s barely on a par with the court ruling that restored CNN blowhard Jim Acosta’s White House press credentials during the first Trump administration.
The AP, of course, trumpeted the decision.
While its article was headlined, reasonably enough, “AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its journalists,” some of its content bordered on laughable.
“What a splendid and well — deserved First Amendment triumph. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would be pleased and relieved,” attorney Floyd Abrams is quoted as saying. (It’s almost enough to wonder if AP reporter David Bauder was writing with his tongue in his cheek.)
Do you agree with McFadden’s ruling?
Yes, there’s no doubt those Founding Fathers would have been “pleased and relieved” to know that the Republic they helped found would still have, almost 250 years later, a Constitution that protected the business model of a private organization.
Because that’s what McFadden’s ruling did.
“To state the obvious, if the AP’s wire reporters are not in the room when news happens, they can hardly be the first to break the news,” McFadden wrote.
“Instead, they are forced to wait and pick up whatever scraps of verifiable information they can find as they watch their competitors break the story first.”
“These disadvantages have poisoned the AP’s business model.”
Well, heaven and the First Amendment forfend that AP’s sacred business model be inconvenienced.
The truly funny part of all this is that, outside of the news business, almost no one knows about it.
There’s not one American in 10,000 who has noticed a bit of difference in the news coverage of the White House since Feb. 11, when the Trump administration blocked it, as the AP described, “from being among the small group of journalists to cover Trump in the Oval Office or aboard Air Force One, with sporadic ability to cover him at events in the East Room.”
Coverage of Trump is still relentless. It’s still relentlessly negative. And it still reflects the inherent liberal bias of the news organizations that are doing it.
Amid Russia’s war against Ukraine in Europe, Israel’s efforts to wipe out Hamas and free its hostages in the Middle East, and Trump’s ongoing, escalating tariff impositions that are rocking business globally, it’s a rock-solid bet that at breakfast tables, diner counters and saloons across the country, Americans are not asking each other where the AP is in all this.
So, yes, there might well be a First Amendment argument involved here, but the practical effect of the AP not being in its usual place has, for most Americans, been literally nonexistent.
More to the point is the AP’s self-regard in how the whole dispute arose, when the news agency declined to go along with the administration’s decision to rename a body of water.
The AP’s reasoning wasn’t outrageous on its face — “Gulf of Mexico” has been around for a long, long time. And AP does have a customer base outside the United States.
But its claims of high-minded devotion to integrity of both thought and word strain credibility, considering the organization hasn’t exactly distinguished itself as a profile in courage when it comes to defying politically motivated mangling of the English language.
The AP cravenly decided — amid the George Floyd mania of 2020 — that “black” should be written as uppercase “Black” when referring to black Americans.
“The lowercase black is a color, not a person,” the AP’s vice president of standards John Daniszewski said at the time, according to the news service. (It sounds like something you might hear from a tween making friendship bracelets outside a Taylor Swift concert. Along with “it’s the journey not the destination.”)
It’s also abandoned biology and truth to refer to “transgender” individuals by pronouns that do not match the individual’s actual sex — calling a “he” a “she” if that’s the disguise of the day.
(It has its comical side. For instance, try to read an AP report about Bud Light marketing disaster Dylan Mulvaney referring to Mulvaney as “her” and “she” without laughing at the obvious absurdity.)
AP even uses the catchall pronoun “they” for singular individuals, in defiance of both grammar and logic.
Notice how all of these changes go in one direction politically.
But when it comes to the Trump White House, by gum, the AP is going to stand firm when it comes to what it still calls the Gulf of Mexico.
And it’s going to paint itself as patriotic for doing it.
“For anyone who thinks The Associated Press’ lawsuit against President Trump’s White House is about the name of a body of water, think bigger,” AP Executive Editor Julie Pace wrote in a commentary published by The Wall Street Journal on March 26.
“It’s really about whether the government can control what you say.”
But the reality is, the AP long ago surrendered its credibility when it comes to defending the sanctity of words and their uses against the defilements of liberal politics.
AP execs as First Amendment heroes? Champions of the principle of clarity of language and precision of thought?
C’mon, man.
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