(AFP) – The White House said Friday it was indefinitely blocking Associated Press journalists from Air Force One and the Oval Office, escalating a row with the US news agency over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
“The Associated Press continues to ignore the lawful geographic name change of the Gulf of America,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich said in a post on X. “While their right to irresponsible and dishonest reporting is protected by the First Amendment, it does not ensure their privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One,” Budowich said. Instead of AP, he said, “that space will now be opened up to the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas of the administration.”
AP reporters have been barred since Tuesday from attending President Donald Trump’s events in the Oval Office over the agency’s refusal to follow his executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. AP editor-in-chief Julie Pace has called the administration’s stance a “plain violation” of AP’s protected free speech rights and “an incredible disservice to the billions of people who rely on The Associated Press for nonpartisan news.”
In a style note last month, AP noted that “the Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years” and said Trump’s executive order “only carries authority within the United States.” In making the case for using Gulf of America, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that the US secretary of interior had officially designated the new name, and Google and Apple had made the change on their popular maps.
The White House Correspondents’ Association has called AP’s exclusion from Trump events “outrageous.” “The attempted government censorship of a free press risks a chilling effect on journalists doing their job without fear or favor on behalf of the American people,” the group’s president Eugene Daniels said in a statement. “This is a textbook violation of not only the First Amendment, but the president’s own executive order on freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.”
Budowich, the White House official, said that while AP would be barred from the Oval Office and the Air Force One presidential plane, AP journalists and photographers will retain their credentials to the White House complex.
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