Washington (AFP) – The Associated Press said Thursday its reporter was barred from a White House event for the third day straight, in a mushrooming row over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” After being denied access to Oval Office events twice, the agency said it was barred again on Thursday, this time from a news conference with President Donald Trump and visiting Indian leader Narendra Modi.
Editor-in-chief Julie Pace called the decision “a deeply troubling escalation” in the administration’s stance against the agency and a “plain violation” of AP’s protected free speech rights. “This is now the third day AP reporters have been barred from covering the president…an incredible disservice to the billions of people who rely on The Associated Press for nonpartisan news,” she said in a statement to AFP.
The agency first had a reporter blocked from covering an Oval Office signing on Tuesday, it said, because it did not “align its editorial standards” with Trump’s executive order renaming the body of water. The reporter for the 180-year-old media organization was again prevented from attending an Oval Office event on Wednesday—the swearing in of new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. In a style note last month, AP said Trump’s executive order “only carries authority within the United States.”
Asked about the restriction, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday the Trump administration was guarding against media “lies.” She noted that the US secretary of interior had officially designated the new name, and that Google and Apple had made the changes on their popular map applications used in the United States. “It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America. And I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is,” Leavitt said.
The White House Correspondents’ Association called AP’s exclusion from the Modi event “outrageous and a deeply disappointing escalation.” “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.”
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