Trump White House bars Associated Press reporter for a second day. AP signals legal action

(CNN) — Out with the oldspeak. In with President Trump’s newspeak — or else.

That’s the apparent message as the Trump White House tries to punish a preeminent news outlet for its editorial decision-making.

On Tuesday the White House broke with decades of precedent and blocked Associated Press reporters from attending two of President Trump’s media availabilities. The AP said it was blocked because it hasn’t changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.”

On Wednesday afternoon it happened again. The AP reporter was banned when Trump held a swearing-in for ceremony for Tulsi Gabbard, his new director of national intelligence.

The newswire’s executive editor, Julie Pace, immediately condemned the action. And in a followup letter on Wednesday to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, she signaled a likely legal challenge.

The actions “were plainly intended to punish the AP for the content of its speech,” Pace wrote, adding that “the AP is prepared to vigorously defend its constitutional rights and protest the infringement on the public’s right to independent news coverage of their government and elected officials.”

At Wednesday afternoon’s briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested the ban may remain in place.

“We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office,” she said.

That’s true, but the AP is typically always in attendance for presidential events because it is a foundational part of the so-called “press pool.”

Leavitt confirmed that the dispute is over a body of water. “It is a fact that it is now the Gulf of America,” she said.

In the United States, government agencies have implemented the name change, yes, but the AP has customers around the world, including in countries that recognize the Gulf of Mexico, so the wire service refers to the original name while also acknowledging Trump’s recent order.

Press freedom groups have lined up to support The AP.

“Punishing journalists for not adopting state-mandated terminology is an alarming attack on press freedom. That’s viewpoint discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement.

But for the time being the AP and the Trump White House are in a standoff.

And it’s part of a much larger weaponization of language to advance the Trump administration’s agenda.

The AP supplies information to newsrooms across the country, and its stylebook is an industry standard, so the White House action was also a warning to the wider world of media and technology.

The president evidently wants journalists to obey his guidance; repeat his words; follow his rules. Outlets that don’t fall in line might lose access.

Editors and reporters are wondering aloud if the administration will next penalize news outlets that acknowledge the existence of transgender people or cite data from purged government databases.

Out with the ‘oldspeak’

Trump’s “first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak,” New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote Tuesday, referencing George Orwell’s “1984.” In its place “is a new vocabulary,” McCreesh wrote, “containing many curious uses of doublespeak.”

Trump, for instance, said he “stopped government censorship” and simultaneously policed language around gender, diversity and immigration.

In the past few weeks his administration has deleted the White House’s Spanish-language website; stated that the government recognizes “only two genders;” and directed agencies to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility efforts.

As a result of Trump’s edicts, employees have been fired; websites have been removed; and scientific papers have been withdrawn.

Language is at the heart of this overhaul. At agencies like the National Science Foundation, workers reviewed active projects with a list of keywords “to determine if they include activities that violate executive orders” issued by Trump, the Washington Post reported last week.

“The words triggering NSF reviews provide a picture of the sievelike net being cast over the typically politically independent scientific enterprise, including words like ‘trauma,’ ‘barriers,’ ‘equity’ and “excluded.’”

In “1984,” Syme tells Winston that “the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” Trump loyalists would argue that they’re doing the opposite, and making it easier to think freely, by reversing progressives’ language-policing. I’ll leave that debate to others. But I want to recognize that language — from the meaning of the word “censorship” to the name of the Gulf — is at the very heart of Trump’s scorched-earth approach to governance, and right now, he’s winning the war of words.

Trump bars AP reporter, but not photographer

Yesterday Trump triumphantly posted a Google Maps screenshot showing that Google has adopted his name change (for users in the U.S.). He evidently wants the AP to do the same.

The AP, because it represents so many news outlets, is typically always part of the White House press pool. But the wire service said it was told earlier in the day on Tuesday that — in Pace’s words — “if AP did not align its editorial standards” with Trump’s Gulf of America order, it would be blocked from attending Trump’s Q&A in the Oval Office. And that’s exactly what happened.

“The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions,” the White House Correspondents’ Association said, calling the action against the AP “unacceptable.”

But it happened a second time late in the evening when Trump welcomed Marc Fogel home from Russia in front of the press pool. Notably, on both occasions, the AP’s photographer was allowed in. Only the reporter was barred.

The AP’s stylebook guidance about the Gulf is transparent and nuanced. The news outlet isn’t ignoring Trump’s renaming, it is simply recognizing that “Trump’s order only carries authority within the United States;” thus its stories still say Gulf of Mexico but do acknowledge “the new name Trump has chosen.”

Maybe this will turn out to be an isolated incident. But it doesn’t feel that way to AP editors. As Jonah Goldberg wrote back in 2021, “if you control the language, you control the argument, which means you control how reality is perceived.”

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