This week, the White House prohibited journalists from Associated Press of three appearances in the media of President Donald Trump, two of them in the Oval office. Part of the reaction said, indeed, this: What right do you have to be there, anyway?
The answer is a combination of tradition, independent reports and the guarantee of the first amendment of a free press.
The AP, a global media founded in 1846, is a source of independent news based on events that reaches thousands of people every day. The News Cooperative has been a member of the White House Press Group of 13 people who reported on the president and held him responsible since the beginning more than a century ago.
The group has access to the President about the understanding that he distributes his comments and activities to other media, Congress offices and more.
When the Trump administration blocked the AP of two events, it not only came from the departure of access to the president; He did it after a law Trump Presidential Order.
He AP has said that will refer to water as the Gulf of Mexico, while indicating Trump’s decision to change it as well. As a global news agency that disseminates news worldwide, the AP says that it must ensure that the names of places and geography are easily recognizable for all audiences.
Here are some background about the relationship between the presidency and the press, now over the years.
The first amendment to the Declaration of Rights establishes that the government “will not make any law … supplying freedom of expression or press.” For the Executive Editor of AP, Julie Pace, the Trump movement, an attempt to use the access of a means of communication to him to control the content he published, is “a simple violation of the first amendment.”
“The actions taken by this White House intended to punish the AP for the content of their speech,” Pace wrote Wednesday to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. “It is one of the most basic principles of the first amendment that the government cannot take reprisals against the public or the press for what they say.”
The White House said the AP allowed to enter its information on Wednesday, but continued to disagree with the style of the Gulf name.
“No one has the right to go to the Oval office and ask questions to the president of the United States,” the White House Secretary, Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday. “We reserve the right to decide who can go to the oval office.”
The relationship between the president and the press is destined to be adversary. That is essential to know what the president and his administration are, or are not, in the name of the United States with the money of taxpayers.
Freely questioning legislators chosen is the reason, for example, why Congress reporters can wander most of the same corridors of the Capitol as the members of the Chamber and the Senate and ask questions on behalf of the Americans. In the White House, a smaller safe compound that works as a residence, work space and event place, the access rules are stricter. But it also belongs to Americans.
“The press is there to represent readers, spectators and listeners from around the world whose lives will be affected by what happens in the oval office but cannot be physically presented,” said Kathy Kiely, a free press teacher studies at school of Missouri journalism. “Journalists make sure that the public obtains information beyond the accounts interested in themselves provided by the president and his public relations team.”
The first known instance of a so -called pool reporter inside the White House was in 1881 when President James A. Garfield was shot. While the executive director lay in bed, AP reporter Franklin Trusdell sat off his sick room, listening to him breathing and sharing updates with other correspondents.
Now, it is a group of media that are ideally in almost every time the president goes: in the oval office, to the state dinners, in Air Force One, in the caravan, and when the president goes to golf or in bicycle, went with Trump to The Super Bowl. The pool is also waiting in case something happens in the world on which the president needs to speak with the nation.
A reason why the pool exists is because the oval office, the president’s official work space, is too small to accommodate all media that wish to cover their signings or meetings of executive orders with foreign dignitaries. Therefore, the group works with a representative of each medium that acts as eyes and ears for others who cannot enter. When an “grouped” event ends, printed, television and radio groupers share written notes, video and audio with everyone else who is interested.
The pool maintains a strict decorum, according to the guidelines of the White House correspondent Association. It is a standard practice to stop when the president enters the room. Although shouting is “unacceptable”, Presidential appearances can be noisy.
The White House Press pool represents all media formats and daily include the APs and other wire service writers, AP and other photographers, a television team, radio correspondent and writers for printed and online publications.
The group was in the caravan of John F. Kennedy in Dallas when he was killed on November 22, 1963. That allowed first -hand stories of the event as conspiracy theories, an example of why independent reports are fundamental to understand what It is happening around the President.
“There was a strong explosion as if a giant firecracker had exploded in the cavern among the high buildings that we had just left behind,” Ap Jack Bell reporter was in the caravan with other reporters, he remembered Columbia Journalism Review. “The man in front of me shouted: ‘My God, they are shooting the president!'”
George W. Bush was in a camera in a school in Florida on September 11, 2001, when an assistant whispered in his ear that the United States was under attack. More recently, the pool was in St. Croix the night the former president Jimmy Carter died. The White House told the pool to stay, and at some point the pool transported a hotel in the center, where then President Joe Biden talked about his predecessor and answered some questions.
Trump is famous for courting the reporters even when he criticizes them publicly. Now, Legacy Media is in its heels Amid an atmosphere of distrust as people receive news from other sources, some less credible than others.
He is not the first to try to surround traditional measures. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his chats by the fire on the radio, since some of the largest newspapers in the country discouraged with the expansion of the government under the New Deal. More recently, television and social networks, and especially podcasts during the 2024 elections, have provided similar solutions for the presidents.
In 1798, John Adams signed the Sedition Law, which made it a crime for US citizens “print, pronounce or publish … Any false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the government and used it for journalists from jail, according to national archives. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson threatened to end the presidential information sessions with journalists, which resulted in what became the White House correspondent Association.
For all tensions, the founders of the Nation recognized the value of a free press in American democracy.
“If they let me decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” the future president Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1787, “I must not doubt a moment to prefer the latter.”
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