Trump Is Right About the Associated Press

Plus, what’s happening at the Kennedy Center

Trump, at Mar-a-Lago on February 18, 2025, explains his view of the Associated Press. Still photo from White House social media video.

President Trump was asked yesterday about his administration restricting some access to the Associated Press wire service because of its refusal to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. “We’re gonna keep ’em out until such time as they agree that it is the Gulf of America,” Trump said. “The Associated Press, as you know, has been very, very wrong on the election, on Trump and the treatment of Trump, and other things having to do with Trump and Republicans and Conservatives. They are doing us no favors, and I guess I am doing them no favors. That’s the way life works.”

The chief White House correspondent of the New York Times, Peter Baker, who is also an analyst for MSNBC, posted to social media in support of the Associated Press: “We stand with the @AP which is resisting government pressure attempting to dictate how it writes about the news. This is exactly what the founders had in mind when they crafted the First Amendment.”

President Obama once attempted in a somewhat similar way to cut back on access to Fox News, with then Obama aide David Axelrod insisting that Fox News wasn’t a real news organization.

I earned money during college by working part-time as the Associated Press’s Harvard stringer, a job that consisted mainly of getting up early in the morning and telephoning the AP Boston bureau, reading the news editor the headlines from the Crimson, and then faxing over any stories that the editor was interested in for the AP wire. It was a good job to have in college, and since then I’ve always admired the AP for its straight-down-the-middle, just-the-facts approach and reputation. (And I also use the anecdote as a way to explain how the internet has allowed for increased productivity in the news business, as nowadays the AP Boston bureau can just read the Crimson headlines on the internet without having to pay a Harvard undergraduate to telephone and fax.)

Unfortunately, there’s new and additional evidence that AP has indeed gone off the rails—and it goes well beyond whether the organization prefers the term Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of America.