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associated press
Trump-Appointed Judge Rules White House Can't Retaliate Against AP Over Gulf of Mexico Dispute
A spokesperson for the news agency said the ruling "affirms the fundamental right of the press and public to speak freely without government retaliation."
Apr 08, 2025
A federal judge appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term ruled Tuesday that the White House cannot cut off The Associated Press' access to the Republican leader because of the news agency's refusal to use his preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico.
"About two months ago, President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The Associated Press did not follow suit. For that editorial choice, the White House sharply curtailed the AP's access to coveted, tightly controlled media events with the president," wrote Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who is based in Washington, D.C.
Specifically, according to the news outlet, "the AP has been blocked since February 11 from being among the small group of journalists to cover Trump in the Oval Office or aboard Air Force One, with sporadic ability to cover him at events in the East Room."
The AP responded to the restrictions by suing White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, "seeking a preliminary injunction enjoining the government from excluding it because of its viewpoint," McFadden noted in his 41-page order. "Today, the court grants that relief."
The judge explained that "this injunction does not limit the various permissible reasons the government may have for excluding journalists from limited-access events. It does not mandate that all eligible journalists, or indeed any journalists at all, be given access to the president or nonpublic government spaces. It does not prohibit government officials from freely choosing which journalists to sit down with for interviews or which ones' questions they answer. And it certainly does not prevent senior officials from publicly expressing their own views."
"The court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints," he stressed. "The Constitution requires no less."
McFadden blocked his own order from taking effect before next week, giving the Trump administration time to respond or appeal. Still, AP spokesperson Lauren Easton said Tuesday that "we are gratified by the court's decision."
"Today’s ruling affirms the fundamental right of the press and public to speak freely without government retaliation," Easton added. "This is a freedom guaranteed for all Americans in the U.S. Constitution."
NPRreported that "an AP reporter and photographer were turned back from joining a reporting pool on a presidential motorcade early Tuesday evening, almost two hours after the decision came down."
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Today's Social Media Are No Longer Safe for Journalism
This existential moment calls for a global social media platform for independent news media.
Mar 21, 2025
Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist who studied totalitarian regimes, noted in 1974 that “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?”
Fifty years later, we have nearly reached that moment. This is existential for all independent (i.e., not allied with a political party or authoritarian regime) news organizations and their ability to reach audiences in the social media space.
Social media like Twitter (now X) and Facebook became important environments for the news media to enter two decades ago because they are where millions of people congregate online. For journalism organizations, the goal has been to post interesting stories and get referrals—those users who click through to the news site and boost web page views.
Yet, that relationship has fallen apart. Ultimately, tech companies are not interested in helping journalism or aiding civil discourse. The annual Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism digital news report for 2025 notes “big falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) over the last two years.”
The even bigger problem for independent news media is that most social media platforms are increasingly antithetical to freedom of the press.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and turned it into X, it’s become the disinformation-drenched social platform of the Donald Trump administration. This year, genuflecting to Trump, Meta (corporate parent of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) announced it would drop its independent fact-checking program in the U.S. in favor of an anemic, crowd-sourced “community notes” system, which has already been a failure at X. Another popular news platform, TikTok, has serious disinformation problems, security liabilities and an uncertain future.
Several news organizations around the globe decided they won’t take it anymore. NPR stopped posting on X in 2023, after the platform insisted on designating it as “U.S. state-affiliated media.” More recently, The Guardian announced it would stop posting on X, concluding it is “a toxic media platform.” Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish newspaper of record, Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, and La Vanguardia, the leading newspaper in Barcelona, quit X, too. The European Federation of Journalists, representing about 320,000 journalists, did the same. “We cannot continue to participate in feeding the social network of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists,” EFJ president Maja Sever wrote.
But, simply quitting X only eliminates the worst option and settles for the slightly less bad options that remain.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind. For example, 54% of Americans get their news often or sometimes from social media. Adults 18-29 are the heaviest users of social media platforms. They deserve a social media platform that respects and informs them.
That’s why legitimate news media should band together and regain the autonomy they ceded to third-party social media. Independent news organizations–large and small–should cooperatively create and control their own social media platform that amplifies news and public information, encourages links to member news organizations, and excludes misinformation and disinformation.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things.
The model for this is something almost as old as modern journalism, too: The Associated Press, an international cooperative nonprofit news agency. As the AP tells its founding story, “In 1846, five New York City newspapers funded a pony express route through Alabama to bring news of the Mexican War north faster than the U.S. Post Office could deliver it.” The problem with social media is similar–if it’s not working, work collectively to build another way. And, like the AP, it could be a global cooperative.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things. But, a news-controlled social media platform could develop features that would demonstrate the multimedia ability of news organizations and enable the audience to create social connections in new and entertaining ways. Users could adjust their feeds to focus on local, regional, national, or international news, or whatever mix and topics makes sense to them, so all legitimate news organizations of any size get to be part of the platform.
Which news organizations and journalists could be part of such a social media cooperative?
Reporters Without Borders, the international journalism nonprofit, already has a powerful statement for fostering global information spaces for the common good, where “information can only be regarded as reliable when freely gathered, processed and disseminated according to the principles of commitment to truth, plurality of viewpoints and rational methods of establishment and verification of facts.” This would enable a broad range of journalism organizations to participate, and draw a bright line to exclude media propagating disinformation.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle.
From a business perspective, journalism organizations, not third-party social media, would retain analytic data and any advertising revenue. The social media app could be free for any person with a subscription to any member news organization (e.g., a local newspaper, a national magazine of opinion, or digital news site), or with a nominal subscription fee, to provide built-in authentication and help prevent bot accounts. There are also strong global standards for content moderation through the International Fact-Checking Network, which was formed in 2015 and has a nonpartisan code of principles and more than 170 fact-checking groups around the world.
What would such a social media platform cost to create?
Clearly, $44 billion is too much. Bluesky, which has gained favor as an X alternative in recent months, offers a case for comparison. It started internally with just a handful of workers at then-Twitter in 2019. In the past two years, it’s received $23 million in seed funding to get it where it is today.
Bluesky may be the current favorite of many journalists, and has many advantages over other social media platforms, but its worthy purpose to encourage a less toxic space for public conversation does not primarily serve the goals of globally disseminating independent journalism.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle. There has been talk for several years about Europe having its own social media platform to highlight democracy, diversity, solidarity, and privacy, and to avoid “foreign information manipulations and interference” from platforms based in the U.S. that have fallen into Trump’s power orbit and China-based platforms as well.
But, a nongovernmental platform, with a consortium of democracy-minded news organizations, may be most resistant to nationalisms and authoritarianism. The project could be built on an open-source structure like ActivityPub (the infrastructure behind Mastodon) or the AT Protocol (behind Bluesky), which would give more power to users.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse. The alternative is the independent press’s passive acceptance of whatever social media ecosystems Silicon Valley plutocrats or authoritarian governments decide to make, which is bad news for a free press.Keep ReadingShow Less
Jeff Bezos Is Greasing America’s Slide Toward Autocracy
Titans like Bezos who control mainstream media are pandering to Trump in ways that compromise their publications.
Feb 26, 2025
Billionaires controlling key elements of the media are helping U.S. President Donald Trump establish an authoritarian regime. Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, has become a poster child for the phenomenon.
American democracy may be a casualty.
From the beginning of Trump’s political career, Fox News, Newsmax, Sinclair Broadcasting, and other right-wing outlets have spread his propaganda. But now titans who control mainstream media are pandering to Trump in ways that compromise their publications.
Once a Hero
Not so long ago, Bezos was on the correct side of a historic struggle. In August 2013, he bought The Washington Post and boosted its investigative reporting staff. After Trump won the 2016 election, the Post adopted the first slogan in the paper’s 140-year history: Democracy Dies in Darkness.
In May 2016, Bezos discussed his reasons for buying the paper: “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light.”
For the next eight years, the Post honored that mission relentlessly. The paper fact-checked Trump’s assertions and documented his lies. By its count, Trump had made more than 30,000 “false or misleading claims” during his first four-year term alone.
Prior to the 2020 election, the Post’s editorial page had characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic experiment. The editorial board described Trump as “the worst president of modern times” and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden to replace him.
The board continued:
Mr. Trump’s negative example has demonstrated how essential in a president are decency, empathy, and respect for other human beings.
…
Democracy is at risk, at home and around the world. The nation desperately needs a president who will respect its public servants; stand up for the rule of law; acknowledge Congress’ constitutional role; and work for the public good, not his private benefit.
And Now a Sycophant
All of the Post’s criticisms of Trump in 2020 were even more on point in 2024. Shortly before the 2024 election, the Post’s editorial board had signed off on the paper’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But it never ran. Bezos personally killed it and, for the first time in decades,The Washington Post did not endorse a U.S. presidential candidate.
The fallout was immediate. Prominent columnists resigned, and more than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
A few hours after Bezos’s “no endorsement” decision became public, officials from his Blue Origin aerospace company, which has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA, met with Trump. Bezos claimed that he didn’t know about that meeting.
In December, Bezos flew to Mar-a-Lago where he and his fiancée dined with President-elect Trump. A few weeks later, another Bezos company—Amazon—paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, who personally will receive $28 million. At Trump’s inauguration, she told CEOs in attendance that they could be mentioned as “sponsors” at the end of the film and receive invitations to the yet-to-be-produced film’s premiere. The price: $10 million each.
And on February 26, Bezos announced a new rightward shift: The Post would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.
The paper’s opinion section editor, David Shipley, resigned in response to the change.
A Dangerous Anti-Democratic Theme
Bezos is not alone among the moguls who are helping Trump along the road to autocracy. In future posts, I’ll discuss some of Trump’s other major media accomplices.
Meanwhile, on February 25, Trump announced that he would break decades of precedent and handpick the media outlets that would be allowed to participate in the presidential press pool—the small, rotating group of reporters who relay the president’s day-to-day activities to the public. Previously, the White House Correspondents’ Association, a 111-year-old group representing journalists who cover the administration, determined which reporters would participate in the daily pool. Most often, the pool has consisted of journalists from major organizations such as CNN, Reuters, The Associated Press, ABC News, Fox News, and The New York Times.
Except, of course, in early February Trump banned the AP from the Oval Office and Mar-a-Lago because it continued referring to the “Gulf of Mexico” instead of Trump’s new name for that body of water, the “Gulf of America.”
Democracy dies in sunlight too.
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