Reporters are in a dither than Team Trump's committing a "naked violation of the First Amendment" by denying access to the Associated Press. So said Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, adding "As [press secretary Karoline] Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern."
The tiff started over the AP refusing to acknowledge President Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America." Both sides are digging in. The liberal media blob didn't react this way when Team Biden obstructed access to the New York Post in their time. The AP in no way should be presented as nonpartisan or "the gold standard of neutrality."
On the PBS News Hour, NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith claimed Trump "going after AP for an editorial choice, is going directly at the First Amendment. It is going directly at the freedom of the press. And it is not coincidental that they are going after AP. AP is extremely influential. They're also kind of straight down the line. They are not a partisan news outlet in any way."
This is preposterous. Their reporters write gushy books about Jill Biden. Wemple acknowledged that NewsBusters calls them "Associated Partisans," and linked to our item on how AP suggested that when Republicans argued that the Biden-Harris campaign would end up as a President Harris campaign, it was "racist" and "misogynist."
In CNN's "Reliable Sources" newsletter, Brian Stelter accused Trump of become the "Word Police." This is incredibly odd, since the AP has a Stylebook that is widely used in newsrooms where they are obviously the Word Police. In recent years, they have not only banned "illegal immigrant" and discouraged the term "late term abortion," they were especially woke on transgenderism, arguing "A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure..."
Stelter quoted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof comparing Trump to dictators: "It boggles the mind that Trump can complain about censorship and then block the AP from access to the Oval Office unless the journalists use language he prefers. But AP reporters have stood up to dictators worldwide, even endured prison; they're tougher than Trump."
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