This week, Marija Šajkaš, CGFoE’s Communications Specialist, interviews Jon Allsop, Editor of Columbia Journalism Review’s flagship daily newsletter, about the Associated Press and its press freedom case against the Trump administration.

As one of the most trusted and far-reaching news organizations in the world, Associated Press (AP) provides critical reporting to thousands of outlets and millions of readers. Its role as a nonprofit, cooperative news agency places it at the heart of journalism’s infrastructure, especially in covering institutions like the White House. In February, after the White House barred the AP from certain press events over its refusal to adopt the term “Gulf of America,” the AP filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the administration officials.

I recently spoke with Jon Allsop, the editor of Columbia Journalism Review’s (CJR) newsletter, about the dispute and the lawsuit that followed, and the relevance of the Associated Press in the media ecosystem. In addition to editing CJR’s newsletter The Media Today, Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. 

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist and editor of Columbia Journalism Review’s flagship daily newsletter “The Media Today.” Photo: courtesy of Jon Allsop.

Marija Šajkaš: Let’s set the stage for our readers. Could you speak about the importance of the AP for the media industry and the general public in the States and globally?

Jon Allsop: The AP can sometimes go under the radar in discussions about the US media industry—the New York Times, CNN, and others seem to be more reliable magnets for comment and controversy—but it performs a vital, outsized role in the information ecosystem. It is a huge news organization that covers a very wide range of stories all around the country, and since it is a news agency, those stories often get carried by other outlets, not least at the local level, where it has been increasingly common to see wire copy filling newspapers amid swingeing cuts. (So much so that when two major local newspaper chains, Gannett and McClatchy, said last year that they would stop reproducing AP content, it was seen as a seismic development, and a big potential loss.) Much the same is true at an international level. AP coverage is generally fast, to the point, and reliable, which is of growing importance in a world full of noise, in which journalism is in decline.

Marija Šajkaš: Can we argue that AP holds a particular importance in covering the White House, and if so, why?

Jon Allsop: Lots of outlets have traditionally covered the White House, and politicians more broadly, but the AP’s coverage has always, to my eye, held up against that of its competitors, and in some cases surpassed it; of all the photos of Donald Trump that were taken in the wake of the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania last year, during the presidential campaign, one taken by Evan Vucci, of the AP, seems to have become the most iconic—indeed, Trump himself slapped it on the cover of a campaign book and put up an artwork based on it in the White House. (Vucci also took an iconic image of an Iraqi journalist hurling a shoe at President George W. Bush back in 2008.) That being said, it’s really a broader principle that’s at stake here, more so than the AP’s White House coverage in isolation: If officials can ban the AP over a matter as silly as what to call the Gulf of Mexico, it can ban any news outlet over any form of reporting it doesn’t like.

Marija Šajkaš: It has been over six weeks since the ruling—is the government complying with it, and has AP’s access problem been resolved? We know that this is an evolving issue. 

Jon Allsop: After the judge ruled that the White House should end its ban on the AP, the administration allowed a journalist from the agency to enter an event in the White House, and photographers to return to the Oval Office. But even this initial compliance appeared patchy, with AP lawyers claiming that they’d been told the outlet would still be excluded from the “press pool,” the small rotating group of journalists that travels with the president on behalf of the entire news media. Then, the administration removed a spot in the pool that had traditionally been dedicated to wire services—meaning the AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg—instead lumping those outlets in with print media more generally; on the first day of the new policy, the right-wing Daily Signal was included instead. This looked like an effort to continue to punish the AP in a way that didn’t look as targeted, since it affected other outlets, too (though the AP said it still violated the court order). And the White House having control over the pool at all is new—until this year, its composition was decided by the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Marija Šajkaš: In your recent commentary, you noted that the AP ruling appeared to push the story to the “hopeful side of the ledger.” Are there other examples that you feel also signal hope for press freedom?

Jon Allsop: My overall view of this moment is that the administration has initiated a series of tug-of-war fights with media outlets, in which the momentum is constantly shifting, and the ultimate outcome remains unclear: Trump tries to defund NPR, but NPR fights back in court; one judge orders the administration to hand over the budget of Voice of America and its sister broadcasters, which Trump is also trying to gut, before another one sides with the administration; and so on. The AP ruling was “hopeful” at the time in the sense that it won its case on its clear First Amendment merits, and we’ve seen other such victories, too. These are important, clearly. But these fights aren’t yet resolved; the administration appealed the AP ruling, for instance. And even at the time, it was a mitigated hope given the other things the White House can do, and in some cases now has done, to restrict access and bully the press without crossing legal tripwires. In the end, it’s all relative. Again, it’s important that a court upheld the clear First Amendment principle at stake in the AP’s case. But in some ways, the White House wins just by having the fight.