Harry Litman - Trump's Exclusion of the Associated Press Will Not Stand
The White House is feeling its oats after a district court declined on Monday to order the administration to immediately reinstate the Associated Press into the White House Press Pool. The administration had kicked it out of the pool, where it has participated for over 100 years, based on the AP’s decision to employ the term “Gulf of Mexico” rather than Trump’s preferred “Gulf of America.”
In the wake of the decision, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced a new policy that the White House itself would determine which news outlets can staff the pool, which has access to the most closely-quartered presidential settings such as the Oval Office and Air Force One. The change breaks with a practice of over 100 years in which the White House Correspondents’ Association determined the press pool membership. The ostensible justification was to permit “new media” outlets to have a greater role in the pool.
That was after White House spokesman Stephen Cheung ridiculed AP’s lawsuit as frivolous. Cheung said that the AP was “clearly suffering from a severe, debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted their peanut-sized brains.”
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Cheung would do well to tone down his brassiness, not only because it’s jerky, but also because it’s quite likely that he is going to have to eat his words.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/trumps-exclusion-of-the-associated
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