Attacks on the media have long been part of President Donald Trump’s political playbook, from his relentless mocking of “fake news” to him singling out reporters and withholding access over coverage he deems unfair. Now, one month into Mr. Trump’s second term, his war on the press seems to be entering a new phase, with the president and his allies taking more aggressive actions – and notching clear wins.
Mr. Trump has sued several media outlets in the past year, winning a settlement against ABC News that shocked many industry observers. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been gleefully canceling government subscriptions to news publications. The new chair of the Federal Communications Commission has opened an investigation into whether taxpayer dollars should continue to go to NPR and PBS, and the Pentagon has booted legacy media outlets from their permanent workspaces in the building to make room for more Trump-friendly outlets.
Perhaps most controversially, the White House has gotten into a tense standoff in recent weeks with The Associated Press over Mr. Trump’s executive order renaming the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America.” After the AP announced it would continue using the “Gulf of Mexico,” while acknowledging that President Trump has renamed it the “Gulf of America,” the administration barred AP reporters from attending Oval Office and some other events and flying on Air Force One. The Monitor, which follows the AP Stylebook with some exceptions, will be using similar language.
Why We Wrote This
A White House rebuff to The Associated Press – over the name “Gulf of America” – comes on top of Trump lawsuits against major TV news networks. Some see rising pressure for news media conformity.
Both the AP and the White House Correspondents’ Association say the Trump administration’s actions are a violation of the First Amendment, and the AP filed a lawsuit on those grounds Friday against three administration officials. The administration has countered that there is a big difference between giving an outlet access to limited spaces and preventing it from publishing the news as it sees fit. So far, most of the leverage seems to be on the president’s side, against a press corps that’s weaker than it has been in decades, with fragmented audiences and shrinking subscriptions. And whether or not the administration is overstepping its authority in this case, observers see larger reasons to be concerned about the freedom of the press, a critical component of a healthy democracy.
“In the past, traditions and norms would have made [the AP ban] very politically divisive for any president to do. But Donald Trump has been a master of weakening institutions, and certainly among them is the press,” says Jason Shepard, a communications law professor at California State University, Fullerton. “There are so many fewer resources available for news organizations and journalists to fight back.”
A battle over a name – and over press freedom
Many other newsrooms are also still using the “Gulf of Mexico” in their reporting. But the AP has been the focus of the president’s ire, in part because of its widely adopted stylebook, which has been the authoritative guide on grammar and terminology for scores of newsrooms since the 1950s.
Trump allies, among others, have complained that the AP Stylebook has employed increasingly ideological phrasing in recent years – such as using the term “gender-affirming care” when describing medical treatments for transgender people, and capitalizing “Black” but not “white.” The Gulf drama isn’t just about the Gulf, White House officials told Axios this week; it’s another example of the AP using language “to push a partisan worldview.”
It’s fine for the administration to offer that kind of criticism, experts say. But when officials take actions to pressure an outlet to produce a certain type of coverage, it becomes more problematic.
“The AP gets to decide its own style,” says Kevin Goldberg of the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit that advocates for the First Amendment. “If [the White House] doesn’t like the AP style, they are free to say that. … But they can’t compel the AP to say particular words. That’s First Amendment 101.”
The dispute is further complicated in this case because it involves the press pool – a group of 13 reporters across print, TV, radio, and photography that was created to serve as “the eyes and ears” of the entire press corps. The pool (which the Monitor is part of) follows the president at home and abroad, sharing notes, photos, and video feeds, as well as travel costs. While the designated print pooler rotates among several dozen outlets, reporters from three wire services – the AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg – are typically always included.
For now, many constitutional law experts say the administration isn’t violating the First Amendment, though it may be edging closer to that line.
“As much as I oppose the [AP] exclusion personally, I am skeptical that it is unconstitutional,” says Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This is something we say as law professors all the time: ‘The fact that something is a bad idea doesn’t mean it’s unconstitutional.’”
If the Trump administration goes beyond barring AP journalists from “invitation-type events” and starts revoking their White House credentials or barring them from big public events, that’s where the First Amendment conversation “really gets elevated,” says Mr. Goldberg.
When the first Trump administration revoked a CNN journalist’s credentials in 2018 after a contentious press conference exchange, a Trump-appointed judge sided with the cable news organization. But that judge made clear he was ruling on Fifth Amendment grounds – saying the administration had not provided the journalist, Jim Acosta, with due process – and was not making a judgment about First Amendment claims.
A tough time for the news industry
Mr. Trump is not the first president to attack or take action against the press. President Abraham Lincoln shut down anti-war newspapers, and he ordered the arrest of some editors over false reports published during the Civil War. President Theodore Roosevelt habitually banished journalists who upset him. Various administrations in recent years have threatened to move the press briefing room out of the West Wing.
But Mr. Trump’s media attacks may serve as a “double whammy,” says historian Harold Holzer, author of “The Presidents vs. the Press,” coming at a time of particular weakness for the press. The AP likely has “a lot fewer subscribers” than it did 20 years ago, says Mr. Holzer.
Some of those subscriptions have shrunk just in the past few weeks. After discovering that the federal government was paying millions of dollars for its employees to subscribe to publications like Politico Pro and The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s self-created Department of Government Efficiency announced it would cancel them all – a significant loss of revenue for some news organizations. Politico, for example, whose granular legislative tracking service Politico Pro is relied upon by many governmental employees, took in $8 million in 2024 from federal subscriptions. The State Department recently asked U.S. embassies and consulates to cancel all “non-mission critical” media subscriptions.
Mr. Trump may have been emboldened to take stronger action against the press in his first month in office in part because of recent wins in the courtroom. In December, ABC News opted to settle Mr. Trump’s defamation lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’ on-air statement that the president had been found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll case. The jury had found Mr. Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape. The president is engaged in another suit against CBS News over an interview it aired with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, which Mr. Trump contends was deceptively edited. There has been speculation that Paramount, CBS’ parent company, may be moving toward a settlement as well. Mr. Trump is also suing the Des Moines Register and its recently departed pollster, Ann Selzer, over a preelection survey that showed Ms. Harris with a lead in Iowa (Mr. Trump won the state by 14 points).
The president’s true victory in the ABC case may not have been the $15 million “charitable contribution” made toward his future presidential library, but the fact that “it shows the media is scared,” says David Enrich, a New York Times reporter. Mr. Enrich is the author of a forthcoming book about the 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, which established the principle that public officials must prove “actual malice” by news organizations in order to win defamation lawsuits.
Overturning that case has become “one of the leading goals of the conservative legal movement” as well as a key goal of Mr. Trump’s, says Mr. Enrich. Without that court precedent, media organizations would face a far greater threat of lawsuits. And while that could in theory lead to more careful, nonpartisan coverage, it could also have a widespread chilling effect if legal action is used to intimidate media organizations and drain their already limited resources.
“Threatening news organizations with lawsuits is a good way to consume their time and money and remind them of the leverage that the federal government has over them,” says Mr. Enrich.
