White House Censoring Press Pool Reports, While Still Discriminating Against AP

Free Speech

from the actual-state-sponsored-media dept

On Tuesday, the White House effectively eliminated the Associated Press from the White House press pool, changing the rules to basically bar the wire service entirely. This is even after (or perhaps in response to) a Trump-appointed judge ruling that the White House was clearly violating the First Amendment in excluding the AP from various press conferences. This isn’t a huge surprise, because last week there were reports that the White House was still excluding AP reporters… and then directly censoring press pool reports that mentioned this and other embarrassing facts.

I’m old enough to remember when there was ostensibly widespread concern with the Biden administration for supposedly (though not actually) ordering social media companies to “censor” conservative viewpoints on social media. The reality, of course, was very different as even the conservative Supreme Court clearly acknowledged just last year.

Since his second inauguration, the Trump administration has launched what may be the most aggressive, censorial attack on free speech in modern American history. While previous administrations have occasionally targeted specific speakers or types of speech, this administration is waging an unprecedented, multi-front war on nearly all forms of expression they disagree with. What makes this especially striking is that it’s happening in an era when First Amendment protections are supposedly at their strongest, and with an administration that keeps wrapping itself in the flag of free speech. And yet… here we are.

As noted, a Trump-appointed judge called out the administration’s discrimination against the Associated Press for failing to use Donald Trump’s preferred proper name for the Gulf of Mexico.

Last week, Oliver Darcy was the first to call out two troubling developments related to this: First, the White House was ignoring the ruling and still blocking the AP from certain access. Indeed, what Darcy had found is that the pool reporter on duty, Joseph Morton, the Washington correspondent for The Dallas Morning News, had written in the pool report the following:

“A reporter and photographer with The Associated Press were turned away from joining the pool.”

So why are we hearing this from Darcy instead of Morton?

Well, that’s the second discovery that Darcy reported on. The White House is now directly censoring White House press pool reports:

It was likely that sentence, which came after a judge had ordered the administration to restore the AP’s access, that irked the White House. That specific pool report from Morton, I’ve learned, was never distributed by the White House to news outlets subscribed to its pool report mailing list — a notable omission and a clear break from precedent.

It also wasn’t the first time this week that the White House chose to censor the pool. On Monday, Philip Wegmann, a reporter for RealClearPolitics, filed a pool report noting that a scheduled press conference between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been “cancelled” and was “no longer taking place.” That report, too, was never sent out by the White House.

The selective distribution has raised alarm among some members of the White House Correspondents’ Association, particularly as the Trump White House seeks to exert a firmer grip over the press corps. Traditionally, pool reporters file dispatches about the president’s movements and remarks that are then distributed by the White House to the wider media ecosystem. Now, it appears the White House is withholding reports it doesn’t like — choosing not to distribute pool reports that contain information it finds inconvenient or unflattering.

It’s worth recalling that Matt Taibbi said that the Biden administration’s mere suggestions about vaccine misinformation were “a grave threat to people of all political persuasions” and claimed the “news media became an arm of a State-sponsored, thought-policing system.”

So where’s his outrage now? This is the White House literally punishing media for not repeating propaganda and editing press reports to hide unflattering information. I may just be a simple country tech/law blogger, but this seems like a far graver threat to press freedom and a much clearer example of state-sponsored thought-policing.

So, you’d expect Taibbi to be up in arms, but somehow, he’s still talking about how Joe Biden (apparently) lied about everything. Apparently, this literal suppression of speech doesn’t merit much of a mention. Ah well.

In any normal moment in US history, a White House directly editing press pool reports while defying a federal judge’s order about press access would be an earth-shattering scandal about government censorship. It would lead every newspaper and dominate cable news coverage for weeks. And yet, somehow, it’s barely cracking the top twenty stories of the Trump administration’s attacks on fundamental rights.

While I don’t expect Taibbi and his cohort to ever acknowledge how badly they misrepresented research on disinformation as “censorship,” you might think the mainstream media — which spent years amplifying that false narrative (or even just accepting the MAGA world’s false framing) — would at least speak up when faced with actual government censorship aimed directly at them.

I guess that’s too much to ask.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, donald trump, free speech, journalism, press pool, reporters
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