White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended a decision by the White House on Tuesday to keep The Associated Press out of the pool of reporters allowed inside the Oval Office to cover an executive order signing with President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk.
“We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office,” Leavitt said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday when asked about the move, calling it a “privilege to cover the White House.”
The AP on Tuesday said it had been blocked from covering two White House events over its refusal to “align its editorial standards with President Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.”
Leavitt was pressed Wednesday by CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins over the decision, asking if the White House’s posture toward the AP should be viewed as retaliatory in nature or can be seen as antithetical to Trump’s stated first amendment prerogatives.
“If we feel there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” the press secretary responded. “And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that but that is what it is.”
After Trump moved to change the name to the body of water, AP — which provides style guides for a number of other news outlets around the country — updated its policy saying it would refer to the Gulf of Mexico “by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.”
News of the wire service being barred from certain White House events sparked swift pushback from press freedom groups and the White House Correspondents Association.
“The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions,” the WHCA said in a statement. “The move by the administration to bar a reporter from The Associated Press from an official event open to news coverage today is unacceptable.”
