The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. This freedom performs the important function of keeping public officials accountable. Presidents and other government officials have generally exercised the right to decide which news organizations to which they want to give one-on-one interviews and whom they want to call upon at press conferences.
But a controversy about the degree to which presidents can exclude a news organization from press events simply because of its stylebook guidance raised new questions in January 2025.
On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Shortly thereafter, The Associated Press Stylebook editors issued guidance about the name change with an updated entry:
Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The body of water has shared borders between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump's order only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change.
The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. Refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.
Per the AP Stylebook, you may also use Gulf or Gulf Coast to describe the body of water along the Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida coasts.
When Associated Press journalists continued to refer to the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico in news stories, while also noting the name change by the president, the White House decided in February to indefinitely exclude AP’s reporters from press events in the Oval Office and the Diplomatic Room of the White House, as well as from traveling with the press on Air Force One.
Calling the AP’s continuing use of the name the “Gulf of Mexico” a “lie,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt informed the AP that the administration would exclude its reporters until it began referring to the body of water as the Gulf of America.
"I was very up front in my briefing on Day One that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable," Leavitt said. "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."
The AP Stylebook editors explained its decision by saying that as a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, “the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences. The AP regularly reviews its style guidance regarding name changes, in part to ensure its guidance reflects common usage. We’ll continue to apply that approach to this guidance and make updates as needed.”
Blocking press access can involve First Amendment issues
The situation is not entirely new. In 2009, President Barack Obama was rebuffed by other news organizations when he tried to exclude Fox News from a pool interview with Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury’s so-called “Executive Pay Czar.”
During Trump’s first presidential term, he tried to revoke the press credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta after a testy exchange with him, but a U.S. District Judge ruled that they had to be restored because the executive branch had not acted in a fair and transparent manner.
In 2022, after Arizona officials allowed state election officials to block press access to a reporter from Gateway Pundit on the basis of the content of his coverage, he won a suit for damages in court (Terr 2025).
Although the specific dispute between the President and The Associated Press appears trivial, it potentially involves First Amendment issues. As the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals indicated in its opinion in Anderson v. Cryovac, Inc., 805 F.2d 1 (1st Cir, 1986), “There is the potential for an infringement of the First Amendment whenever the government prohibits free speech or publication.”
Allowing over favored media is akin to licensing
One of the key steps that Great Britain took toward freedom of speech and press, that the U.S. Supreme Court emulated in Near v. Minnesota (1931), was to prevent prior licensing of publications. Although the Associated Press situation probably does not fall directly under this rubric, allowing only favored media to participate in presidential press events is akin to such regulations.
First Amendment forbids viewpoint discrimination
Even more to the point, a long-standing principle of First Amendment law forbids viewpoint discrimination. Under such a principle, a government entity could ban reporters for improper decorum involving the manner in which they carried out the job, but not on the basis of what questions reporters asked or what political stance they embraced.
In this case, the White House is clear that it based its exclusion simply on AP’s failure to bend to its will on nomenclature. The attempt to control such language appears akin to attempts, which the Trump White House has consistently opposed, to impose what it has called political correctness or wokeness, often involving naming.
Chilling Effect
In similar fashion, the idea that a newsperson or a news organization can be excluded based on the acceptance of a particular governmental policy or edict is likely to have a chilling effect on the willingness of such individuals and organizations to express any contrary viewpoints.
This effect is accentuated when laws under which reporters are barred are vague or are enforced in an arbitrary fashion that does not provide due process.
John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.