Lawyers for the Associated Press asked an appeals court on Monday not to reverse a lower court’s decision to end the White House’s ban on AP reporters over the newswire’s decision not to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” since the “First Amendment commands no viewpoint discrimination.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments from both the White House and the AP on Monday as the White House demanded a reversal of an April order by Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who ordered the White House to end its ban on AP reporters’ access to White House spaces over the decision. The appeals court in June stayed the ruling until arguments this month.
The AP has said it retained the “Gulf of Mexico” name to appeal to a global audience, though it notes President Donald Trump’s executive order changing the name in its stories. The White House banned the outlet from the Oval Office and Air Force One over the matter, saying they did not have the right to access the president.
“The president can make individual decisions,” AP lawyer Charles Tobin told the court’s panel of judges on Monday. “It’s also established in this circuit that if the White House has a hard pass program or admission for all journalists to the East Room or the Brady press room, he must not discriminate based on viewpoints.”
Yaakov Roth, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued that the White House is within its rights to restrict reporters from non-public spaces and that such restrictions did not merit retaliation, comparing it to if the White House rejected someone’s employment application because they criticized the president or when Trump decides which guests to host in the Oval Office.
“The president routinely invites Republicans and not Democrats into the Oval Office for ceremonies,” Roth said. “Nobody thinks that he has to extend those invitations on a viewpoint-neutral basis for the same reasons he can invite favored reporters and not disfavored reporters to watch that ceremony in the Oval Office.”
AP Executive Editor Julie Pace wrote in an op-ed on Monday that “letting the government control which journalists can cover the highest office in the land and setting rules about what those journalists can say or write is a direct attempt to undercut the First Amendment.”
“It should worry all of us,” she wrote. “Because if a president of any party can use personal and political preference to choose which journalists to allow in – and kick others out because of the words they use – it means you are not getting a full picture of what is happening. It results in a filtered look at whoever holds the highest office, not the rigorous coverage the public deserves.”
The White House has since permitted AP photographers into its pool events, but did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
