The Associated Press is 179 years old, but can still turn on a dime.
When the White House in February barred the news organization from the Oval Office, Air Force One and other events after refusing to adopt the president’s “Gulf of America” renaming, reporters “had to think about different ways of sourcing, of covering events when we’re not necessarily in the room,” said Washington bureau chief Anna Johnson.
Eight months later, the news organization found itself outside another major U.S. institution: the Pentagon. This time, the AP joined dozens of outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Fox News, in rejecting new press rules and walked out the door. “Throughout this whole year,” Johnson told TheWrap, “we’ve had to pivot so many times.”
Pivoting on the fly was the norm in 2025 as news organizations had to contend with an avalanche of consequential stories like the administration’s dismantling of the federal government and immigration crackdown, along with tragedies at home and abroad. In conversations with TheWrap, journalists discussed the challenges of covering stories amid new constraints, all while competing for reader’s attention in a TikTok world. Through it all, from daily scoops to Signalgate, journalists managed to hold power to account, even as corporate and regulatory pressures cast a shadow on the industry
They’re doing so in an an environment that is far more hostile to journalists than during Donald Trump’s first term. His persistent attacks on the media, from cruel jabs at reporters to “fake news” rants on social media, could leave the impression that little has changed since he first took office in 2017. But the White House clamped down on the press corps in new ways in 2025, including taking over the rotating pool that covers the president on trips and in close quarters, a role traditionally held by the White House Correspondents Association.
The Trump White House also laid down West Wing access restrictions and launched a “media offender of the week” initiative, while an influx of conservative journalists and pro-Trump personalities helped change the composition of the briefing room in the second term.
Peter Baker, the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, told TheWrap that “last time everything was on the fly,” but this time there’s been a more concerted effort for handling the media.
“The plan was really to push back in a way they may have wanted to in the past, but didn’t do in a systematic way,” Baker continued. “This time it has been systematic.”
Trump, who promised retribution on the campaign trail, and now enjoys a compliant GOP-led Congress and Supreme Court, has targeted his political enemies for federal prosecution, while personally suing the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BBC for billions. All three have defended themselves.
But the posture of several other media giants has been more troubling. ABC News-parent Disney settled with Trump for $15 million in December, and CBS News-parent Paramount did so for $16 million in July, as the latter was vying for FCC approval to merge with Skydance. (Paramount CEO David Ellison, who is now seeking to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, appointed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News; her decision this week to hold a “60 Minutes” report on Trump deportations was described by the correspondent behind it as “political.”)
In September, Nexstar and Sinclair pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, and Disney suspended it, after Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, took issue with the host’s comments about the late Charlie Kirk, warning on a right-wing podcast: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
In several ways, Trump’s rhetoric has become reality in a second term. He talked about cutting public media funding in his first term, but did it in the second by getting Congress to claw back money allocated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helped support PBS and NPR. He has also called for cuts at the Agency for Global Media, which funds the likes of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. And in a stunning move earlier this month, Trump said “it’s imperative” that CNN be sold off as part of a Warner Bros. deal, a more public and explicit directive than when the network’s parent was sold during the first term.
“The Trump administration in a second term is far more organized, far more disciplined, and far less willing to adhere to traditional norms, constraints and checks and balances,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper told TheWrap. “That has meant a much more aggressive campaign when it comes to any number of things, including the assertion of executive powers, when it comes to his belief in tariffs, when it comes to his deportation agenda and absolutely when it comes to his campaign against the press.”
‘Never wavering’
It was clear on January 20 just how dramatically the media and tech landscape had transformed.
Inside the Capitol rotunda, where the president’s supporters rioted just over four years earlier, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, were seated behind the president, along with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and who would soon take a chainsaw to the federal government through the just-created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was on hand, as well as new media power players like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Theo Von and Kirk, who led the influential Turning Point USA.
What hadn’t changed was the approach journalists took in drilling down on stories. Wired, for instance, was among the outlets to doggedly pursue coverage of this unprecedented confluence of tech and political power.
“The entire Wired newsroom, from editors and reporters to fact-checkers and photo editors, has been working relentlessly to unearth new information about what exactly Elon Musk and his allies are doing across federal agencies, and to what end,” global editorial director Katie Drummond told readers in early February.
The New York Times also closely covered the Tesla and SpaceX chief’s outsize role in the Trump administration, reporting in March that the “Pentagon set up a briefing for Musk on potential war with China.” Days later came a national security blockbuster from The Atlantic: “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”
Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic’s executive editor, recalled in an interview with TheWrap that she first thought her colleague, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, might’ve been targeted in a phishing attempt. But more improbably, Goldberg had been inadvertently included in a Signal group chat with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and other top officials. Realizing the group chat was legit, she said, the questions then became, “How do we cover this? How do we do it responsibly?”
LaFrance praised Goldberg’s handling of the two Signalgate stories as “a masterclass in editorial judgement,” by weighing national security risks and being “being careful and thoughtful and never wavering.”
While journalists told TheWrap in October that access inside the Pentagon was useful in getting timely responses and adding nuance to stories, The Atlantic’s scoop was a reminder that some of the most memorable stories don’t come from casual exchanges in the hallways or briefing room.
In November, the Washington Post reported exclusively on a U.S. strike on survivors of an attack on an alleged drug vessel in the Caribbean, shining a light on Hegseth’s handling of an escalating conflict with Venezuela. The media fallout played out as Pentagon officials welcomed conservative journalists and right-wing personalities inside for a press briefing, taking over spots previously held by mainstream outlets.
Earlier this month, Tapper and Zachary Cohen reported for CNN that the Inspector General for the Pentagon concluded that Hegseth risked exposing sensitive information in Signalgate and could have endangered troops.
Tapper noted that “journalism about the Defense Department is still quite possible without access.”
Johnson also stressed that not being physically in the Pentagon “doesn’t mean we’re not going to cover the US military.” The AP can harness its resources across 50 states and around the world to strengthen coverage of Washington, especially when decisions impact Ukraine, Gaza or Venezuela, she noted.
“You can see from what the AP and so many others have been reporting, it hasn’t stopped anyone from covering the US military in a really thorough and really newsy way,” she added.
What can be a significant challenge these days, Johnson said, is prioritizing what’s most important given “the huge buffet of options that we have to cover on every given day,” and grappling with potential news “fatigue” among readers.
Discussions about how best to reach audiences in an increasingly complicated information environment — and provide the context to appropriately frame what’s happening and the stakes — is playing across newsrooms. LaFrance noted that 168-year-old Atlantic is “in a moment to moment fight for attention, not just with other newsrooms, but Spotify and TikTok.”
The Trump conundrum
In recent weeks, the president has lashed out at more than a half-dozen female reporters, calling them “piggy,” “ugly,” “stupid” and “terrible,” inappropriate behavior that’s prompted calls for the press corps to push back in real-time and defend their colleagues.
But collective action, such as staging a walkout to defend an outlet or colleague, is a rarity within the press corps. There’s reluctance among reporters to become a useful foil for Trump and also because their primary motivation in such limited encounters with the president is to get new information in the public interest. “All I’m listening for is an answer,” one veteran White House reporter told TheWrap. “Everything that is not an answer, I dismiss.”
When asked about Trump’s recent string of insults toward female reporters, a White house spokesperson told TheWrap this month, “President Trump has never been politically correct, never holds back, and in large part, the American people re-elected him for his transparency.”
While Trump may insult reporters to their faces, he also is in front of them taking questions more frequently than his predecessor. And the president sat down for interviews this year with ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, Politico and even the Atlantic, shortly after Signalgate broke. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a briefing last month that the president “calls out fake news when he sees it,” but “also provides unprecedented access to the press and answers questions on a near-daily basis.”
“There is this conundrum about a president who still clearly craves media attention,” said Baker, who wrote a book about Trump’s first term with his wife, New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser. “He still wants to be out there all the time. He wants to be part of it. He wants to be in the papers. He wants to be talked about and written about.” At the same time, Baker noted, he’s “attacking the foundations of an independent press.”
Both Baker and LaFrance referenced former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron’s first-term slogan, “we’re not at war, we’re at work,” as applicable for journalists in the second term.
“Journalists are not a political opposition. Our role is to serve the public,” said LaFrance. “We have a public service mission and our role is to hold the powerful to account.”
One looming concern is whether executives at media organizations will stand by journalists amid the president’s attacks and pressure, knowing that doing so could hurt their bottom line.
“Capitulation is the road to hell, ” said LaFrance, adding, “Our obligation to the public is to tell the truth and do it fearlessly.”
Tapper said it has been “discouraging to see some CEOs buckle when faced with challenges to their independence.”
“Everybody thinks they’re going to write their own legacy, they’re in charge of what they’ll ultimately be known for,” Tapper added. “What people ultimately are known for is how we stand up to things we didn’t see coming.”
