Judge in AP case stands up for the First Amendment; plus, protest coverage, and news you can’t use

By ruling in favor of The Associated Press in its lawsuit to overturn a ban imposed by the Trump White House, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden applied the First Amendment in a straightforward, entirely predictable manner. The Trump administration may appeal, but it would be shocking and deeply disturbing if McFadden’s decision isn’t upheld.

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First, McFadden ruled that though the White House can exercise broad discretion in terms of which news organizations are allowed access to the Oval Office, Mar-a-Lago and other venues, it must do so in a neutral manner. The White House, by explicitly stating that the AP was being banned for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its proper name rather than the “Gulf of America,” was engaging in unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination,” McFadden wrote. He continued:

The analysis is straightforward. The AP made an editorial decision to continue using “Gulf of Mexico” in its Stylebook. The Government responded publicly with displeasure and explicitly announced it was curtailing the AP’s access to the Oval Office, press pool events, and East Room activities. If there is a benign explanation for the Government’s decision, it has not been presented here.

The judge also rejected the Trump administration’s claim that the AP was seeking special privileges. First Amendment precedent holds that a news organization has no right to demand, say, an interview with a public official, or to be called on at a news conference. The White House claimed that’s what the AP was seeking.

But McFadden cited a 2006 precedent called The Baltimore Sun Co. v. Ehrlich. The governor of Maryland at that time had forbidden state officials to speak with Sun journalists because he was angry at two of the paper’s reporters. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the governor, finding the ban “unobjectionable,” as McFadden put it. But he added that the case “does not get the Government where it needs to go” because it “turned on an alleged right to interact and speak with government officials, not a right of access to a physical forum for observational newsgathering.”

As for the harm done to the AP by the White House ban, McFadden said that was clear as well: “These disadvantages have poisoned the AP’s business model. As its ability to rapidly supply new photographs and breaking news has dwindled, the AP’s customers have expressed concerns and turned to other sources for their needs.” Among other things, the AP lost a $150,000 advertising deal because of the ban.

In stressing the ordinariness of the his ruling, McFadden wrote:

[T]he Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.

If the White House doesn’t appeal, then the ban will end in a week. Regardless of what happens next, the AP deserves enormous credit for fighting this rather than giving in, as many other news organizations have done.

A lack of protest coverage?

Did the media give sufficient coverage to the massive anti-Trump protests that took place on Saturday? Trump critics, especially on social media, insist that the coverage was nowhere near enough given the massive crowd sizes, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands in cities across the country.

I’ll mainly focused on two newspapers that have been called out for not doing enough — The Boston Globe and The New York Times. And, in my view, the complaints are at least partly rooted in print nostalgia.

The Sunday Globe’s only mention of the protests on the front page of its print edition is a tiny tease directing readers inside the paper. Yet the protests dominated the homepage, with multiple stories, for a good part of Saturday and well into Sunday. This is 2025. The website is the paper’s principal outlet, and the Globe has many more digital subscribers than it does print readers. (Caveat: A lot of digital subscribers opt for the e-paper, which is an online version of the print product.)

On Tuesday, the Globe’s opinion section ran two full columns of letters from readers who thought there should have been more. The headline: “Outraged readers, protesters found coverage of Hands Off! demonstration paper-thin.”

I failed to capture what the Times published on its homepage on Saturday or Sunday, but from what I recall, the protests received prominent coverage, though I don’t think they led the site as they did at the Globe. The Sunday print edition features a below-the-fold photo with a tease for a story inside the paper.

I also noticed that the Times’ morning newsletter on Monday noted that the protest was the most-clicked story on the Times’ website. Obviously someone found the coverage.

Media critic Margaret Sullivan took in a broader sample of news outlets — not just print papers, but websites as well — and concluded that the media didn’t do enough. She also offered three theories as to why the story was played down. One was that it merely featured liberals being liberal and thus lacked news value. Another was that editors may have feared provoking right-wing critics. The third was that they didn’t want to alienate their pro-Trump readers.

Sullivan complained that “much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.”

To get back to my print-versus-digital framing. What is the purpose of a print front page in 2025? Certainly deadlines weren’t the issue. The editors knew the protests were likely to be huge, and they could have blocked out some space in advance. By choosing not to, they alienated a shrinking but loyal and vocal part of their audience.

Minimizing harm

I was walking through Government Center one early evening last week when I came across a demonstration in support of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts Ph.D. student who was grabbed off the street by ICE thugs and who is now being held in detention, apparently for the crime of helping to write a pro-Palestinian op-ed piece.

I decided to take a photo — and I did something I don’t recall doing previously. I made sure to take it from the back so that no one’s face was showing in an identifiable way. The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics says that we should “minimize harm,” and I knew that if I published a picture with people’s faces, I might be putting someone at risk.

Anvee Bhutani reports in The Guardian that student newspapers across the U.S. are making similar calculations, taking down stories and commentaries when requested to do so. Bhutani writes:

At the University of Virginia, the Cavalier Daily has historically refused takedown requests, but its editor, Naima Sawaya, acknowledged that the current climate was different. “One of our staffers, an immigrant, had to resign from our editorial board after we published pieces about Trump’s policies on universities, specifically regarding immigrants and pro-Palestine activism,” she said. The student, she said, was advised by the university’s international studies office that being publicly linked to these articles could pose risks to their visa status.

Of course, this wasn’t an issue back when papers appeared only in print. I looked up The Cavalier Daily, and it does in fact have a print edition. Presumably its back issues are archived and stored on microfilm. But content that has been taken down from the web will no longer be easy to find, and digital-only content will disappear entirely. There’s always the Internet Archive, but that doesn’t capture everything, either.

All of this is just another sign of how the Trump regime is warping everything it touches.