Associated Press

Overview

The Associated Press is the wire service most of the world’s news quietly runs on — and, as of 2025–2026, a litigant against the government it covers. It is a not-for-profit news cooperative owned by its U.S. newspaper and broadcast members: “No one owns AP,” its leadership puts it — it is neither part of a corporation nor funded by any government, and any revenue it generates must be reinvested in the newsgathering operation (The Associated Press). Four billion people see AP journalism every day, produced by journalists in 230 locations across nearly 100 countries and all 50 U.S. states, at a daily clip of about 2,000 text stories, 3,000 photos and 200 news videos (The Associated Press; The Associated Press). Its journalists’ work has won 60 Pulitzer Prizes, including 36 for photography (The Associated Press).

The wire service that sues the White House

The AP’s defining institutional habit in the Trump era has been to fight access restrictions in court — a practice its own leadership describes as mission, not aberration: “We believe in fighting for access on behalf of the public,” participating every year “in dozens of legal actions, all focused on protecting free expression” (The Associated Press).

The current fight began with a stylebook decision. In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; the AP, citing editorial standards, said it would keep using the established name while acknowledging Trump’s chosen one (Reuters). The White House responded by limiting AP’s access to press gatherings, calling the decision “divisive and misinformation” (Reuters). The AP sued three senior Trump aides that month, alleging the restrictions were an attempt to coerce the press into using the administration’s preferred language and violated free-speech and due-process protections (Reuters).

On April 8, 2025, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden — a Trump appointee — granted a preliminary injunction: “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” (WJXT/AP). The administration appealed two days later (WJXT/AP). In June 2025 the D.C. Circuit split the difference: the administration could keep AP out of the Oval Office, Air Force One, Mar-a-Lago and similar restricted workspaces while the case proceeded, but the injunction held for East Room events, treated as a designated public forum (Just Security). A July bid for en banc rehearing failed, and the circuit heard oral argument on November 24, 2025 (Just Security; Reuters).

In parallel, the White House structurally demoted the wires: in April 2025 it removed Reuters and the AP from the permanent press pool — a system running since the Franklin D. Roosevelt era — leaving them rotation-only, while inviting outlets that had never been in the pool, many of them right-leaning, into pooled events and onto Air Force One (CNN; Reuters).

The sequel arrived in September 2026, when Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds over “fake news” and claimed national-security risks (The Associated Press). Judge Timothy Kelly — nominated by Trump in 2017 — issued a 14-day temporary restraining order restoring their access, finding they were likely to succeed on due-process grounds, calling the White House’s “objectionable reporting” standard “so vague it hardly does the trick,” and ruling that “nothing in the record” suggested national security motivated the revocations (The Associated Press). Notably, the AP filed an amicus brief in that case urging the court to restore the three rivals’ access — defending press access as an institution while its own case was still pending — and the five-network TV pool suspended coverage of Trump events in solidarity (The Associated Press).

The cooperative invention

The AP was formed in May 1846 when five New York City newspapers funded a pony-express route to bring news of the Mexican-American War north faster than any other source (The Associated Press). The cooperative model — members pooling newsgathering costs rather than competing to gather the same facts — became the template for modern syndicated news, and the AP has stayed a cooperative ever since, governed by its executive leadership and a board drawn from member organizations (The Associated Press).

Its second great invention is a book. The first publicly available AP Stylebook was issued in June 1953 — a 100-page, 12,000-word volume hailed at the time as “the most definitive and inclusive work of the kind ever undertaken by a group of newspapers” — replacing inconsistent internal guides from 1951 (Editor & Publisher). The 1977 overhaul, which put entries in alphabetical order, is the edition AP treats as its benchmark; it is updated periodically on suggestions from AP editors, journalism schools and newspaper editors worldwide (Editor & Publisher).

The mission has carried a body count: 35 AP journalists have died pursuing facts, most covering wars, beginning with stringer Mark Kellogg at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 — four were killed in 2014 alone (The Associated Press).

Reporting with teeth

The access fights matter because of what the access is used for. In March 2019, AP reporting broke the inside story of Bill Shine’s exit as Trump’s communications director: two people close to the president told the AP on condition of anonymity that Trump had grown frustrated Shine had not improved his press coverage, and the story described Shine as Roger Ailes’ “operations man and enforcer, the one who tried to put his boss’ directives into action,” noting he had been named in lawsuits over covering up workplace-behavior allegations at Fox News (Associated Press). The AP’s own roll call of impact work includes the 2015 investigation into labor abuses in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry that freed more than 2,000 enslaved workers, and the long campaign to unseal Bill Cosby’s court documents that helped reopen the criminal case against him (The Associated Press).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the final outcome of the AP’s 2025 lawsuit against the Trump aides — the last confirmed step is the November 2025 oral argument. It does not cover the longer-term resolution of the September 2026 CNN/MS NOW/Politico case beyond the 14-day restraining order. Staff, bureau and audience figures are the AP’s own current published numbers and change year to year. It takes no position on whether the White House’s access decisions were lawful beyond what the cited courts ruled.