AP says it was blocked from Oval Office event

• "Barring AP journalists from an official presidential event because of the news outlet's editorial decisions is an affront to the First Amendment and a free press," PEN America program director Tim Richardson said. "It is retribution, plain and simple, and a shameful attempt to bully the press into ideological compliance."
• "Today's action by the White House is a direct attack on press freedom. No administration gets to decide how journalists do their jobs. The role of a free press is not to serve as an extension of any administration," National Press Club president Mike Balsamo said.

Zoom in: In a statement posted Tuesday evening, AP executive editor Julie Pace said the outlet was informed by the White House that if it did not align its editorial standards with President Trump's executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, " it would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office."

• "It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism," Pace said.
• "Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP's speech not only severely impedes the public's access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment."

Context: Trump said in his executive order the "area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America."

• However, AP says will refer to the region by its original name that it's had for over 400 years "while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen."
• In response to an AP journalist's post to X about the situation, White House communications director Steven Cheung posted a GIF of a tiny violin with the comment "poor thing."
• The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment in the evening.

Zoom out: The White House and Congressional Republicans have scrutinized media companies heavily during the first few weeks of the new administration.

The big moves:

• Ending federal news subscriptions: The executive branch said it will stop spending money on Politico subscriptions after paying millions of dollars to the news outlet last year. It's part of a broader effort to cut back on government spending, per White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.
• Pentagon pushout: The Defense Department informed NPR, the New York Times, NBC News, and Politico they had to move out of their workspaces at the Correspondents' Corridor in the Pentagon.

• Pentagon pushout expanded: It later added CNN, the Washington Post, The Hill and The War Zone to that list and replaced them with conservative outlets such as Washington Examiner, The Free Press, Daily Caller, and Newsmax, along with the liberal HuffPost under a new rotation system.
• Congressional PBS, NPR probe: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has called on the CEOs of NPR and PBS to testify at a DOGE subcommittee hearing about what she says is "systemically biased content."
• FCC PBS, NPR probe: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is also investigating the two public broadcasters over whether their member stations violated FCC rules around airing commercial ads.
• FCC CBS inquiry: FCC Chair Brendan Carr opened an inquiry into CBS News to evaluate whether it violated the FCC's news distortion rules when it edited a "60 Minutes" interview with 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris during the campaign.
• Trump increases CBS claim: Separately, Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS for what he claimed was a deceptively edited interview of Harris, which the network rejects. Trump increased the lawsuit claim from $10 billion when it was initially filed to $20 billion earlier this week.

The big picture: With media trust at an all-time low, news companies are under more pressure to defend their work.

• Elon Musk and Trump in recent weeks have both called for certain journalists to be fired on their respective social media sites, per The New York Times.

Go deeper: Trump's media playbook