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A veteran AP photographer and top White House correspondent testified Thursday that the news organization has struggled to compete in its coverage of the Trump presidency since White House’s decision to limit its access to presidential events, the Oval Office and Air Force One.
Evan Vucci, the chief photographer for the AP in Washington, testified during a hearing in his company’s legal challenge to the White House ban that since the organization has had its access severely curtailed, it’s “really struggling to keep up” with its competitors, particularly during major news events that have happened during the opening weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term.
“It’s hurting us big time,” Vucci said at one point in response to questions from the news organization’s attorney, Charles Tobin. “We’re basically dead in the water on major news stories.”
AP’s chief White House correspondent, Zeke Miller, testified Thursday on the impact the limitations have had on the outlet’s work, telling the court the outlet was forced to report in a “delayed fashion” and that its coverage did not have “the same level of completeness.”
The AP, one of the world’s biggest news outlets and wire service that’s used by local publications around the world, was singled out by the White House over its refusal to substitute “Gulf of America” for “Gulf of Mexico.”
The issue was underscored, Vucci said, during the contentious Oval Office meeting last month between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The administration’s decision to ban Washington-based AP photographers and reporters from the Oval Office meant the organization had to rely on one of its foreign-based photographers to capture visuals of the event.
But that person, Vucci said, lacked the experience and skill he has that allow him to transmit photos back to his editors for wider distribution within seconds. The foreign-based photographer was able to attend the event as part of the group of reporters covering Zelensky, not Trump specifically.
“We just absolutely got slammed in the play,” Vucci said. “We got destroyed.”
Vucci said during his testimony that the AP’s photographs reach some 4 billion people globally and stressed that the organization’s absence from certain White House events in recent weeks is meaningful to the public.
“Associated Press photographers are the gold standard,” he said. “Of course it matters to the public. … It’s awful.”
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Pressed by Tobin on what he knows about how the White House is now choosing which photographers can now attend certain White House events, Vucci said he was “clueless.”
“There’s no rhyme or reason,” he said. “I don’t think anyone knows.”
Under cross-examination by Justice Department attorney Brian Hudak, Vucci struggled to answer specific questions about how the AP was harmed financially by the White House, saying he wasn’t the best person to speak to those details.
And later, when US District Judge Trevor McFadden asked if, as an artful photographer, Vucci has changed how he snaps pictures of the president since the ban has been in effect, he pushed back strongly on the idea.
“My approach doesn’t change,” he said. “I’m a professional.”
Vucci took the famous photograph of Trump raising his fist moments after surviving an assassination attempt during a campaign rally last summer. Asked about the image on Thursday by Tobin and Trump’s own embrace of it, Vucci described it as “an iconic photograph.”
Thursday’s hearing is the AP’s latest shot at convincing McFadden to order the administration to restore the outlet’s full access to White House events. The Trump appointee had declined in late February to issue a temporary restraining order that would have done just that. Now, Tobin is pressing the judge to issue a preliminary injunction in his client’s favor.
“AP has now spent 44 days in the penalty box,” he told the judge just after the proceedings got underway.
Miller testified that he has observed “softening” of the questions asked by other outlets during presidential events since the restrictions were imposed.
Miller he said had noticed, in reading transcripts and other coverage of the outlets that are participating in such pool events, that there had generally been a “softening of tone and tenor” in the questions being asked of the president by other journalists in the pool.
And since AP reporters must rely on reporting from other journalists for pool events the outlet is locked out of, Miller said it was possible that such a “softening” was impacting his company’s ability to adequately cover the news.
“We don’t know what we’re missing out on,” he said.
McFadden, who was appointed by Trump, returned to the “softening” claim at the end of Miller’s testimony, asking if there were specific outlets or examples he could point to.
Miler did not identify any particular outlet, but said he had noticed that outlets in the pool were asking fewer questions about the “news of the day” – meaning the big stories about the administration at a given time – and that some questions tended to be not on topic or irrelevant. He also recalled noticing in coverage of SpaceX’s recent return of some astronauts that journalists were referring to the Gulf of Mexico as just “the gulf.” Miller said it seemed they were trying to “skirt around the issue.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
