The top Washington photographer for the Associated Press (AP) told a judge on Thursday the White House’s ban on its staffers was crippling the outlet.
“It’s hurting us big time,” AP photographer Evan Vucci said during a court hearing Thursday, according to CNN. “We’re basically dead in the water on major news stories.”
In February, the Trump administration barred the AP from the White House press pool and Air Force One over its decision to use “Gulf of Mexico” even after President Donald Trump changed the name to “Gulf of America,” which the organization said was necessary to cater to its global audience.
In response, the AP filed suit against White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Trevor Budowich, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Vucci said during Thursday’s hearing that the AP had to rely on a foreign photographer with less experience to cover Trump’s contentious meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“We just absolutely got slammed in the play,” Vucci said, according to CNN. “We got destroyed.”
Vucci was the photographer who took the widely circulated photograph of Trump after last year’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Vucci also cast doubt on Thursday on Budowich’s assertion in a sworn declaration this week that the White House has laid out a detailed process for choosing which outlets are included in the daily press pool.
“There’s no rhyme or reason,” he said. “I don’t think anyone knows.”
The AP’s photos reach 4 billion people across the globe, Vucci noted in his testimony.
“Associated Press photographers are the gold standard,” he said. “It’s awful.”
Under questioning by a Justice Department attorney, Vucci couldn’t say whether the AP was harmed financially by the weekslong ban, saying that did not fall under his purview.
Zeke Miller, the AP’s chief White House correspondent, testified that he believed reporters from other outlets were “softening” their questions to the White House in light of the ban on AP staffers.
Since it is their pool reports the AP is now forced to rely on, Miller said, he didn’t know what may end up omitted from their recaps.
“We don’t know what we’re missing out on,” he said, according to CNN.
AP executive editor Julie Pace wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday that the ban represented a larger quest by the government to censor free speech.
“For anyone who thinks the Associated Press’s lawsuit against President Trump’s White House is about the name of a body of water, think bigger,” she wrote. “It’s really about whether the government can control what you say.”
