Pressure of Truth
The news, with the spin made visible.
Outlet profile

Associated Press (via WTOP / Boston Globe)

U.S. center-left

Owned byNot-for-profit news cooperative collectively owned by its member news organizations — more than 1,700 U.S. daily newspapers and roughly 6,000 television and radio stations, plus thousands of international subscribers; no single private, corporate, or government owner
FundingMember fees paid by subscribing news organizations; licensing and syndication fees from commercial and international clients; no government funding, no advertising revenue, no single private donor; surplus is reinvested into operations rather than distributed
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

The Associated Press was founded in 1846 by five New York City newspapers — the Sun, Herald, Courier and Enquirer, Journal of Commerce, and Evening Express — to share the costs of gathering news by telegraph from the Mexican-American War front. It was formally reorganized as a not-for-profit cooperative corporation in 1900, a structure it retains today. Over the following century it expanded into a global wire service, supplying text, photographs, audio, and video to thousands of outlets worldwide and becoming the factual backbone of much of the world's daily news diet. Its cooperative ownership model means no single commercial or political interest controls its editorial direction, though critics on the right have long argued its fact-checking and framing tilt left, a pattern now quantified by AllSides, which rated AP 'Left' in an April 2025 editorial review. A notable editorial controversy occurred in 2000 when an AP photograph from the Second Intifada was criticized for a misleading caption that appeared to label an Israeli soldier as Palestinian. The most significant recent confrontation came in February 2025, when the Trump White House barred AP reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One press pools because the AP declined to rename the Gulf of Mexico 'Gulf of America' in its stylebook; the AP sued the administration on First Amendment grounds, won an initial district-court order restoring access, but lost on appeal in a 2–1 D.C. Circuit ruling. The AP's wire content reaches U.S. audiences through thousands of member outlets, including radio broadcaster WTOP and the Boston Globe.

Sources

  1. Associated Press — Wikipedia
  2. Associated Press | Journalism, Pulitzer Prizes, Photography, & Gulf of Mexico controversy — Britannica
  3. Associated Press (AP News) — Bias and Credibility, Media Bias/Fact Check
  4. Associated Press Media Bias — AllSides
  5. The White House bans the AP indefinitely over the use of 'Gulf of Mexico' — CNN Business
  6. AP sues Trump White House for denying access over 'Gulf of Mexico' row — NPR
  7. Judge orders White House to give AP access to Oval Office — NPR
  8. Trump says AP access will continue to be curtailed until it changes style to 'Gulf of America' — First Amendment Encyclopedia, MTSU

Profile compiled 2026-07-17; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

← Back to track record