Media embargo: US State Department targets six news outlets

The US State Department announced on Thursday that it had ordered a halt to all media subscriptions as part of a government-wide effort by the Trump administration to cut spending it deems unnecessary.

“The department has halted all non-mission-critical contracts for media subscriptions other than academic or professional journals,” a State Department spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement.

Bureaus and agencies can request exemptions on grounds of “why the access is mission critical, how it aligns with the Secretary’s priorities, and how it affects the safety, security and well-being of the workforce,” the statement said.

The State Department did not explain how long the pause would last. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said that all government spending must be in line with Trump’s “America First” priorities.

The Washington Post, which first reported the decision on media subscriptions on Wednesday, also cited a State Department memo instructing staff to prioritize the termination of contracts with the Economist, New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg News, Associated Press, and Reuters.

A Reuters spokesperson said it was their policy not to comment “on commercial agreements.”

Reuters’ parent company, Thomson Reuters, said last week that Trump and Musk had “misrepresented” their work with the US Department of Defense after they publicly criticized a Pentagon contract for a division of the company to work on cyber threats.

New York Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said, “Public officials, like Americans in the private sector, need reliable information to do their jobs. The government is, of course, free to cancel any subscription it wants. But the main consequence of blacklisting independent news is that these agencies and offices will know much less about what is going on in the world. It’s hard to imagine how that would serve the people of the United States,” he said.

The president said on Tuesday that he would deny the Associated Press (AP) access to the Oval Office and Air Force One because it continued to refer to the region as the Gulf of Mexico despite an executive order he signed in January directing his administration to change the name to the Gulf of America.

In response, AP said that while it accepted Trump’s new name, it would refer to the Gulf by its original name to ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to readers around the world.

In early February, the White House ordered the cancellation of subscriptions to Politico, a news organization that had come under fire for receiving payments from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for subscriptions to the premium news service Politico Pro.