Associated Press

The Associated Press (AP) is a news cooperative headquartered in New York City, founded in 1846 and owned by United States newspapers and broadcasters as its members.¹ In 1846 five New York City newspapers funded a pony express route through Alabama to bring news of the Mexican War north faster than the Post Office could carry it.² The AP's history page carries a photograph of its president and chief executive, Daisy Veerasingham, taken at the New York headquarters on January 11, 2022.²

Cooperative structure

The AP was incorporated as a cooperative association under the Membership Corporations Law of the State of New York. In its 1945 decision the Supreme Court counted the publishers of more than 1,200 newspapers among its members and described a body of by-laws that bound every member, allowed the board of directors to fine, suspend or expel a member for a violation, and barred members from selling news to non-members. The AP had begun as an Illinois corporation in which an existing member held an absolute veto over the application of a competing publisher; the by-laws were amended in 1931 to extend a right of protest to members of more than five years' standing, and again in 1942 after complaints to the Department of Justice produced an investigation. In Associated Press v. United States, argued December 5 and 6, 1944 and decided June 18, 1945, Justice Hugo Black wrote for the Court that the by-laws restrained trade in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Justices William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter filed concurring opinions, Justice Owen Roberts dissented in part in an opinion joined by the Chief Justice, Justice Frank Murphy dissented, and Justice Robert H. Jackson took no part.³

The board is drawn from member publishers and broadcasters. At the annual meeting of April 2022 the AP announced a board of 13 directors, who were elected by members or appointed by the board, each eligible to serve nine years in total with the chair exempt. Gracia Martore, formerly president and chief executive of Tegna and a director since 2013, became chair in succession to Steven Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst Corporation, who had been elected in 2009 and had completed a five-year term as chair. The meeting added Mark Adams of Adams Publishing Group as a director representing small-market newspapers, and the directors named included Michael Newhouse, co-president of Advance, and Isaac Lee, founder of Exile Content.⁴ The notice of May 2014 had reported a board of 21 directors, with Jon Rust of the Southeast Missourian as vice chair, and had listed Lee as president of news for Univision and Rob King as a senior vice president of ESPN, both appointed by the board.⁵

A search of the Nonprofit Explorer index of Internal Revenue Service exempt-organization returns on October 1, 2026 returned the Associated Press Emergency Relief Fund (EIN 02-0749041) and the Associated Press Media Editors foundation (EIN 13-3529099), and returned no Form 990 filer under the name of the cooperative itself.⁶

Berlin, 1931 to 1941

The AP opened subsidiaries in Britain and Germany in 1931. The German subsidiary, the AP GmbH, was a German-registered photo service whose staff, as the AP's own 2017 history states, was "wholly subject to Nazi law." The Berlin news bureau was run by Louis P. Lochner, who received the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for correspondence; the photo service sent some pictures to New York, where editors selected them for distribution to the AP's 1,400 American newspaper members.⁷

In late 1935, after resisting for two years, the AP complied with the decree that all persons working in German media be of German "Aryan" origin; the picture service reassigned or discharged six employees considered Jewish. The AP's history states that five eventually resettled in the United States with its help, that a sixth was reassigned to the Vienna bureau and was arrested by the Gestapo when the Nazis arrived in 1938, and that Alfred Eisenstaedt and two other discharged colleagues launched the Pix photo agency in New York at the end of 1935.⁸ The historian Harriet Scharnberg wrote in 2017 that the AP was the only Anglo-American picture agency operating internationally that kept its Berlin subsidiary open after 1935, that its German photographers were bound by the Schriftleitergesetz (Editors' Law) not to act to the detriment of the Reich, and that AP pictures appeared in the propaganda pamphlets Die Juden in USA (1939) and Der Untermensch (1942). She wrote that the AP's review of its own history confirmed these points and that the AP stated it regretted not having protested the use of its pictures in that way.⁹

In December 1938 Kent Cooper, the AP's general manager from 1925 to 1948, wrote to Lochner about an unspecified proposal from the German government to the AP GmbH, a letter the AP's history reproduces. Cooper wrote: "We will want to give consideration to the suggestion for the reason that it is a suggestion to AP GmbH which is a German company." He continued that "even The Associated Press of New York is better off in Germany if it uses its good offices with the German company [AP GmbH] to bring the practices of the German company [AP GmbH] in harmony with the suggestions of the German government," and that the subsidiary "might even get the benediction of German officials." The same letter said he had long wished the subsidiary could have a German at its head so that an American need not serve as its Geschaeftsfuehrer. Lochner wrote in 1946, in a passage the history quotes, that in 1937 Nazi authorities had insisted that he give up that post because he was a foreigner and that he had then recommended Brandt, and Willy Brandt became Geschaeftsfuehrer; a letter from Cooper to the London manager in 1939 recorded the appointment. The history states that the subject of the German proposal has not been established.¹⁰

Franz Roth, an Austrian-born photographer hired by the AP to cover the war in Ethiopia in 1935, had left the AP and was freelancing in 1938 when he was named the official Nazi party photographer for Austria. When Lochner planned to rehire him, W. F. Brooks, the AP's managing director in London, wrote to Lloyd Stratton in New York that it "would not be good business for AP to have on its staff the official S.A. photographer," and proposed a freelance arrangement giving the AP a right of first refusal on Roth's pictures. Stratton replied that he agreed "wholly" with the original reply on employing Roth and also agreed "with the contractual method of obtaining Roth's product, assuming that the contract is approved by counsel."¹¹ The AP's history records Roth as an "ardent Nazi" who traveled with the Waffen-SS before and after the AP's expulsion from Germany and who died in combat in 1943.¹² Scharnberg wrote that Roth was in Lemberg on July 2, 1941, during a pogrom in which about 4,000 Jewish inhabitants were killed, and that he photographed Soviet prisoners of war, captured tanks and cheering residents rather than the violence or its victims; the pictures passed German censorship and were distributed in the United States by the AP.⁹

After 1939 the German government drafted several AP photographers into propaganda units, requiring that their pictures be pooled for German media while the AP continued to pay their salaries, and the photographers sent some pictures to the AP picture service as exclusives. The AP's history states that its photo and news managers worked to keep the picture service free of propaganda, that it found no record that the AP protested directly to the editors of pro-Nazi media about biased headlines and captions, and that "the AP in the totality of its conduct fulfilled its mission to gather the news in Germany forthrightly and as independently as possible." It adds that the AP should have protested when its photographs were exploited by the Nazis for propaganda within Germany and should have refused to employ German photographers with active political affiliations, and that suggestions "that AP at any point sought to help the Nazis or their heinous cause are simply wrong." Scharnberg wrote that none of the results in her 2016 article, "The A and P of Propaganda," published in Zeithistorische Forschungen (Studies in Contemporary History), were disproven by the review.⁹¹³

The Bureau Laux photo exchange and the Office of Censorship

On December 11, 1941 the AP's Berlin office was closed and its American staff arrested; they were interned for five months and returned in a prisoner exchange via Lisbon in spring 1942. The German picture service, with its files, was confiscated and given to the Foreign Ministry under the control of Helmut Laux, a Waffen-SS photographer, and most of its German personnel were absorbed into the Bureau Laux. Brandt, the German manager of the picture service, who had been drafted into the Luftwaffe, was transferred by Laux into the Waffen-SS to work full-time for the Bureau.¹⁴

In 1942 Laux proposed to the AP's Lisbon correspondent, Luiz C. Lupi, a photo exchange, an arrangement in which Lochner, during his repatriation, took part. Under it the Bureau Laux sent packets of photographs from Germany and German-occupied Europe to AP offices in New York and London through neutral Portugal, and later Sweden, until 1945, and the AP sent photographs from the United States to the neutral countries for distribution by Laux inside Germany. The earliest evidence of the arrangement in the AP's archives is an undated 1942 cable from the executive newsphoto editor in New York, Al Resch, to the Lisbon agent.¹⁴

Byron Price had been named the AP's first executive editor in 1937. Ten days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Franklin D. Roosevelt took him from the AP to direct the Office of Censorship. On July 13, 1942 the AP's executive editor, Alan J. Gould, telephoned N. R. Howard, an assistant to Price, to ask "if I could think of any reason why the AP should not make and/or renew loose photo exchange agreements with syndicates" in neutral countries. Howard's memorandum of the call records his reply: "Told him I could think of none as long as censorship operated on the news photos sent out of this country." On July 14 Gould wrote to Howard that "an experimental arrangement whereby an exchange of news pictures is being undertaken by the Associated Press" with a photographic agent in Lisbon, who furnished pictures "including pictures from Axis territories" in return for American photographs, was subject to censorship regulations. Howard replied that the Office of Censorship, including its postal, cable and press divisions, "has no objection to such an exchange, with all hands understanding that the pictures, as usual, and like all others, are subject to censorship regulations." The acting chief of postal censorship, Army Major N. V. Carlson, wrote that the exchange "should be encouraged for the information value that may be derived from the arrangements." The three letters are in the National Archives and are reproduced in the AP's history.¹⁴

German editors received the AP's photographs through Laux, who copied them for Nazi leaders and offered them to German newspapers and magazines; with one exception the pictures were unaltered, and the captions were rewritten. Allied investigators who compared the original and published captions after the war found that "practically every text was altered before release to the German public." The AP's annual reports listed the receipt of photographs from Germany among the cooperative's wartime accomplishments, and its captions identified their German origin to member newspapers.¹⁴

Laux cooperated with Allied criminal investigators and intelligence after the war, argued that his arrangement with the AP should spare him punishment, served time in an Allied detention camp, founded a photo agency in Frankfurt and sold pictures of Hitler on D-Day to Life. Brandt's request to return to the AP was refused by the American military authorities overseeing denazification because of his enlistment in the SS, which Brandt had said was forced; Lochner was embittered that the AP did not contest the finding, and the AP rehired Brandt in 1950, when he headed sales for the reconstituted AP German service until he retired in 1978. The AP sold its German-language service in 2010.¹⁵

The AP published its history, Covering Tyranny: The AP and Nazi Germany, 1933-1945, on May 10, 2017, after Scharnberg's article of 2016. The report describes itself as the result of research in previously unexamined AP archives, other repositories, American military documents and records declassified by the National Archives and Records Administration in response to AP Freedom of Information Act requests, and it is accompanied by a separate file of scans of 43 documents, a number that Scharnberg's statement gives as 70.¹⁶

Contra reporting, 1985 to 1987

Robert Parry and Brian Barger, AP reporters in Washington, wrote in December 1985 the first story on cocaine trafficking by some Contras to raise money, with the Reagan administration turning a blind eye, according to Parry. Parry wrote that the story prompted the then freshman senator John Kerry to open an investigation, that the reporting was attacked by the White House, the conservative press and "mainstream outlets like The New York Times," and that by summer 1986 "our AP editors had begun to lose faith in us" and Barger resigned after being left indefinitely on the overnight editing shift. Parry left the AP in early 1987 to join Newsweek.¹⁷ Parry had also been, he wrote, the first reporter to describe the activities of the White House aide Oliver North in arranging support for the Contras after Congress ended CIA funding.¹⁷

Gary Webb wrote in Dark Alliance that Parry's editors sat on the story for weeks, edited it heavily and spiked it at the last minute, that the suppression of the AP story foreshadowed the media establishment's treatment of Webb's own series a decade later, and that the AP's failure to publish its own reporters' findings allowed the government to maintain its denial of Contra-connected drug trafficking for years.¹⁸

Correspondents who moved to other posts

Robert Berrellez was born in Nogales, Arizona, was educated in Arizona and worked for the AP in Phoenix before becoming a roving correspondent with headquarters in Mexico City. A column in the Phoenix Republic of April 2, 1978 states that he was in Cuba when Fidel Castro came to power and spent six months in jail there, that he had gone to work for International Telephone and Telegraph, that he was by then the company's public relations director in the Southwest, and that a court in Washington was to decide whether he had committed perjury and obstructed an investigation in testifying before a Senate subcommittee on the company's conduct in Chile.¹⁹

Telephone records, 2012 and 2013

On Friday, May 10, 2013 the AP's general counsel, Laura Malone, received a letter from Ronald C. Machen Jr., United States attorney for the District of Columbia, who had been appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder to lead an inquiry into leaks. The letter stated that the Department of Justice had obtained telephone toll records for more than 20 separate lines assigned to the AP and its journalists for April and May 2012.²⁰ On May 13 the AP's president and chief executive, Gary Pruitt, wrote to Holder: "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters."²⁰

Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole replied on May 14 that the Department had opened criminal investigations into unauthorized disclosures of classified information in May 2012, and had conducted "over 550 interviews" and reviewed "tens of thousands of documents" before seeking the toll records. He wrote that for each number in the May 10 letter "there was a basis to believe the numbers were associated with AP personnel involved in the reporting of classified information," that the subpoenas did not seek the content of calls, that the records covered "only a portion" of the two-month span, and that they had been "closely held and reviewed solely for the purposes of this ongoing criminal investigation."²¹

In September 2013 Donald Sachtleben, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation bomb technician who had continued working for the bureau as a contractor, agreed to plead guilty to disclosing national defense information to a reporter in May 2012 about a thwarted Yemen-based plan to bomb a United States-bound airliner. The Department of Justice said he "was identified as a suspect in the case of this unauthorized disclosure only after toll records for phone numbers related to the reporter were obtained through a subpoena and compared to other evidence collected during the leak investigation," and that this allowed investigators to obtain a search warrant for his phone and computer. The plea agreements, filed in Indianapolis, carried a 43-month term on the national security counts and a consecutive 97-month term on two child pornography counts.²²²³

On July 12, 2013 the Department of Justice published a report on its policies toward the news media that reversed the presumption concerning advance notice to affected media organizations. Notice and negotiation would be omitted only if the Attorney General, taking account of the recommendations of a newly established News Media Review Committee, determined for compelling reasons that they would pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation, risk grave harm to national security or present an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm, and any delay would run for an initial 45 days with at most one further 45 days.²⁴

The Gaza bureau, 2021 and 2024

On May 15, 2021 an Israeli airstrike destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed the AP's bureau and other media offices. The AP's account stated that the strike came roughly an hour after the Israeli military ordered people to evacuate the building and that all AP employees and freelancers left safely. Pruitt's statement said that the Israeli military had "long known the location of our bureau and knew journalists were there," that the AP had received a warning that the building would be hit, that it was seeking information from the Israeli government and was engaged with the State Department, and that "the world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today."²⁵

Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a press availability in Copenhagen on May 17, 2021. A reporter's question recited that the prime minister of Israel and officials of the Israel Defense Forces had said over the weekend that they had transmitted intelligence to the United States showing that Hamas used the tower to house military assets. Blinken answered that he had spoken over the weekend with Pruitt, that "we did request additional details regarding the justification" for the strike, that he "wouldn't want to weigh in on intelligence matters," and that he would "leave it to others to characterize if any information has been shared and our assessment of that information."²⁶

On May 21, 2024 Israeli officials seized an AP camera and broadcasting equipment in Sderot, accusing the AP of violating a media law enacted against Al Jazeera by supplying it with live images of northern Gaza. The communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, ordered the equipment returned the same day.²⁷

Exclusion from the White House press pool, 2025

On February 11, 2025 White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the AP that it would not be permitted in the Oval Office or the press pool unless it revised its style guide to refer to the Gulf of America. The AP was also excluded from events in the East Room. Press pool membership had historically been set by the White House Correspondents' Association, of which the AP is a founding member and which had offered the AP a standing invitation to send one reporter and one photographer. On February 25 the White House announced that it would select pool participants itself. The AP sued on First Amendment grounds in Associated Press v. Budowich, No. 1:25-cv-00532 (D.D.C.), naming Taylor Budowich, the Deputy Chief of Staff, as defendant.²⁸

Judge Trevor N. McFadden entered a preliminary injunction on April 8, 2025. On April 14 the AP was denied access to the Oval Office while the injunction was in effect; on April 15 the White House issued a policy abolishing the wire services seat from the press pool, and the district court denied the AP's motion to enforce, finding the new policy facially neutral and crediting a White House declaration that it had not excluded the AP on the basis of viewpoint.²⁸

On June 6, 2025 a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted the government's motion for a stay pending appeal in part, staying the injunction except as applied to the East Room. Judge Neomi Rao, joined by Judge Gregory Katsas, wrote that the White House was likely to succeed because "these restricted presidential spaces are not First Amendment fora opened for private speech and discussion" and that the White House "retains discretion to determine, including on the basis of viewpoint, which journalists will be admitted." Judge Cornelia Pillard dissented and would have denied the stay.²⁸ On July 22, 2025 the full court denied the AP's motion for en banc reconsideration and vacatur of the stay order.²⁹ The D.C. Circuit's posted opinion lists for January through September 2026 contain no opinion in No. 25-5109.³⁰