# Associated Press The **Associated Press (AP)** is an American not-for-profit news cooperative, owned by its member newspapers and broadcasters and headquartered in New York. Five New York dailies formed it in May 1846 to share the cost of telegraphing news of the Mexican–American War. With [[Reuters]] it is one of the two dominant English-language wire services, and the AP Stylebook sets the house conventions of most American newsrooms. Daisy Veerasingham has been president and CEO since 2021, and Julie Pace is executive editor. The vault tracks AP for three reasons: it **counts the votes and calls the races**, it **fought the White House over the press pool** and is still in court, and it is a node in the [[Fact-Checking]] system the right has attacked since 2016. ## Counting the vote and calling races AP's election role goes back to 1848, when it declared [[Zachary Taylor]] the winner of the presidential election. Today it collects returns from thousands of county clerks and stringers. In 2024 it counted the vote and declared winners in nearly 7,000 races, with more than 5,000 people working on election night, and it says its calls were 99.9% accurate. Three developments made it the near-monopoly source: 1. **2017–18: leaving the exit-poll pool.** AP and [[Fox News]] left the [[National Election Pool]] in 2017 and built **[[AP VoteCast]]** with NORC at the University of Chicago. It debuted in the 2018 midterms. 2. **October 2025: everyone moves to AP.** ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC agreed to take AP's vote count for the 2026 and 2028 elections, ending their reliance on [[Edison Research]]. With Fox, all five major networks now run on one count (see [[How Election Results Are Transmitted and Reported]]). 3. **The survey merges.** From 2025 VoteCast was folded, with the networks' exit poll, into **The Voter Poll by SSRS** ([[SSRS]]). AP set up its elections work as a separate business unit in January 2025. That concentration is the structural point. On election night 2026 there is effectively **one private vote count** behind every network's numbers. A call is a journalistic judgment, not a legal result: the legal result comes from the [[Election Canvass]]. But a single count is also a single target for "they called it too early" politics. ## The White House ban: *AP v. Budowich* When AP kept "Gulf of Mexico" in its style guide after Trump's order renaming it the "Gulf of America," the White House barred AP reporters from press-pool events. | Date | Event | |---|---| | Feb 11, 2025 | AP reporters barred from the Oval Office and other pool events | | Feb 21, 2025 | AP sues deputy chief of staff [[Taylor Budowich]], press secretary [[Karoline Leavitt]] and chief of staff [[Susie Wiles]] | | Feb 25, 2025 | The White House takes control of pool membership from the White House Correspondents' Association | | Apr 8, 2025 | Judge Trevor McFadden grants a preliminary injunction, calling the exclusion viewpoint discrimination | | June 6, 2025 | A [[DC Circuit]] panel partly stays the injunction, 2–1. The ban stands for the Oval Office and other restricted spaces; AP keeps access to larger venues like the East Room. | | July 22, 2025 | The full D.C. Circuit declines to rehear the stay | | Nov 24, 2025 | Oral argument on the merits | | As of Sept 2026 | **No merits ruling.** The case is still pending. | The case set the template for the [[White House Press Ban]] of September 2026, which excluded CNN, MS NOW and Politico by name. AP was not one of the banned outlets, but the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that it filed a brief in their support. That case is before Judge [[Timothy Kelly]]. ## Money AP's newspaper business is shrinking: - **November 2024.** After [[Gannett]] and McClatchy dropped the service, AP announced buyouts and layoffs to cut 8% of staff. - **April 2026.** It offered buyouts aimed at cutting under 5% of staff. Newspapers now bring in about 10% of revenue, and that revenue fell 25% over four years. Pace said: "We're not a newspaper company." Its election data business is growing. AP says it gained 30% more customers over the last presidential cycle. ## AP Fact Check **AP Fact Check** is the wire's political-claim verification desk. Its work goes out to AP's member outlets rather than as a standalone brand, making it one of the wire-service nodes of the post-2016 [[Fact-Checking]] infrastructure. AP was paid to review flagged content in [[Meta]]'s third-party fact-checking program. It left the program in early 2024: when Meta ended the U.S. program in January 2025, AP reported that it had "ended its participation a year ago." AP works within the field's standards body, the [[International Fact-Checking Network]]. ## See Also - [[How Election Results Are Transmitted and Reported]] · [[National Election Pool]] · [[AP VoteCast]] · [[Exit Poll]] · [[Decision Desk HQ]] - [[Edison Research]] · [[SSRS]] · [[Fox News]] - [[White House Press Ban]] · [[Taylor Budowich]] · [[First Amendment]] · [[Media Capture]] - [[Fact-Checking]] · [[Reuters]] · [[International Fact-Checking Network]] · [[Meta]] - [[Misinformation]] · [[Disinformation]]