Short answer: nobody owns the Associated Press the way a billionaire owns a newspaper. The AP is a not-for-profit cooperative — founded by five New York papers in 1846 — that is collectively owned by its member news organizations, the U.S. newspapers and broadcasters that carry its wire. There are no shareholders taking dividends and no proprietor setting the line. So "is AP liberal or conservative" is slightly the wrong lens: the structural pressure on the AP isn't a political owner, it's the need to sell one identical story to outlets on every side of the aisle. * Here's how the ownership actually works. Members elect the AP's board of directors and fund it through fees; in return the cooperative gathers and distributes news none of them could afford to cover alone. Because AP copy runs in conservative and liberal papers alike — plus thousands of subscribers worldwide who pay to use it without being members — the business model rewards being the plain-vanilla version of events everyone can reprint. That's why AP stories read flatter than a cable-news chyron: the blandness is the product. * That same instinct is why the AP Stylebook — the rulebook most American newsrooms actually write by — carries so much weight, and why a fight over three words blew up in 2025. After President Trump signed a January 20, 2025 order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," the AP said it would keep using Gulf of Mexico while acknowledging the new name Trump had chosen. On February 11, 2025 the White House told the AP its reporters would no longer be allowed into the Oval Office or aboard Air Force One over it. * The courts then split. On April 8, 2025 U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden — himself a Trump appointee — ordered the White House to restore the AP's access, writing that once the government opens its doors to some journalists it "cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints." In June 2025 a D.C. Circuit appeals panel reversed that 2–1, ruling the White House may exclude reporters from restricted spaces like the Oval Office, and the case kept grinding through the courts after that. Whatever the final word, the episode showed the AP doing the un-partisan thing that annoys whoever holds power: refusing to change its words on command. * So is it biased? Critics on the right have called the AP liberal for decades, and you can always find an individual word choice to argue about — but there is no owner, no shareholder, and no political proprietor pulling a lever behind the newsroom. Its actual bias is toward the safe, sellable middle, precisely because it has to keep hundreds of ideologically opposite members buying the same copy every day. * On our least-biased-news ranking we grade outlets by who owns them and what that owner wants. By that measure the AP scores unusually clean: a cooperative that answers to a broad membership has no billionaire's politics baked into it. Read it for what it is — the raw wire that the rest of the media builds its stories on — and save your skepticism for the outlets that add the spin on top.