And all it took was a fight with a Republican White House.
And all it took was a fight with a Republican White House.
T he Associated Press is fighting the Trump administration over a mandated name change, presumably because the global newswire sees the twisting and politicization of language as its exclusive remit.
Journalists are territorial, after all.
On January 20, President Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Google Maps and Apple Maps soon updated their software in the U.S. to reflect the name change. Some news organizations, including Axios and USA Today, also updated their style guides to incorporate the new title.
The Associated Press, however, released a statement on January 23 declaring its opposition.
“The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years,” the newswire announced. “The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”
To emphasize its commitment to clear, precise language, the AP said in the same announcement that it will honor Trump’s executive order reversing President Obama’s decision to rename Mount McKinley as Mount Denali. The AP clarified that since the mountain is on U.S. soil, the news agency has no issue referring to it by the name established through executive order. In response to the AP’s refusal to adopt “Gulf of America,” the Trump administration revoked its White House press credentials, preventing reporters from attending briefings in the Brady Room. Since then, there has been much hullabaloo over whether this represents an attack on the First Amendment, whether the Associated Press deserves this treatment, and so on.
It’s all rather silly, particularly the revocation of the AP’s credentials. What is also true, though, is that it’s impossible to ignore the AP’s own sordid history of bending and torturing language for political reasons, as anyone who has suffered the tyranny of the AP Stylebook knows all too well. Amid all the overwrought commentary about assaults on the free press, there’s the persistent reality that the AP is not that staunch guardian of language it claims to be.
The AP once referred to former Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the most liberal Democratic senators to serve in the Senate in the 21st century, as a “centrist.”
“Centrist”? By what standard?
It’s not little things, either.
The AP Stylebook, a widely used manual guiding editorial decisions for thousands of newsrooms, tells reporters to use the terms “anti-abortion” (not “pro-life”) and “abortion rights.” The AP is why pro-lifers are stuck with the “anti-” tag, while the pro-abortion camp goes home with “rights.” Cute.
It was the AP that issued a memo in 2021 instructing staffers not to refer to the border crisis as a “crisis.” Notably, before the wire service handed down its directive, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 100,441 encounters with migrants (including apprehensions plus crossings of undocumented immigrants at legal ports of entry). Also, at the time of the AP directive, CBP was recording an average of 5,000 undocumented immigrants per day. Two years before the Associated Press memo went out — when Donald Trump was president, and the monthly number of encounters was far lower — the newswire published a fact-check that included the following line: “Few would argue that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding.”
This is the newsroom that repeatedly referred to the Venezuelan illegal immigrant who murdered Georgia woman Laken Riley as an “Athens man.” (The AP also reported that Riley’s murder “highlight[ed] the fears of solo female athletes.”)
This is the same newsroom that formally ditched the term “illegal immigrant” in 2013, reasoning that “illegal” should apply only to actions, not people.
This is the same newsroom that embraced “they” as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun, not only to recognize “that the spoken language uses they as singular” but because the AP editors “also recognize the need for a pronoun for people who don’t identify as a he or a she.”
This is the newsroom that endorsed the gender-neutral framing “pregnant people,” explaining that “the inclusive term ‘pregnant people’ is preferred when describing people who are pregnant. It takes into account minors, transgender men and nonbinary people. Aim to use the phrase ‘pregnant women’ only when it’s known everyone the term applies to identifies as a woman.”
This is the news organization whose style guide has adopted the language of trans activists for all related coverage, including that “a person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.” This is the newsroom that unironically uses female pronouns in reference to biological males and vice versa. This is the newsroom that uses terms such as “gender-confirmation procedures” and “gender-affirming care” to describe breast removal in minor girls, the use of puberty-blocking drugs, and genital mutilation of minors. This is the newsroom that argues that referring to a transgender person’s given name — “deadnaming” — “can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”
Amid the introduction of terms such as “pregnant people” and the insistence on referring to biological males and females by opposite pronouns, one can’t help but wonder how on earth “Gulf of America” became the Associated Press’s red line.
Is the AP’s dismal record on politized speech beside the point? Perhaps. It’s just tough to put this history aside in the broader context of its fight with the White House. The AP sermonizing on the need for clear, precise language is a bit like Larry Flynt sermonizing in defense of sexual propriety — it’s hard to take the speaker seriously.