A linguistic gulf at the Associated Press

Journalists finally care about free speech. Too bad it's only one word.

If MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was correct when she predicted, last June, that Trump would send journalists to detention camps then perhaps it all began here, on Tuesday, when the Associated Press got booted from the Oval Office.

The dramatics of that night leached in to the White House press briefing room the following morning with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, stalking the press pool with her razor thin smirk, determined to get some answers.

“Which White House official made the decision to bar the AP reporter from the Oval Office and the diplomatic reception room last night?” Collins, who is sometimes confused with a crocodile, asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

The Associated Press, never one to miss an opportunity to remind you just how independent and vital they are, released its own statement, calling the decision a “punishment” for “independent journalism,” and a “plain violation” of the First Amendment.

“The Associated Press informs billions of people around the world every day with factual, nonpartisan journalism,” the agency whined. “Billions of people rely on The Associated Press for nonpartisan news.”

(It seems worth noting here the AP has taken over $52 million in taxpayer money since 2008, according to a documents on USAspending.gov).

With around a dozen news organizations present at any given Oval Office reception, no one needs the AP to tell them what happened. It is, in fact, the AP’s ego being punished, not the American people.

The whole dust up boiled down to a dick-wagging contest between President Trump and the persnickety semantics-mavens at the AP, centering around how to refer to the body of water that borders the southern United States.

Among his first acts as president, Trump issued an order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. At the same time, he restored the name of Alaska’s Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, which had been changed to “Denali” in 2015 by President Obama.

The AP, in its style guide update, noted it would adopt McKinley—being that the geographical feature lies solely in the United States and its name is therefore under the full authority of the U.S. The Gulf, however, said the AP, is shared by three nations—Cuba, Mexico, and the U.S.—and the agency would refer to that body using both Gulf of Mexico—named so in the 1600s by Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci—and Gulf of America.

The AP takes such things very seriously, as their style guide is considered the gold standard for news reporting and public relations. This decision, at least in principle, tracks with established AP standards, sort of. The Gulf of California, for example, is a U.S.-designated name, despite the body lying largely in the jurisdiction of Mexico, where it is known as the Sea of Cortez.

While the search function on the AP’s website has been mysteriously scrubbed of any result for both “Gulf of California” and “Sea of Cortez,” reports can be found elsewhere of the AP referring to that body using both terms, with “Gulf of California” taking precedence (the U.S. preferred name) and “Sea of Cortez” mentioned later as a side note.

Further silk-stocking tedium led the AP to announce, in 2019, a change to the spelling of the Ukrainian capital, from Kiev to Kyiv, writing that the change “is in line with the Ukrainian government’s preferred name and transliteration.”

The squabble du jour is, like everything else, all Obama’s fault. Before him, there are no examples of U.S. presidents unilaterally renaming features on the map. Only two instances come close, in 1963 and 2003, respectively, when President Lyndon Johnson advocated changing the name of Cape Canaveral, in Florida, to Cape Kennedy. This was achieved by an act of Congress only to be reversed, also by Congress, ten years later (the new name never caught on with locals).

In 2003, the Bush Administration spearheaded a push to remove “derogatory” names from geographical features, which resulted in Arizona’s Squaw Peak getting the new moniker Piestewa Peak, for a woman solider Bush sent to die in Iraq.

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(The rechristening of Mount McKinley National Park—named for assassinated Republican President William McKinley—to Denali National Park—after an Athabaskan word—occurred in a 1980 land conservation bill passed by Congress, but the name of the peak itself, McKinley, remained unchanged. The six-million-acre preserve’s Indian name wasn’t enough for Obama and his fruity, postcolonial brain worms; he needed to paint over the mountain, too. And, tellingly, Trump has kept the name Denali for the surrounding park).

While the whole Gulf of America thing is fragrant with trolly antics, the majority of the Gulf’s exclusive economic zone is under the jurisdiction of the U.S, giving credence to the name change. Moreover, it could be seen as a sort of symbolic reestablishment of the Monroe Doctrine and a nod to the Trump administration’s nationalist agenda—all words that make journalists squirm.

Yet, the kerfuffle could have been avoided if the AP had been clearer on what, exactly, using “both terms” meant. Would “Gulf of Mexico,” like “Sea of Cortez,” merely be an interjection? Instead, the agency wanted to pick a fight, and its hissy fit sparked other imperial news courtiers to pile into the quicksand.

“The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions,” Eugene Daniels, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said without a hint of irony.

“Barring AP journalists from an official presidential event because of the news agency’s editorial decisions is an affront to the First Amendment and a free press,” Tim Richardson, of the organization PEN America, sniped.

“It’s ironic that the same president who just weeks ago touted his executive order purporting to restore freedom of speech now wants to bar news outlets from executive order signings if they don’t use his preferred language,” Seth Stern, director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told the Washington Post.

On Friday, things escalated when the Trump administration placed further sanctions on the AP, barring the outlet from Air Force One, triggering more grandstanding and cries of censorship from the imperial media.

You’d think they might have learned something over the last ten years: that Trump’s most effective maneuver against the press is to encourage their arrogance, and this is no different.

The AP’s petty outrage and self-aggrandizement is having a boomerang effect. Savvy Americans are reminded how unimportant such institutions are in today’s media landscape, as well as how little access the press had to the previous administration compared to Trump’s (mostly) wide-open door. The more they cry censorship over something so stupid as a proper noun, the more we are reminded of the media’s complacent participation in actual government coercion when Biden was in charge.

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