Don’t Shed a Tear Over AP Getting the White House Boot

The Associated Press is getting kicked out of the White House, but this is hardly a random act of vindictiveness from President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration recently banned AP from the Oval Office and from traveling with President Trump on Air Force One after the news agency announced that it would refrain from changing the name “Gulf of Mexico” to the new, lawful name “Gulf of America.”

AP had no problem making recent name changes to a location based on the whim of a government, namely Ukraine’s spelling of Kiev. But not this time. Curious, right?

“Freedom of speech is a pillar of American democracy,” an AP spokesman said in a statement to Fox News. “The actions taken to restrict AP’s coverage of presidential events because of how we refer to a geographic location chip away at this important right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for all Americans.”

It’s hard to get upset over AP losing its position when it said nothing as other journalists were losing White House access. The Biden administration blocked 440 reporters from White House press conferences. I don’t recall AP reporting on that story at all or issuing warnings about the pillars of democracy being tumbled.

Now, it may seem strange that Trump is nuking AP over this “Gulf of America” issue. After all, there are plenty of other hostile media outlets that he’s still at least cordial with.

Is the “Gulf of America” change really worth going to war over?

In this case, it might be.

AP’s refusal to call the Gulf of America its new, official name was just the last straw in what has been a long chain of abuses.

AP represents a unique place in the media ecosystem. It has enormous influence over the media industry because it controls the highly influential AP Stylebook.

The AP Stylebook had been for decades the gold standard in setting up the basic rules of the road for journalists. This by itself wasn’t a bad thing. AP built a reputation for fairness and objectivity rarely matched by other media organizations. It leveraged that reputation with a guide that set the bar for professional standards in language and style.

The emphasis was on good grammar and clarity, certainly worthwhile goals.

What’s happened to AP in the last decade, though, is a tale that’s been repeated in elite institution after elite institution. The highest standards of objectivity were flushed down the drain to promote culturally left-wing points of view and foist them on the rest of society. They used their institutional capital to leverage culture war aims to the maximum extent.

AP hasn’t always been blatant with how they used this power, but the pattern and increasing bias in the AP Stylebook has been impossible to miss for those paying attention.

Axios recently listed some of “MAGA’s” problems with AP. Funny how Axios framed the report as if only Trump supporters have issues with these changes, but their list wasn’t bad.

Axios noted that AP essentially picked a side in the debate over transgenderism to avoid “false balance”—oops, according to AP I’m not supposed to use the word “transgenderism” because it “frames transgender identity as an ideology.”

Transgenderism is based on ideology, but AP decided that it’s one that everyone must accept as their truth regardless of whether the claims of proponents conform with reality.

AP insists that media outlets use the phrase “gender-affirming care” to refer to transgender surgeries and chemical interventions. Of course, this phrase reinforces the ideology that when someone engages in these procedures it “affirms” their “gender,” which can be chosen by any individual at any time regardless of biological reality.

Oops again. AP says I can’t write things like “biological sex.” Instead, AP suggests using the phrase “sex assigned at birth” as the approved terminology.

But that implies that what’s been assigned can be unassigned. Again, what AP is doing is reinforcing ideology that it says isn’t up for debate.

It isn’t just transgender or LGBTQ issues where AP clearly picked a side and affirmed the views of left-wing activists.

AP decided during the often violent Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to limit the use of the word “riot.”

“Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice, going back to the urban uprisings of the 1960s,” AP wrote.

The implication here is that the BLM riots—I’ll use that word because I don’t have a clearer word to describe the rampant looting and burning of cities in 2020—were just and that opposition to them was unjust.

The problem wasn’t just that AP suggested abandoning the word “riot,” it was the timing of this change that so obviously demonstrated that they were changing language to fit the aims of the Left.

There are countless other examples of word manipulations too.

Don’t you dare use “illegal alien” or even “illegal immigrant.” Don’t use technical phrases like “chain migration” either. That would anger open borders advocates, of course.

Oh, and don’t use the words “terrorist” or “terrorism,” because they’ve become “politicized.” I’m guessing some of the AP’s pals and colleagues in Gaza didn’t like those words too much.

The Daily Signal has reported on some of AP’s style abuse in recent years, too. In one case, AP practically malfunctioned trying to appease various left-wing social factions over the abortion issue.

“Phrasing like pregnant people or people who seek an abortion seeks to include people who have those experiences, but do not identify as women, such as some transgender men and some nonbinary people,” read new AP guidance in 2022.

Obviously, the transgender lobby has the most exalted place on the hierarchy of oppression.

Don’t forget climate activists, though. My colleague Tyler O’Neil reported on the AP’s contortions to appease this group in 2024. It decided to allow the phrase “climate crisis” in the place of “climate change.”

“Climate change, resulting in the climate crisis, is largely caused by human activities that emit carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies, science organizations and climate scientists,” the AP style guide suggests. “This happens from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, and other activities.”

Again, AP suggested avoiding “false balance.”

All these language changes have been made on behalf of left-wing causes. The specific prohibition of balance only goes one way.

Axios apparently tried to find examples where the Left didn’t like AP’s language guidance. All they could come up with is that some were angry that AP suggested not using the word “Palestine” because it isn’t a country or unified state. They also weren’t happy that AP didn’t do the DNC’s bidding and use the phrase “convicted felon” to describe Trump at every opportunity.

That’s it.

The pattern is clear. AP veers increasingly to the Left, which is fine except the model that gave it such exalted status was its neutrality.

Initially the AP’s strategy of stealth social engineering sort of worked. But over time, as institutional capital is spent pushing increasingly absurd and blatantly one-sided concepts on the public, that institutional capital runs out.

This is in many ways the source of widespread Western populism. Once-trusted institutions squandered their credibility and ultimately their power over the public. Some government institutions are making up for that with raw force.

But a media institution like AP doesn’t have that luxury, especially now that its leftwing allies no longer control the federal government.

That’s why AP and the legacy media are on the ropes. The people are tuning them out and turning toward alternatives. Trump and Republicans are no longer giving them unlimited VIP access, access that they don’t deserve.

If they wanted to return to their previous status, a vast mea culpa might begin that process, but my feeling is that they’ve gone too far down this road.

AP will have to adjust to the new media era, one that they unwittingly created.

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