Trump vs. the AP: An American Standoff
The president targets the wire service whose stylebook is the wellspring of journalistic groupthink.
There’s often a deeper meaning to Donald Trump’s absurdist comedy, and the president’s current dustup with the Associated Press is a case in point. On Inauguration Day Mr. Trump impishly announced that the U.S. would change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to “Gulf of America.” The AP was not amused. “The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years,” it declared in a Jan. 23 “style guidance” dispatch. “The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.”
Now the White House and the wire service are locked in what Mr. Trump might call an American standoff. The AP has been stripped of its position in the traveling presidential press pool and excluded from covering limited-capacity events. “It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism,” executive editor Julie Pace said in a statement. “Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.” On Friday the wire service sued three White House officials in federal court.
I side with the AP on the style question, but then I’m reactionary about names. I still say Twitter, Washington Redskins, Burma and Bruce Jenner. I find the White House’s actions in this matter amusing, not alarming, and they plainly don’t violate the First Amendment.
In 2018, CNN went to court and won a temporary restraining order after the White House revoked correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credential. But the judge didn’t rule on the network’s First Amendment claim, the White House restored Mr. Acosta’s credential, and CNN dropped the litigation. The AP’s reporters still have their White House credentials, making the wire service’s case considerably weaker than CNN’s was. The freedom of the press doesn’t entail a right to privileged access, and the word “Associated” appears nowhere in the Constitution. The relief the AP seeks—a judicial injunction compelling physical access to the president’s chambers—would be a gross encroachment on the constitutional separation of powers.
Most news organizations (including the Journal) have responded to “Gulf of America” in the same way: by noting but declining to adopt Mr. Trump’s name change. Why did the White House single out the AP? Axios’s Marc Caputo reported on Feb. 17 that it was “to protest what aides see as years of liberal word choices that the wire service’s influential stylebook spread across mainstream media.” In emails to the AP on Feb. 18, chief of staff Susie Wiles confirmed that, according to the wire service’s lawsuit.
Contra Ms. Pace, the White House’s objection isn’t to the AP’s “independent journalism” but to its homogenizing effect on news coverage. As she notes in her statement, AP reporting reaches “billions of people around the world” when what she calls its “factual, nonpartisan journalism” is republished by member newspapers, broadcasters and websites. The AP has an even wider reach through its stylebook, which most of its members incorporate as their own. This would hardly matter if the stylebook stuck to matters of style, like whether to hyphenate “email” or when and how to abbreviate months and states. But there’s a lot of substance, including ideological substance.
The AP Stylebook is the wellspring of journalistic groupthink. Since it went online in 2002, the flood of conformity has intensified. Decrees and dogmas propagate far more rapidly than they did when the stylebook was a spiral-bound volume with new editions published years apart.
One of the most prominent examples looks deceptively like a question of pure style: A few years ago, the AP began capitalizing “black” when used as a racial designation. This was a telling change because in contrast with the Gulf of Mexico, the AP didn’t stick with tradition. Nor did it bow to a change in common usage, but to activist demands. “Words, like Black lives, matter,” David Lanham of the National Association of Black Journalists wrote in an open letter to the AP on June 16, 2020. “It’s Black, with a capital B.”
The wire service complied three days later, its timing rich with symbolism—at the height of a nationwide frenzy over race and on June 19, now the federal holiday of Juneteenth. With some exceptions, liberals (including most news organizations) fell into line with the AP, while conservatives didn’t. The Supreme Court, for instance, has split, with the three Democratic appointees and Justice Neil Gorsuch opting for “Black.” The “nonpartisan” AP attempted to position itself at the vanguard of history and succeeded in stranding itself on one side of America’s ideological gulf.
Mr. Caputo reports that White House aides’ “grievances” against the AP extend to immigration (the stylebook bans “alien,” “illegal immigrant,” “chain migration” and “anchor babies”), political violence (it discourages “riot” and “terrorism”), and overseas geography (it transliterates Ukraine’s capital as Kyiv, not Kiev). But the stylebook descends from bias into delusion with its “Transgender Coverage Topical Guide.”
This is a 2,948-word ideological manifesto, although it doesn’t identify as a manifesto: “Do not use the term transgenderism, which frames transgender identity as an ideology,” the guide instructs. It is filled with bizarre assertions and jargon, which reporters are mandated to accept as if they supersede the facts of life.
According to the guide, a child isn’t “born a boy or girl”; rather, sex is “usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate.” “Examples of gender identities include . . . nonbinary; bigender; agender; gender-fluid; genderqueer; and combinations of identities, such as nonbinary woman.” “Deadnaming a transgender person”—that is, accurately reporting such a person’s given name—“even posthumously in obituaries or other coverage, is often considered disrespectful to the deceased, their survivors and any transgender people.” If I worked for the AP, I would have to petition management for a dispensation to mention Bruce Jenner.
All this is cloaked in appeals to authority: “Experts from organizations including the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association say gender is a spectrum.” Reporters are instructed to squelch any challenge to the accepted authorities: “Don’t quote people speaking about biology or athletic regulations unless they have the proper background.” Ketanji Brown Jackson was following the AP Stylebook when she declined to define the word “woman” on the grounds that “I’m not a biologist.”
These editorial diktats have real-world effects. Sports teams, locker rooms, public rest rooms and prisons are segregated by sex primarily to protect the privacy and safety of women. Many women object when “transgender women”—men who conceive of themselves as being female—intrude into these areas. Good luck if they want fair treatment from the local newspaper, which is almost certainly an AP member. The AP’s policy—its “style”—is that those men are women, and the women who object to their presence in intimate spaces should stifle themselves.
In another Inauguration Day action, Mr. Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It declared: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
That has been the case at least since sexual dimorphism emerged in trilobites, some 540 million years ago. If the AP is willing to deny the primordial truth about sex on the say-so of some authority figure, the Gulf of Mexico is a strange hill for it to die on. But I hope it does—or at least I hope both sides stand their ground after the AP loses in court and the result is a diminution of its influence on American journalism.
White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich promised in a Feb. 14 tweet that the space the AP used to occupy “will now be opened up to the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas.” The temptation will be to favor partisans who reliably take the administration’s side. But maybe there will be room for some who are genuinely curious, skeptical, creative and beholden only to the truth.
Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.
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