Justice for AP News

The Associated Press is one of the most respected news outlets in the nation and world. Known for its neutrality and its accuracy, the nonprofit news service frequently tops media reliability rankings. It publishes 400,000 stories a year, along with 1.2 million photos, all across the globe, and says its content is seen by 4 billion people every day: around half of humanity.

Small newsrooms use AP’s coverage to inform readers on state, national and world events that their local reporters can’t cover. Large outlets covet its accessible writing, quick reporting, and top-of-line reporters. Virtually every professional print news publication in the nation follows its industrywide ethical, grammatical, punctuational and terminological guidelines spelled out in the AP Stylebook, which I keep a copy of on my desk at all times. The Associated Press is the authoritative news outlet, without exaggeration.

And as of this month, its reporters are banned from covering most events involving the president.

It started Feb. 12, when two of the AP’s White House reporters were denied entry to that iconic building where they do their jobs. The same has held true for every other credentialed AP reporter seeking entry to Air Force One, presidential news conferences, the Oval Office, and most other venues involving the commander in chief, for the last several weeks.

On Feb. 18, the president confirmed that he’d personally ordered the ban in response to the outlet’s refusal to call the body of water between the United States, Mexico and Cuba, “The Gulf of America.”

“We’re going to keep (AP) out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” President Donald Trump said to reporters at Mar-a-Lago after an executive order signing event. “We’re very proud of this country, and we want it to be the Gulf of America.”

For context, Trump has made a handful of executive orders renaming iconic American landmarks. The famously tall mountain in Alaska previously called Denali, after its Indigenous name, was rebranded Mount McKinley, after the former president who it was also named after for a while. North Carolina’s Fort Liberty reverted back to Fort Bragg, though Trump said it was now named after a private who fought in World War II, not a Confederate general from the Civil War.

And a third, of course, asserted that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as the Gulf of America. AP declined to alter its style guide accordingly, and was subsequently blocked from covering most presidential functions.

The outlet has filed a lawsuit in response, and on Tuesday, the Oval Office escalated the fight by announcing it would henceforth choose its own media pool, rather than deferring to the White House Correspondents’ Association, a third-party group that traditionally picks which reporters and outlets get the honor of covering the commander in chief’s appearances.

Names aren’t exactly facts

Within days of Trump’s inauguration, the Associated Press released guidelines for reporters on how it would handle the name changes. In short, it said landmarks within the U.S. would be called whatever the president calls them. Those that extend beyond its borders, however — Like the Gulf of Mexico — would go unchanged.

“The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years,” wrote Amanda Barrett, AP’s vice president of news, standards and inclusion, on Jan. 23. “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 information around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”

This is, frankly, more than reasonable. As a news source, AP’s job is to describe events and their locations in the least confusing way possible. And calling a body of water by a name it’s never had, which most of the planet doesn’t recognize, would probably confuse a sizable chunk of readers.

The outlet’s global audience is a great indicator of how names are socially determined, not absolute truths or falsehoods.

Consider the newspaper or website you’re reading from right now. When folks around here talk about this publication, they usually call it The Washington Evening Journal, not by its legal name: The Southeast Iowa Union. And they’re not wrong for doing so. Aside from the fact that it’s still a subtitle we print once a week, this paper was known as the Washington Evening Journal for over a century, before rebranding when it merged with the Mt. Pleasant News and Fairfield Ledger. A legacy like that doesn’t disappear overnight, even though today’s paper isn’t delivered in the evenings, nor is it exclusive to Washington.

Other examples abound. It’s not factually wrong to call our U.S. Senator by the name “Charles” Grassley, but it’d be weird to do that, because he prefers “Chuck.” The “Keota Curve” isn’t labeled on any DOT map of Highway 22, but the plenty of folks around Kinross know exactly where it is. Most people I know still refer to “X” as “Twitter” in casual conversation.

The presidential administration, however, appears to be under the impression that names are absolute. It has accused the AP not of disagreeing on a matter of opinion, but of blatantly lying to readers on a matter of fact.

“If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt a day after AP was first barred access to the Oval Office. “And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called, ‘The Gulf of America.’”

But like, it’s not. Even if one buys into Leavitt’s assertion that names are somehow falsifiable matters of fact, this one’s hardly indisputable.

The Economist and YouGov surveyed 1,603 adult U.S. citizens from Feb. 16-18, and found that just 30% “strongly or somewhat support” renaming this body of water. Which leads me to assume the other 70% — who are neutral, uninformed of, or opposed to the change — probably still call it the Gulf of Mexico, if only out of habit. That’s a strong majority. And therefore, the area is still “called” the Gulf of Mexico by most Americans, regardless of its formal entry in the U.S. Geographic Names Information System.

For the numerous AP readers who live in other countries, it’s still quite unambiguously known as the Gulf of Mexico, socially and legally. A casual news consumer in Canada or the UK might see an AP headline about the “Gulf of America” and assume it’s some other body of water that doesn’t affect them, and not the source of The Gulf Stream and a considerable chunk of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves. It’s asinine to expect an international outlet to willingly mislead those readers just because an American government official asked them to.

The name doesn’t matter. The retaliation does.

Does the combination of words we use for this chunk of ocean matter that much to myself, a man in Iowa whose only contributions to the Gulf of Mexico are whatever water runoff I indirectly produce in the Mississippi River watershed and occasional purchase of seafood that may or may not be might be caught down there? No. Probably not.

And while it’s sure to come up more often for people who live and work close to it, I don’t get the impression that the name alone for the gulf has a tangible impact on anyone in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi or Alabama. As long as the water continues to be there, its name won’t noticeably alter the region’s natural gas, crude oil, tourism and fishery industries. This doesn’t seem like a debate that materially affects anyone at all.

And that makes it all the more asinine to sanction one of the world’s most respectable news agencies over.

Here comes another quote from current White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, picking up right where the last one left off.

“I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, (the Gulf of America,) but that is what it is. The secretary of interior has made that the official designation in the geographical identification name server. And Apple has recognized that, Google has recognized that … and it’s very important to this administration that we get that right.”

Color me unconvinced.

Look, Apple and Google are some of the most profitable companies on the planet. Their first priority is to maintain that profitability, and that’s very difficult to do when they butt heads with the current administration. It frankly makes financial sense for them to differ to the whims of the president of the United States on something trivial like this.

But Apple and Google aren’t news outlets. Unlike Apple and Google, journalists have a sacred duty to disregard any government order telling them what to say or how to say it. This commitment is what keeps journalists independent. It is what holds democracies accountable to voters. It is why we know about the My Lai massacre, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, the Snowden leaks.

When we think of the most important journalism out there, it tends to be stuff government officials didn’t want the public to know about. We think of narratives from protesters fighting repressive regimes, innocent people arrested under false pretenses, and politicians hiding bribery and corruption from their constituents.

Governments don’t always play by the rules, and reporting on all of the above requires bravery. It requires reporters and editors and publishers to share the truth with the world, regardless of retaliation they may face from powerful people. Journalists have risked and lost their lives doing this, because it’s just that important.

Journalistic independence ensures transparency, which is why no government official should be allowed to tell a member of the American public what to say or how to say it, nor should they be allowed to choose what reporter covers it. Those decisions must be made by news outlets themselves, without obstruction.

Disagreeing with elected officials is not only a fundamental right assured by the First Amendment and a time-honored American tradition; it is what we should expect responsible news media to do, under every administration of every ideology and at every level of government. If dissenters are not equipped with information, they can’t petition the government for a redress of grievances, and if they can’t do that, then it’s not a democracy. It’s why every item in our Bill of Rights protects people from the government, not vice versa.

Every president will at some point make a controversial choice or catastrophic mistake in office. And when they do, we the people will deserve to know about it immediately and accurately. What we do with that information is up to us, that’s the beauty of a representative democracy.

And it’s impossible in a world where the president can unilaterally block any news outlet — even an individual reporter — from covering White House events in response to their publication of sufficiently bad press. Imagine a world where every journalist and editor must weigh the importance of publishing any major story that makes the president look remotely bad, versus the odds that they’re never allowed back into the building where they have the most capacity to inform the American public.

Now imagine a world where all it takes to trip that switch is something as inconsequential as disagreeing about the name of a body of water.

Whatever your political party, that’s a bad world to live in. This is not a question of partisanship, but of how much we’re willing to trust any government. And the sum of American history gives us the obvious default answer: very, very little.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com

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