There is no such thing as an individual First Amendment right to access the White House, and the Associated Press found that out earlier this month after two of its reporters were barred from White House events by the Trump administration press team.
The dispute with President Donald Trump revolves around his executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The AP has since issued guidance through its official Stylebook to ignore the Trump order. “The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years,” the AP guidance reads. “The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.”
Unhappy with this decision, the deputy chief of staff, Taylor Budowich, explained that for the Trump White House, “This isn’t just about the Gulf of America. This is about AP weaponizing language through their stylebook to push a partisan worldview in contrast with the traditional and deeply held beliefs of many Americans and many people around the world.”
Whether or not the AP should cave to Trump on the Gulf of America, Budowich is 100% correct that the AP’s past Stylebook guidance has exposed the organization as little more than a communications arm of the Democratic Party.
Most glaringly, the AP has consistently carried water for the Democrats on immigration, refusing to call illegal immigrants “illegal,” instead using the euphemism “undocumented,” refusing to call the situation at the southern border a “crisis” even though the Biden administration was eventually forced to admit it was exactly that, and referring to illegal immigrant Jose Ibarra as an “Athens man” after he murdered Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
None of these word choices can be justified by a pursuit of truth since “illegal” is an illegal immigrant’s legal status, almost all “undocumented” immigrants have documentation, and Ibarra was from Venezuela, not Athens.
The AP also refused to label the political violence of the summer of 2020 “riots,” and it has also promoted transgender ideology by insisting on the use of the fiction of “gender-affirming care.”
The AP has a First Amendment right to advocate all of these partisan political beliefs that are far outside the mainstream beliefs of the public, but to turn around and pretend it is an objective reporting organization is simply not credible.
“What’s in a name?” Juliet asked Romeo. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But the names we give things and the words we use to describe certain people and events do matter. They shape how the information is interpreted. And the Trump White House has every right to ask the AP to try and be as objective and nonpartisan as it claims to be.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
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