A Word, Please: White House makes unprecedented move to stifle the press

If you’ve read this column before, you know about AP style. I’ve been writing about it for decades.

You know that the Associated Press Stylebook is a playbook for AP’s own editors to ensure consistency in their stories, avoiding, for example, writing “5-year-old” on one page and “five-year-old” on the next, or writing “USA” on one page and “U.S.A.” on the next. You know that the stylebook takes positions on matters of spelling, grammar, word usage, capitalization and punctuation. And you know that sometimes AP’s positions are controversial, like when its editors decided to allow “over” to mean “more than” in its style: “children over 5 years old.”

AP makes these decisions for its own articles, updating its rules periodically as need arises, and many other publications choose to follow AP’s popular style guide. Independent decision-making like this is normal in a free press, which itself is crucial to a functioning democracy.

Recent headlines involving AP are anything but normal. President Donald Trump’s administration barred two AP reporters from covering White House events. The reason: AP did not change its style guide to accommodate Trump’s insistence that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Gulf of America.

All Americans should be up in arms about a public servant trying to dictate the words news outlets use. They should be outraged that their representative refuses to answer to the people’s proxies: mainstream journalists.

Yet too many people seem to think it’s fine: “Who cares about AP? Mainstream media are the bad guys. Biased. Liars. ‘Enemies of the people.’”

We’ve been told this for years. There’s a multibillion-dollar media establishment built on this narrative. The anti-mainstream-media media tell us: “Those other news agencies are lying to you. We’re the only ones you can trust.” They stoke suspicion and play on the pride of people who want to believe they’re too savvy to be conned.

The irony is that people who buy this argument are falling for one of the oldest cons in the book. “That guy over there just picked your pocket!” the pickpocket says as you turn the other way and he takes your wallet. Nothing suspends critical thinking like the belief that one is under attack.

Opinion

A Word, Please: I’s instinct is you know this is wrong

People often make the mistake of using “I” when it’s part of a plural, writes grammar expert June Casagrande, when they should use “my.”

Feb. 11, 2025

In the world that the anti-mainstream-media media have constructed, traditional news agencies can’t be trusted, and they can’t make honest mistakes. If a newspaper reports something in a way you don’t like, it’s deliberate, sinister manipulation.

Years ago, when I was a community news reporter working under a heavy workload on tight deadlines, I was assigned to write a light feature article about a struggling sailing club. In my haste, I glossed over the underlying news story — a story with two valid sides that both deserved an airing. I blew it.

The next day, I got an angry email from a reader who called my story a “socialist diatribe.” Deliberate manipulation. No chance I was just a human being who did a bad job, even though I lived 50 miles away and had no personal interest whatsoever in what happened in his city. As a member of the media, I was a supervillain.

Yes, journalists sometimes let their own bias skew a story. But in my experience, journalists are more inclined to overcompensate for their own bias, skewing stories in the opposite direction. So if you see only bias against your side and never bias that favors your side, you’re not a good judge of media impartiality.

Things weren’t always this way. For the first half of my life, people knew that, flawed as they are, mainstream media like AP act as the people’s scribes. As citizens in a functioning democracy, they expected their representatives to answer to the mainstream press, who ask questions on the people’s behalf. A leader shutting out a major journalism outlet would have been tantamount to telling the American people you no longer answer to them. Unacceptable.

I get why people like the name “Gulf of America.” The word “America” is, frankly, beautiful. To me, it’s a reminder of how people living under dictators like Stalin, Mao and Pinochet could look to us and see it’s possible for citizens to pick leaders who wield power on the people’s behalf, not their own. It was in those places, not here, that leaders could dictate what the media said.

No American, regardless of party or ideology, should tolerate a public servant telling journalists what to write. It’s un-American.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at [email protected].