The Media Research Center thinks that any media outlet that does not mindlessly acquiesces to President Trump’s partisan whims is an enemy of the people (despite what Tim Graham claims to believe) as well as an enemy to Trump himself — thus, Graham is totally down with the White House’s war on the Associated Press for refusing to go along with Trump’s needless, partisan renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Graham huffed in a Feb. 17 post:
It could be painted as a strange sticking point, the Trump White House blocking access to the Associated Press because it refuses to acknowledge the new geographical term “Gulf of America.” It’s strange that AP would find this to be a battle over some grand principle, and it’s strange to block access for the body-of-water slight.
But Marc Caputo at Axios reports Team Trump has a broader message.
“This isn’t just about the Gulf of America,” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich told Axios. “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.”
Naturally, the AP pretends they’re not partisan or ideological. It’s bad enough that Caputo claims AP has “long been considered the gold standard of neutrality.” That’s ridiculous. They’re just as DNC-centered as the rest of the DC press.
AP communications veep Lauren Ellis claimed they’re “nonpartisan” and “fact-based.” Leftist outlets don’t get to pretend they’re exactly like they were in 1960.
Graham, meanwhile, wants you to think that right-wing outlets are “nonpartisan” and “fact-based” — after all, he has never called out their bias. He further huffed:
AP has choked on “Gulf of America” because they’re a “global” news agency. Their guidance to the media claimed “Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change….The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years.” And lots of people changed their names (and pronouns) after decades. This is all about opposing Trump.
AP accepted Trump changing back the name of Mount McKinley since that’s inside America.
By contrast, the MRC demands that transgender people be deadnamed — identified by their birth name and not their chosen one.
Clay Waters joined in the complaining the next day:
PBS’s regular Monday political conclave with Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter and NPR White House reporter Tamara Keith ran hotter than usual, with concerns about President Trump’s purported assault on the First Amendment fanning the fear flames, leading the panel to make ridiculous defenses of the non-partisan (!) Associated Press.
[…]Keith shrugged off capitalization decisions as a formality. But the AP style guide has made several shifts for ideological reasons. In the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter hysteria, it announced it would capitalize the word “black” when referring to black Americans (but not “white” when referring to white Americans). The reasoning: “AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.”
Waters didn’t explain how it’s ideological to capitalize a name.
Graham returned to whine further about this in his Feb. 19 podcast:
Reporters are in a dither than Team Trump’s committing a “naked violation of the First Amendment” by denying access to the Associated Press. So said Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, adding “As [press secretary Karoline] Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern.”
The tiff started over the AP refusing to acknowledge President Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Both sides are digging in. The liberal media blob didn’t react this way when Team Biden obstructed access to the New York Post in their time. The AP in no way should be presented as nonpartisan or “the gold standard of neutrality.”
On the PBS News Hour, NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith claimed Trump “going after AP for an editorial choice, is going directly at the First Amendment. It is going directly at the freedom of the press. And it is not coincidental that they are going after AP. AP is extremely influential. They’re also kind of straight down the line. They are not a partisan news outlet in any way.”
This is preposterous. Their reporters write gushy books about Jill Biden. Wemple acknowledged that NewsBusters calls them “Associated Partisans,” and linked to our item on how AP suggested that when Republicans argued that the Biden-Harris campaign would end up as a President Harris campaign, it was “racist” and “misogynist.”
That appears to be restricted to a single incident in 2023 — nothing like the Trump White House’s blanket ban on the AP. Graham continued to whine:
In CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter accused Trump of become the “Word Police.” This is incredibly odd, since the AP has a Stylebook that is widely used in newsrooms where they are obviously the Word Police. In recent years, they have not only banned “illegal immigrant” and discouraged the term “late term abortion,” they were especially woke on transgenderism, arguing “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure…”
Stelter quoted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof comparing Trump to dictators: “It boggles the mind that Trump can complain about censorship and then block the AP from access to the Oval Office unless the journalists use language he prefers. But AP reporters have stood up to dictators worldwide, even endured prison; they’re tougher than Trump.”
Why doesn’t Graham think journalists should follow an agreed-upon set of standards?
Nicholas Fondacaro rehashed old grievances in a Feb. 20 post:
In an appearance on Wednesday’s CNN Newsroom and in his so-called “Reliable Sources” Newsletter, liberal media janitor Brian Stelter kvetched about President Trump “embracing the role of word police” for barring the Associated Press from official White House events over their refusal to call it the Gulf of America. Meanwhile, Stelter had backed the Biden administration’s attempt to create a literal word police via the Department Homeland Security and the so-called Disinformation Governance Board.
“In a statement, an AP spokesperson says, quote, ‘This is about the government telling the public and press that what words to use and retaliating if they do not follow government orders,’” host Pamela Brown teed up Stelter.
To which Stelter whined: “Yeah, Trump is embracing the role of word police. You know, he is trying to enforce the idea that the Gulf of America is the only acceptable name.”
Stelter went on to argue that, “The AP has clients and customers around the world, many of whom recognize it as the Gulf of Mexico.” And touted how the AP was “not going to back down here. And as a result, this is a stalemate that’s now going into a second week.”
He went on to bellyache about the lack of overt support the AP was getting from other outlets and shared the AP’s frustration with it:
[…]But despite his apparent outrage at Trump acting as the “word police,” Stelter has shown that he supports the idea quite literally. In July of 2022, before his ouster from the network, Stelter lamented the demise of former-President Biden’s attempt at creating word police under the Department of Homeland Security via the Disinformation Governance Board.
But the board Jankowicz led was not acting as “word police” — it was targeting disinformation, which the MRC refuses to admit exists (when right-wingers do it, anyway).