What’s In A Name
Newspapers, and later broadcast and online operations, have long operated by using “stylebooks”—reference manuals to lead to greater consistency. For example, if a newspaper prints a story that includes a date, do you spell out the month of February, or abbreviate it? The stylebook tells you, so that when you read the paper, the stories all look the same, as you would expect.
Large newspapers or companies that publish many papers used to develop their own stylebooks, but in more recent times, we’ve relied on the ones written by wire services…formerly UPI, and now AP—the Associated Press—as the last remaining one of any size. I would teach the AP Stylebook to journalist students, just as I had learned a generation before them.
KXEL dropped its AP affiliation a couple of years ago due to cost and lack of relevance—we weren’t using it very much, because we had reason to distrust some of the reporting, or at least phrasing. But it is still used by a large number of media outlets.
About five years ago, in the aftermath of the George Floyd death, the AP decreed that a change in the stylebook was necessary: capitalizing the first letter in the work black to refer to a race. However, the first letter in the word white would not be capitalized. So literally, if you wrote that “a gathering of blacks and whites led to positive change”…the B would be capitalized and the W not capitalized, even though only the word “and” separated them. Didn’t seem right to me, so I declined then and now to follow that rule.
President Trump issued a valid and legal executive order, changing the name of a body of water which touches the U.S. in a variety of places to the “Gulf of America” instead of the “Gulf of Mexico”…whether you think that’s silly or not is not the point; it was a legal and valid change recognized now by even Google Maps, for whatever that’s worth.
The Associated Press, however, has declined to make any change and continues to report on the area as being the “Gulf of Mexico”—which earned the AP reporter a stiff arm when the reporter tried to go to the Oval Office with other reporters this week. The reporter was blocked because the White House said that access to the building and the President was a privilege, not a right—and those who failed to report accurately on the Administration would be reporting from afar in the future.
Not all reporters were blocked, mind you…just that one. And the White House press office is right—covering the President is not a right guaranteed to every journalist or news organization.
I’ve always bristled that when the AP said to do it a certain way, that was the law. I’ve come across many examples over time. When a President issues an Executive Order, however, that does have the force and effect of law. So who is the most credible source in this situation…the AP with its preference, or the document with the effect of law?
