by Frank Miele at RealClear Wire
The Associated Press may not have spent a lot of time thinking about how to respond either, but when they decided to keep using the old name, they started a journalistic skirmish that is bread and butter for the Trump administration.
In retaliation, Trump’s press aides banned the AP from an Oval Office pool, and later from attending a news conference and traveling on Air Force One. The president himself said that these were privileges and that the restrictions would continue until the news organization relented.
Mind you, the AP wasn’t exactly belligerent. In a statement, Amanda Barrett explained that “Trump’s order only carries authority within the United States. 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. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.”
For the AP, that’s pretty reasonable. They often make no concessions to reality at all.
It must have been sometime in 2015, for instance, when I read a news story by the Associated Press about a convicted military whistleblower named Chelsea Manning.
At that time I was the managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake newspaper in Kalispell, Montana, and I was constantly monitoring the news wire for stories of interest to our local readership.
Something about Manning seemed familiar. There had been several famous cases of service members or intelligence agents who had passed classified material to WikiLeaks, but I couldn’t remember any woman who had done so. Still, something nagged at my reporter’s brain and I decided to Google-search “Chelsea Manning.”
It was then that I discovered that Chelsea Manning was none other than Bradley Manning, the former U.S. Army soldier who was convicted in 2013 of multiple violations of the Espionage Act.
How, I wondered, could the AP change Bradley Manning into Chelsea Manning without any acknowledgement that the original Manning had ever existed?
I soon found out how – by following the AP Stylebook, which was once the gold standard guiding newspaper people on grammar, spelling, and usage coast-to-coast. But AP has turned into an unregulated and self-administered experiment in social engineering. Turns out that back in August 2013, the Associated Press deemed (there is no better word for it) that people should be referred to by whatever damn pronoun they preferred, no matter what biology and social history said otherwise.
“The use of the first name Chelsea and feminine pronouns in Manning’s case is in conformity with the transgender guidance in the AP Stylebook,” the AP had announced. “The guidance calls for using the pronoun preferred by the individuals who have acquired the physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth.”
AP cannot be solely blamed for the pronoun confusion that followed for the next 12 years, but they certainly went along for the ride.
And note: The worst aspect of this particular conversion was that Bradley Manning was “disappeared” altogether. On its own, the AP declared that Chelsea Manning existed and Bradley Manning didn’t. If, like me, you didn’t know who Chelsea Manning was, that was your problem. At least, in the current battle the Associated Press was willing to acknowledge that President Trump had renamed the gulf, even if they didn’t want to use the name themselves.
These may seem like relatively insignificant examples of media bias, but they point us in the right direction. As George Orwell famously observed in “Politics and the English Language,” “… if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
That is certainly true for the decision to adopt leftist language to describe gender as a choice rather than a scientific fact. It also applies to the AP’s embracing of racial ideology in its 2020 decision to capitalize Black when referring to individuals with high melanin content, but to continue to refer to Caucasians by the lower-case descriptor “white.”
Isn’t that blatant bias?
The AP justified its decision because it claims that the skin color black reflects “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. The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”
So why is the lowercase white not simply a color? You can’t justify such a decision except when viewed within the framework of an ideological perspective. It is a conscious decision by a supposedly fair-minded journalistic organization to marginalize white culture, white history, and white identity.
If Black is to be capitalized, then why exactly can’t the AP declare that White will likewise be capitalized “in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as White, including those in the European diaspora and within Europe. The lowercase white is a color, not a person.”
Certainly European culture, spread throughout the globe, is a force that “conveys an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community,” but the AP muddles that up with skin color. Black is a skin color, not a person. And so is white. If people want to use black and white as shorthand to describe a much larger cultural milieu, so be it. But do so evenhandedly, not to impose an ideological viewpoint.
The AP Stylebook is nothing more than an echo chamber where journalists can go to be reassured that their liberal bias is appropriate. The gulf that the AP should be worried about isn’t the Gulf of America, but the gulf between their Stylebook and reality.