Last week, if Google Maps is the last word (and it is, since our entire lives are controlled by all things Google), the Gulf of Mexico is now named the Gulf of America.
This re-christening is something that President Donald Trump has ordered and promised to do prior to his inauguration. He signed off on an executive order (one of 5,678,987) to do just that once he was in office.
Name changes take some time getting used to. For instance, the mighty Mike and the Moonpies have been going by the band name Silverada now for a couple of years, but I just can’t bring myself to think of them as that. They’re still incredible, though, no matter what name they’re rockin’.
This “Gulf of America” business is going to take some time, and although we’re fully aware of the magical powers of Trump’s Sharpie. He did, in his first term, divert the path of a serious hurricane with a single stroke of said pen upon a map.
No country technically owns the body of water. It borders three separate countries. Under the provisions of the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea, the United States of America controls the waters of the Gulf 12 nautical miles from its shores and maintains what is referred to as an Exclusive Economic Zone, which stretches 200 miles offshore. By the way: that information comes to you courtesy of the NOAA, which is one of many governmental agencies the Trump-Musk administration wants to make major cuts to.
There are most certainly much bigger fish to fry afoot in our country than the renaming of a body of water, but for a moment here, I want to reflect on a topic that emerged from this whole deal.
Last Tuesday, the White House blocked an Associated Press (AP) reporter from an event in the Oval Office, after demanding that the venerable, international news agency bend to the knee and use “Gulf of America” in its style book.
The AP style has been an industry standard in journalism and public relations for decades, and I often find myself flipping pages in my AP stylebook to see how a certain term or name should appear in print. AP Style does change from time to time. For example: for years, when writing about a large metal trash container, the term was Dumpster, with the proper noun designation, but recently, it has changed to the lower-case “d,” as it’s now considered a generic term and not a brand name. That habit has been hard to break, though.
Julie Pace, senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated Press, called the administration’s move unacceptable.
“It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism,” Pace said in a statement. “Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment,” she said.
Now call me old-fashioned and out of touch, but it would seem that a president’s demand that a body of water be renamed, without the legislation to accompany that move yet being passed into law, and another demand that a worldwide news agency change its style to reflect that would be a First Amendment issue.
Ah, yes, that pesky pole position on the Bill of Rights which prevents the government from stopping the press’s freedom, yes, that old thing.
Part of having a free and independent press is to keep the leadership in check; to “thank ‘em, or spank ‘em,” in the words of Donnis Baggett, of the Texas Press Association.
The American people elected Donald Trump to be a leader, and to breathe new life into our economy; not to threaten the First Amendment rights of the free press. The AP incident isn’t the only one, as lawsuits with ABC and other outlets over unfavorable coverage has shown.
Newspapers, broadcast outlets and magazines that still do actual journalism, must remain a neutral force to hold leaders accountable when need be, and within the confines of opinion pages, writers must be able to make their voices heard without fear of governmental reprisal.
This outlet, in the past, has published opinions critical of Trump, as well as his predecessors, and will continue to do so, and until a law states otherwise and/or the AP changes their listing, the Gulf of Mexico will still be just that around here.
