Trump wants to control the AP. I covered the Middle East for them — here’s what he’s got wrong
Trump understands the power of language — but preserving its subtleties is crucial
Google Earth displays the “Gulf of America” on Feb. 11. Photo by Drew Angerer / AFP / Getty Images
Columnist Dan Perry February 18, 2025
I know from decades of working at The Associated Press that the journalists there agonize over ensuring that the terminology they use conveys facts without reflecting a political leaning. But President Donald Trump seems intent on disrespecting that, as he insists on punishing the AP for refusing to adhere to his decree declaring that in the U.S., the Gulf of Mexico will now be known as the “Gulf of America.”
It’s a fight worth having because words shape narratives, influence perceptions and, in the context of international reporting, can either bridge cultural divides or deepen existing chasms. The significance of respecting that truth was made to clear to me during my AP years reporting on the century-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a war of parallel narratives that hardly intersect, in which the two sides perceive utterly different realities, and therefore a particular linguistic minefield.
AP’s argument in its fracas with Trump is straightforward: The president of the United States has no authority to actually rename a thing that is not in the United States, only to change how it is referred to by the U.S. government. Since AP’s readership and clients are global, convention and widespread use must rule the day — so the Gulf of Mexico it shall remain.
Trump’s response has been, predictably, vindictive and childish. AP reporters have been blocked from attending White House events and barred from boarding Air Force One. (They are still permitted to attend standard press briefings.)
At stake is far more than what to call a body of water. It is a battle over freedom of the press, as well as government transparency, since the shrinking of the news industry means vast numbers of Americans rely on AP reporters to tell them what is going on in Washington.
Those readers also rely on the AP to avoid charged vocabulary, something I spent countless hours agonizing and sometimes arguing over in my years working at the AP, including as bureau chief in Jerusalem and then editor in charge of Middle East coverage.
The imperative for impartiality is enshrined in AP’s News Values and Principles, which outlines the organization’s mission to deliver accurate, balanced and unbiased reporting. Central to that mission is the meticulous selection of language, especially when reporting on contentious issues. The AP Stylebook serves as a compass, directing journalists toward terminology that upholds clarity and neutrality. Its standards are widely used by other news organizations, including the Forward.
So, for example, the AP will not refer to Russia’s war against Ukraine as a “special military operation” — the euphemism preferred by the Kremlin, meant to whitewash the fact that it was a major unprovoked military invasion. Instead, the Stylebook calls for “the Russia-Ukraine war” and offers a “topical guide” with 21 entries on how to spell and describe key people, places and the Ukrainian currency (“hryvnia”).
The AP’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is similarly guided by a commitment to precision and impartiality. But many terms in regular use in conversations around that conflict — like “settlements,” “occupied,” “terrorists” and “refugees” — carry profound political and emotional weight, making neutrality a sometimes elusive goal. As the old cliché goes, one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
So, the AP’s guide to the conflict notes that the U.S., the European Union and some other countries “have branded Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups” but advises using “militants” instead, with “fighters, combatants or attackers” as acceptable alternatives — but not “soldiers.”
“The terms terrorism and terrorist have become politicized, and often are applied inconsistently around the world,” the stylebook notes. “Because they can be used to label such a wide range of actions and events, and because the debate around them is so intense, detailing what happened is more precise and better serves audiences.”
I remember following that policy at the beginning of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising. We used the terms “suicide bomber” or “assailant” — anything but “terrorist” — and I was OK with that. After all, many on the Palestinian side accused Israel of “state terror” — a term we also avoided — and there’s just no way to win.
Then came 9/11. Suddenly the AP wire — and all media — was full of references to the “terrorists” who carried out the biggest “terrorist attack” in history. What changed? Perhaps the fact that the only representatives of the “other side” were probably in a cave in Afghanistan. Then along came ISIS, a terrorist group so widely seen as vile that it was OK to call them what they are, and, as the AP’s Mideast Editor, I made sure we did.
(The current AP Stylebook describes both al-Qaida, which was responsible for 9/11, and ISIS, as “militant” groups.)
The AP, unlike the Forward and news organizations including The New York Times, did not use the terms “terrorist” or “terror attacks” in describing the brutal Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its main story that day referred to the invaders as “militants” and “gunmen” who “stormed from the blockaded Gaza Strip into nearby Israeli towns, killing dozens and abducting others in an unprecedented surprise attack.”
The AP only included reference to the massacre as a terrorist attack in a quote by then-President Joe Biden — and that is generally the pattern: slipping the word in when it can clearly be attributed.
Another conundrum in Middle East coverage is the 7 million Palestinian “refugees” living in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and around the world. This population includes a small number of surviving actual refugees from the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967, as well as several generations of their descendants. But the United Nations classifies them all as refugees, and the places they live as refugee camps even though they look more like towns. This hereditary refugee status is unique to the Palestinians.
If the U.N. applied a similar standard in south Asia, for example, we’d currently have tens of millions of Hindu and Muslim refugees, descended from the 15 million or so displaced by the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. We’d also have millions of Jewish “refugees” descended from the 1 million who fled Arab countries and mostly ended up in Israel. But that’s not what the AP or any other news organization calls Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern descent.
Of course it’s more complicated. Unlike the Jewish refugees who are now Israeli citizens — or the Muslims and Hindus who are citizens of Pakistan and India respectively — many of the descendants of the Palestinian refugees remain stateless. That’s true including in countries like Jordan and Lebanon: Those countries have refused to give resident Palestinians citizenship, in order to perpetuate their grievance against Israel.
I always pushed to do stories about the plight of these people. But I also pushed back against the U.N.’s simplistic classification, instead writing “refugees and their descendants.”
In my decades on this fraught beat, I learned that you cannot use “terrorist” enough to satisfy the Israelis — or “settlements,” “occupied” and “refugees” enough for the Palestinians. The reason is clear: these terms all suggest that one or the other side is in the wrong.
They are dog-whistles, just as Trump’s “Gulf of America” is a dog-whistle for “America is great.” (And, yes, “dog-whistle” is a loaded term that minimizes the seriousness of the person saying whatever is being described as a dog-whistle.)
Now that I write opinion columns, I’ve come to think impartial language is sometimes impossible. The public senses a sort of dishonesty in it, which may itself further undermine trust in the media.
The AP, like much of the English-language media, dignifies sham processes in places like Russia as “elections.” Sometimes stories note that they are a sham, but short items often report the results as if they were reliable. Similarly, dictators like Vladimir Putin are dignified with the title “president” in the name of neutrality, which risks making their governance seem democratically legitimate.
The AP is a major engine of global news machinery, and my decades as part of that engine showed me what a delicate and complex undertaking it is. They’re right about the “Gulf of America,” and I’m proud they are standing their ground on it.
Journalists tend to sidestep controversy, aiming to present fact-based realities in a way that readers can relate to and understand. But ours, increasingly, is not that kind of world.
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