Trump's White House Says 'Gulf of Mexico' Is Misinformation
Misinformation concept creep is getting out of hand.
President Donald Trump's exceedingly silly efforts to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America" became particularly obnoxious this week, as the White House announced that it would strip the Associated Press of access to presidential press briefings and Air Force One flights. The news organization's transgression? Sticking with Gulf of Mexico in its official style guide.
There are obvious hypocrisies running in both directions here. Many liberal and mainstream media organizations have embraced the progressive push to rename various public locations, landmarks, sports teams, etc., or to use new and awkward naming conventions in an effort to appease social justice activist groups. The A.P. deciding in July 2020—in the midst of the summer of unrest following the killing of George Floyd—that its style guide would henceforth capitalize black but not white is a good example of this.
But in this case, the MAGA hypocrisy is even more galling. If Joe Biden's White House had stripped a right-leaning news organization of Oval Office access because it refused to recognize the area in front of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., as Black Lives Matter Plaza, conservatives would have gone ballistic. Imagine a Biden surrogate asserting that any journalists who failed to properly respect the space's new name were guilty of spreading misinformation—the opprobrium would be cacophonous and well-deserved.
Yet that's exactly what the Trump White House is doing. In a statement on X, Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich accused the A.P. of betraying its commitment to stem the spread of misinformation.
"The Associated Press continues to ignore the lawful geographic name change of the Gulf of America," he wrote. "This decision is not just divisive, but it also exposes the Associated Press' commitment to misinformation."
This is a baffling statement that demonstrates exactly why it was such a profound mistake for mainstream and progressive organizations to latch on to misinformation as a quasi-clinical term to describe everything they disagree with. Misinformation concept creep has become a real and regrettable phenomenon; the term should be reserved for information that is patently, objectively false—not a viewpoint-based disagreement over which naming convention should apply to a body of water.
