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The Associated Press may not be inclined to use it, but there’s an old expression about relieving oneself and blaming the results on the rain that it ought to be reminded of.
On Tuesday, the White House demanded that the AP alter its style guide and align itself with President Trump’s latest branding exercise: Renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
When the AP refused, Team Trump barred AP reporters from a buzzy Oval Office signing ceremony featuring Elon Musk.
There’s nothing to celebrate about that; the most powerful man in the country shouldn’t deny journalists access based upon their editorial judgments.
Still, the AP’s haughty, delusional reaction to the dust-up is something to behold.
“As a global news organization, The Associated Press informs billions of people around the world every day with factual, nonpartisan journalism,” proclaimed executive editor Julie Pace.
“It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism.”
If only saying it made it so.
In both its journalism and its stylistic edicts, the AP is neither independent nor nonpartisan.
Indeed, its product bears a closer resemblance to those of other left-wing infotainment companies like MSNBC and CNN than the buttoned-up wire service it presents itself as.
While the AP may now be pretending to be above using its vaunted stylebook to serve partisan ends, its actual objection is to serving the wrong partisan ends.
Take, for example, its 2022 command not to “use the term late-term abortion,” because “the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) defines late term as 41 weeks through 41 weeks and 6 days of gestation, and abortion does not happen in this period.”
Never mind that late-term abortions — which Americans overwhelmingly oppose — have long been colloquially understood to refer to those performed deep into the second trimester.
The AP demands conformity around the position of Planned Parenthood and ACOG, which is not some authoritative, disinterested source of medical expertise, but a pro-abortion activist group devoid of any of the credibility attributed to it.
After all, the ACOG opposes any abortion restrictions whatsoever — regarding abortion as an unqualified boon to society no matter how, when and why it’s performed.
The AP’s deference to such a group betrays that it’s not independence it cherishes, but the illusion of it.
Countless other infractions underscore this revealed leftist preference.
In 2022, the “Associated Press Stylebook,” which is widely used across the industry, published guidance on transgender issues that represented an unconditional surrender to radical gender ideologues.
“Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time,” it lectured.
At other points, the guidance asserted that a person’s sex is sometimes “assigned at birth . . . inaccurately,” accused conservative legislators of “falsely framing children as under threat,” and recommended that writers use the sinisterly euphemistic “gender-affirming care” to describe irreversible sex-change treatments given to minors.
A publication with such slanted rules could only produce slanted coverage.
Recall that while it mourned the loss of the “charismatic and shrewd” terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah, it noted the death of former Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe by calling him a “defense hawk who called human-caused climate change a ‘hoax.’”
Remember that it intentionally omits damaging information about Hamas from its reports.
And don’t ever forget how it shamefully tried to pin the blame for a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Those are just a few tips attached to a massive iceberg.
There was the time the AP fretted over the mere existence of traditional Catholics in the United States.
The time it called plagiarism a “new conservative weapon against colleges,” after shamed Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned amid scandal.
The time it accepted $8 million from climate activists to launder their agenda under the AP’s journalistic aegis.
Its efforts to bolster former President Joe Biden’s poisonous lies about so-called voter suppression.
And its decree that writers refer to charitable crisis pregnancy centers not by their chosen label but as “anti-abortion centers,” even amidst a wave of violence against them.
Of course, the AP has every right to cover people, places and events from the progressive perspective from which it does.
But by insisting it’s still the unbiased gold standard for journalists to aspire to — rather than the left-wing organization, staffed by left-wing employees, and intent on pushing left-wing narratives that it is — the AP is burning its last shred of credibility.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.