President Donald Trump, right, speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One before signing a proclamation renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America on Feb. 9. (Roberto Schmidt – AFP / Getty Images)
By Ben Zeisloft February 24, 2025 at 5:00am
Various news outlets asked the White House on Feb. 17 to allow the Associated Press to once more attend press events despite its insistence on referring to the Gulf of America as the “Gulf of Mexico.”
The Associated Press has continued to use the “Gulf of Mexico” terminology in reports even after President Donald Trump signed an executive order formally changing the name.
As a result, its reporters have been barred from official events.
But a letter signed by 40 outlets and organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association implored the White House to lift the ban, according to The New York Times.
“The First Amendment prohibits the government from asserting control over how news organizations make editorial decisions,” the document said.
“Any attempt to punish journalists for those decisions is a serious breach of this constitutional protection.”
Liberal media outlets like The New York Times, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The Washington Post signed the letter.
But interestingly, so did conservative outlets like Fox News and Newsmax.
The latter outlet said in a statement to the Times that it wants the Associated Press to have freedom to use the language it desires.
Do you support the White House restricting the AP’s access to the president?
“We can understand President Trump’s frustration because the media has often been unfair to him, but Newsmax still supports The AP’s right, as a private organization, to use the language it wants to use in its reporting,” a Newsmax spokesman said in a statement.
“We fear a future administration may not like something Newsmax writes and seek to ban us,” the spokesman added.
One can understand where Newsmax is coming from.
It’s true, after all, that future administrations could penalize news outlets and restrict their freedom of speech.
But recent administrations, and in some cases very recent administrations, have already crossed that bridge.
The Biden administration revoked over 440 media credentials, representing more than 30 percent of the total reporters with “hard passes” to cover White House events, per the Heritage Foundation.
Trump nevertheless moved swiftly to restore the passes within days of his return to office.
That came despite the media waging a decade-long war against Trump, his agenda, and his character, to the point that several are having to pay him massive settlements.
In other words, the Trump administration is trying to balance respecting free speech with keeping vicious behavior from the media at bay.
It’s not an easy task.
But expecting that outlets use the official names for national landmarks and geographical locations, rather than using their old names simply because they do not like Trump, is a relatively simple request.
Ben Zeisloft is the editor of The Republic Sentinel, a conservative news outlet owned and operated by Christians. He is a former staff reporter for The Daily Wire and has written for The Spectator, Campus Reform, and other conservative news outlets. Ben graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with concentrations in business economics and marketing.
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