You don’t get far in the world of journalism without learning to use the Associated Press Stylebook. Often called the “Bible of journalism,” the reference book is used in newsrooms around the United States, from the Chicago Tribune to Newsweek to the entire Gannett chain of hundreds of daily and weekly papers, including USA Today. Even papers like the Los Angeles Times that have their own proprietary style guides use rules “similar to AP.” The AP Stylebook is considered “the foremost arbiter of grammar and word choice” for serious news and opinion writers, and it has sold more than 2.5 million copies since it was first published in 1953. It’s a basic resource in college journalism and editing courses, too, where students can be docked points on their assignments for failing to follow its guidelines. Simply put, it’s the industry standard—and that fact gives the people who write and edit the Stylebook a lot of power to shape both news coverage and the political narratives around it. 

The Associated Press, of course, denies that it’s a political institution. Like many professional organizations, it claims that its decisions are “factual and nonpartisan” and that its Stylebook “doesn’t align with any particular agenda.” But we should always be wary of people and groups who loudly proclaim themselves neutral—because they rarely are. Instead, they usually have unspoken biases and ideologies that shape their work, whether the people involved realize it or not. The Associated Press is no different. When we dig into the latest edition of the Stylebook, we can find all kinds of material that expresses a political viewpoint—or suppresses one. From the environment, to immigration, to policing, to Palestine, the AP Stylebook serves to reinforce the status quo and prevent writers from telling the truth about today’s most important issues. 

The idea that seemingly neutral reference works like dictionaries and usage guides are intensely political is not new. The late David Foster Wallace summed it up best in his 2001 essay “Authority and American Usage.” Ostensibly, it’s a review of a new dictionary, but it’s really Wallace’s sprawling exploration of just what language is and how it’s used to challenge or reinforce different arrangements of power in society: 

[D]ecisions about what to put in The Dictionary and what to exclude are going to be based on a lexicographer’s ideology. And every lexicographer’s got one. To presume that dictionary making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism. 

Wallace’s point applies to style guides, too: they might claim to be apolitical, but in practice they always lean either right or left. In fact, it’s not hard to think of examples where a stylebook seems to exist solely to promote an ideology. William F. Buckley Jr., the infamous editor of the National Review, wrote a sourly conservative one called The Right Word, in which he spends an entire chapter scoffing at concerns about sexism and gendered language: gender-neutral terms like “chairperson,” he writes, simply “sound stupid.” Or there’s the style guide for the conservative New York Sun, which has some truly bizarre entries: the word “ethnic,” it informs us, means “not Jewish or Christian,” the phrase “occupied territories” for Gaza and the West Bank should be avoided (though “Judea and Samaria” is fine), and “Any favorable reference to a communist must be shown to either the editor or the managing editor of the Sun before publication.” To its credit, the Associated Press Stylebook is more subtle than either of these. But just like Buckley and the editors of the Sun, it has a political line to push. 

What is that line? Well, a lot of conservatives believe it consists of rampant “wokeness.” Increasingly in the last few years, people on the political Right have found bones to pick with the AP Stylebook and what Fox News calls its “woke new guidance.” They don’t care for the stylebook’s previous elimination of xenophobic terms like “illegal immigrant” and “anchor baby,” the use of “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun, the capitalization of “Black” as an ethnic and cultural group, and so on. There’s no reason to take this very seriously, because today’s Republicans think everything that exists outside the confines of a Trump rally is too “woke,” but some of the AP’s changes really have been progressive. In particular, the Stylebook’s 2020 warning to be careful about the word “riot”—since “focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize broad swaths of people”—is valuable. In that sense, the conservatives are right about one thing: the orientation of the AP and its style guide is broadly liberal. Its creators are concerned with using “inclusive” language and with not causing anyone offense. But that also means they share the flaws and weaknesses of liberalism. 

Importantly, many of these recent textual changes in the Stylebook, and the whole question of “inclusiveness,” revolve around questions of identity labels—racial, gender, and so on. But this kind of liberal nicety can be incredibly patronizing, too. As Wallace puts it: “I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as ‘economically disadvantaged’ rather than ‘poor.’” The AP Stylebook is full of that kind of thing. Its editors are concerned with using the most polite label (is an immigrant “illegal,” “undocumented,” or perhaps just “lacking permanent legal status”?) but not with more fundamental questions of power (should borders be policed? Should the policing be described as a neutral fact, or even a good thing?) And when we consider those deeper questions, the AP Stylebook starts to look downright reactionary. 

For example, consider the Stylebook’s extensive entry on the terms “climate change” and “climate crisis.” There’s plenty that’s good in these pages, like the straightforward statement that climate change is “largely caused by human activities that emit carbon dioxide” and a warning to avoid creating “false balance” by including the perspectives of climate change deniers in news stories. But there are also glaring flaws. For one, it says to use “crisis” only “sparingly,” which doesn’t exactly reflect the seriousness of the emergency we’re all in. There are more specific issues, too. In its entry for “methane,” the Stylebook accepts the term “natural gas” for methane-based fuel, as if calling it “natural gas” were perfectly neutral and factual. But this is actually a disputed term. Many environmentalists say it contributes to harmful “greenwashing,” since the word “natural” makes the gas sound harmless and clean. In reality, “natural” gas is highly artificial, since it requires intensive industrial processing before it’s usable, and it’s still a fossil fuel, so burning it causes the release of carbon dioxide, just like with oil and coal. Methane itself, which is emitted in the “extraction, processing, and transporting” of natural gas, also causes a more severe greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide does. For those reasons, climate activists prefer the term “fossil gas” or simply “methane gas.” At minimum, their objection should be noted, but it’s nowhere to be found in the AP’s “methane” entry. 

Even small choices like these are critically important, because the climate crisis is actively killing people all over the world, whether it’s catastrophic flooding in Libya or extreme heat in Texas. As a public service, news outlets ought to be telling people very directly that it’s the fossil-fuel industry (together with other industrial polluters, like factory farms) that makes these disasters both more common and more intense. They should also be pointing out which politicians support and receive donations from the polluting industries. If the mission is really to provide all the facts, these are important ones to have. But the AP Stylebook runs in the opposite direction and instructs journalists to “avoid attributing single occurrences to climate change unless scientists have established a connection.” (They also don’t describe what it would mean to “establish” such a connection, making it an impossible task.) So when a devastating storm like the recent Hurricane Milton hits Florida or a lethal wildfire sweeps across Los Angeles, a strict interpretation of the AP’s rules would discourage journalists from drawing the obvious connection to higher global temperatures, unless it’s in a quote from a scientist. And it would almost certainly prevent the writer from mentioning how politicians like Governor Ron DeSantis (in Florida) or Mayor Karen Bass (in Los Angeles) have made decisions that benefit the fossil-fuel industry, and drawing a connection there. It’s a fact that these leaders have sold out and harmed their constituents, and it’s a fact that fossil-fuel production needs to be halted—but those aren’t the kind of facts the Associated Press is interested in.¹ 

Don’t Say “Palestine”

The Associated Press also doesn’t want you to use the word “Palestine.” Turning to the Ps, we find their reasoning, such as it is: 

Use Palestine only in the context of Palestine’s activities in international bodies to which it has been admitted. Do not use Palestine or the state of Palestine in other situations, since it is not a fully independent, unified state. For territory, refer specifically to the West Bank or Gaza, or the Palestinian territories in reference to both.

This isn’t quite as bad as the New York Sun mandating the term “Judea and Samaria,” but it’s close. In the first place, the Associated Press touts itself as a global institution serving “nearly 100 countries,” but this Stylebook entry flies in the face of international opinion and favors the view of the United States. Today, 146 of the world’s 195 countries recognize the State of Palestine, including virtually all of Asia, Africa, and South America. The only reason Palestine is not internationally considered a state is because the U.S. keeps using its veto power on the United Nations Security Council to block its admission as a full U.N. member, a blatantly anti-democratic move. It’s also notable that the listing just says “Palestinian territories” and not “occupied Palestinian territories,” although Israeli military occupation and blockade is the most important thing to know about the situation there. The listing for “Zionism” is even more alarming: it’s found in the “religion” section of the Stylebook, and it describes Zionism not as a political issue or movement but as “the effort of Jews to regain and retain their biblical homeland,” which puts a highly favorable gloss on a project that even the early Zionists themselves described as “something colonial.” 

The prohibition on “Palestine” is both sinister and absurd, because you’re allowed to write about “Palestinians” all you like, but not to say where the Palestinians live or where they’re from. As Delaney Newhouse, a student journalist at Baylor University, has pointed out, “The AP allows me to write about Kurdistan and use its name. Taiwan, Somaliland, and even the wildly-disputed Transnistria do not have these restrictions.” Sure enough, you can scour the AP Stylebook in vain for any prohibition on mentioning these disputed lands. We could also add Tibet, which is frequently named in AP news coverage, to Newhouse’s list. It’s only Palestine that’s been singled out for exclusion. We know the rule is being followed, too: at the Los Angeles Times, journalist Suhauna Hussain reports that “Other than in quotes, we are not allowed to say Palestine.” That policy plays directly into the hands of the U.S. and Israeli leaders who are now trying to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its people and wipe it off the map, to be replaced with a Trump-led “Gaza Riviera” or “Freedom Zone.” After all, how can a place be under attack if it doesn’t officially exist? 

Even more subtle AP Stylebook rules have deep political implications. Take the listing for the “Great Recession,” for instance. We’re told that it started in December 2007, was caused mainly by “losses on subprime mortgages,” and was the “longest and deepest [recession] since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” All true enough. But what’s missing from this picture? Well, most of the world is. Like its refusal to acknowledge Palestine, the AP’s view of the “Great Recession” is myopic and U.S.-centered. A more appropriate term, and the one the Encyclopedia Britannica uses, would be “Global Financial Crisis,” because the entire world was impacted; an even more accurate one would be “crisis of capitalism.” In fact, the United Nations estimated in 2009 that Africa was particularly hard-hit, with the market crash wiping out “20 per cent of the per capita income of Africa’s poor—a figure that dwarfs the losses sustained in the developed world.” But you wouldn't know that from the AP’s “Great Recession” listing. Like with “natural” gas, using the word “recession” makes the event sound less severe than it really was. A “recession” is to be expected in an economic system that ebbs and flows, while a “crisis” threatens the existence of the system itself. In turn, downplaying the fact that a “crisis” occurred helps to prop up the capitalist status quo a little longer. 

We should regard the listing for “Labor Day” with a suspicious squint, too. Here, the AP Stylebook says only that Labor Day is “the first Monday in September.” But again, this is a U.S.-centric narrative, because the United States and Canada are the only countries that celebrate Labor Day in September. Most of the world—roughly 160 countries—celebrates the holiday on May 1, also called “May Day” or “International Workers’ Day.” Why is the difference important? Because the May 1 Labor Day was created by workers themselves to commemorate the 1886 general strike in Chicago, which helped to win us the standard eight-hour workday, and to honor the seven martyred labor organizers who were executed under false pretenses in retaliation for the strike. It’s one of the most important days in American history, and by any measure it should be considered the real Labor Day. The one in September, by contrast, was created by President Grover Cleveland as a consolation prize for workers after he brutally suppressed the Pullman railway strike of 1894, and he chose the date specifically to avoid May Day’s more radical connotations—with the added benefit, for him, that it would create a cultural divide between American workers and their international counterparts. And what does the AP Stylebook have to say about May Day? Only that it’s “often observed as a political or festive holiday,” with no mention of labor whatsoever. Grover Cleveland might as well have written the entry himself. 

Who’s “Controversial”?

Or consider the listing for the word “controversial.” The AP Stylebook, in its infinite wisdom, says to avoid this, too:

An overused word. Most issues that are described as controversial are obviously so, and the word is not necessary.

The instruction to shun “controversial” as an “overused word” has been around, in slightly different forms, since at least the 1977 Stylebook (which was the first to be formatted alphabetically). And it’s not a bad rule, if it were consistently applied. But if anything, the word “controversial” isn’t overused; it’s selectively used, and we ought to be using it in more and different cases. You see, the AP has no issue using “controversial” to describe issues and proposals associated with the political Left. In 2020, for instance, the agency published some pretty colorful language about Bernie Sanders and his “unyielding embrace of controversial proposals like ‘Medicare for All.’” Or in an article about police reform in Minnesota, we can find a reference to “the more controversial ideas proposed by Democrats,” including “anything that would dismantle or defund police departments, expand voting rights for convicted felons or give the attorney general responsibility for prosecuting officer-involved shootings.”2 But the word never cuts both ways. You’ll search in vain for an AP article that references the “controversial proposal” that we should give police departments generous budgets, or the “controversial idea” that healthcare should be run by for-profit companies, even though there is plenty of controversy about both issues. 

Instead, the AP often uses “controversial” as a subtle form of pro-police “copaganda.” Specifically, the word is employed as a euphemism to soften the severity of what police have done to people, like in a 2023 article that said a “controversial police shooting” had taken place in California. Really, the cop in question—a white man named Mark McNamara—had shot a young Black man named K’aun Green who broke up a fight and was holding a gun he’d taken from someone he disarmed. (No good deed, as they say, goes unpunished, although thankfully Green survived and went on to play college football for the University of Arkansas.) McNamara also had a history of sending blatantly racist text messages, including about Green soon after the shooting: “N— wanted to carry a gun in the Wild West. [...] Not on my watch haha.” So this was more a “racist shooting” of an innocent man than it was a “controversial shooting,” and the AP is obscuring the truth (and ignoring its own Stylebook rules) when it describes it as the latter.

Even a single vowel can make all the difference. For another textual battlefield, consider the vexed question of how to describe people who protest: are they “protesters” or “protestors”? In the 2022-2024 edition, the AP Stylebook says it’s “protester,” but gives no explanation; the shiny new 2024-2026 book doesn’t have an entry for “protester” at all, but “protester” is still being used in the agency’s news coverage, so it seems the rule is still in force. However, it’s notable that this rule doesn’t seem to apply to many other kinds of person: the Stylebook does not insist on “acter” or “professer,” or describe the people who compile its pages as “editers.” Why not? Well, we can find the rationale in the pages of America’s worst magazine, the Atlantic. In a 2011 article, Adam Clarke Estes wrote that “Once and for All, It’s Spelled ‘Protester’ Not ‘Protestor’,” and interviewed one of the editors of the AP Stylebook, “grammar expert” David Minthorn, to back up his point. Minthorn said that “the general feeling is that -or implies a rather specialized, technical, or professional role (as with advisor in contrast to adviser),” while “The suffix -er is the regular one used in English for agent nouns (nouns for people who do things, like protest).” This is a sneaky way of injecting hierarchy into the mix. People described with “-or” are implied to be a cut above those described with “-er,” possessed of more knowledge or more specialized technical acumen; someone who works on Wall Street is an “investor,” while someone who fixes your sink is a “plumber.” And so, because people who protest couldn’t possibly know what they’re talking about, they get lumped into the latter class and become “protesters.”

Homeless people, meanwhile, seem to fall outside the AP Stylebook’s parameters for who deserves “inclusive” language. In its entry about immigration “raids,” it’s notable that the Stylebook recommends journalists “avoid sweep, which may be interpreted to mean removal of something undesirable.” That’s good advice. But the same warning doesn’t appear in the entry about “homelessness,” and homeless people are still being described in AP news stories as the recipients of “sweeps,” simply because police and government officials use that term. Where’s the same consideration for them? Why aren’t those actions described as what they are: violent raids? 

Cops, TERFs, and Anti-Vaxxers

This gets to the core of the Associated Press Stylebook’s single biggest hangup: concepts of authority, respect, and who does and does not deserve them. And as you might have guessed by now, the Stylebook lands firmly on the side of giving respect and deference to the Powers that Be. In its section on “criminal justice”—itself a loaded term, since the U.S. policing and prison system doesn’t really deliver “justice”³—the book informs us that the word “cop,” although it “may be used in lighter stories and in casual, informal descriptions,” is often a “derogatory term out of place in serious police stories.” Note the ideological assumption: taking a “derogatory” tone toward the police is not “serious,” while taking a respectful tone is. (As a political writer, I would reply that I’m quite serious about disrespecting the police, and they really don’t want to hear the words I’d use instead of “cop.”) The sickeningly deferential “the authorities” doesn’t have an entry, but we can find it throughout AP news coverage, so presumably it’s been deemed suitable.

What else can’t we say? “Anti-vaxxer,” for one. Here, the edict is firm: “Do not use this imprecise label for someone who opposes or is hesitant about vaccinations. Instead, be specific about a person’s or group’s position.” Now, the instruction to add more context and detail is fair enough. But the editors of the AP Stylebook are only worried about the possibility of dubbing someone an “anti-vaxxer” when their views are more complex or nuanced than the term suggests, and they’re not worried about the opposite pitfall: allowing someone who really is an “anti-vaxxer” to be described in terms that make them sound more reasonable than they are. If we take the example of someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, the AP Stylebook would have us use a softened phrase like “who is skeptical about some vaccines.” But that doesn’t cut it. Although Kennedy denies being an anti-vaxxer, he clearly is one, and he even boasts about it, saying things like, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’” If he’s going to directly threaten people’s health like that, there’s no reason we can’t call him what he is. 

The same goes for “TERFs,” or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, another word the AP Stylebook says is verboten:

We recommend avoiding the vague and politicized term to describe cisgender women or others who object to the inclusion of transgender women in women's spaces.

If we’re playing “spot the lie,” this is an easy one. Although it’s true that they’re obsessed with toilets, a TERF is not just someone who “object[s] to the inclusion of transgender women in women’s spaces,” the way the AP suggests. That’s far too generous. Rather, many of them clearly have a problem with the existence of transgender people as such. The foremost public TERF, J.K. Rowling, regularly posts appallingly bigoted statements describing trans women as “men in women’s sport, men in women’s jails,” and that’s typical of the entire ideology; former comedy writer Graham Linehan, another leading light of TERFhood, has actively harassed a trans woman online. The only issue with the term “TERF” is that people like Rowling and Linehan aren’t really “radical feminists” at all; they’re just plain transphobic, and they use a thin veneer of feminism as an excuse for their bigotry. But notably, the AP Stylebook goes further, and also says writers should avoid using “gender-critical”—the term anti-trans bigots often use for themselves. So, if they follow its guidelines to the letter, writers would be left without any overall label for transphobic political actors and movements and would be ill-equipped to criticize them, which can only help the transphobes themselves. It’s as if the Stylebook had banned the word “racist” in 1960, at the height of the Civil Rights movement. The stakes are comparable. 

With all this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that the Associated Press has caved almost completely to Donald Trump and his bloviating demands to change the names of world landmarks. Shortly after Trump issued his executive order about changing the name of Denali to “Mount McKinley” and the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” the AP made a formal reply. “As president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country,” editor Amanda Barrett wrote, and so “Mount McKinley” it would be. Never mind what the people who actually live there, or the indigenous communities who named Denali centuries before Trump was born, might think about it. On the Gulf, the AP made a half-hearted compromise: they’ll be using both “Gulf of Mexico” and “Gulf of America.” And even this groveling display of abjection wasn’t enough, because Trump just banned AP reporters from the White House anyway, because they weren’t only using “Gulf of America.” They might as well have just denied his absurd changes altogether, and kept their dignity—but their instincts are to defer to cops and other people in authority, so deferring to Trump came as a natural extension. Like any bully, Trump has sensed weakness and is now pushing further, suggesting that he’ll unilaterally rename the Persian Gulf the Arabian Gulf to insult Iran and please his Saudi allies. It’ll be interesting to see if the Associated Press goes along with that, too. 

It all goes back to that one word: authority. When there’s uncertainty about which word is more appropriate to use, who gets to decide? Will the chosen word be the one people in power prefer, or the one used by people on the receiving end of it? Or, as Wallace puts it in “Authority and English Usage”: 

We regular citizens tend to go to The Dictionary for authoritative guidance. Rarely, however, do we ask ourselves who exactly decides what gets in The Dictionary or what words or spellings or pronunciations get deemed substandard or incorrect. Whence the authority of dictionary-makers to decide what’s OK and what isn’t? Nobody elected them, after all.

The Associated Press has a certain claim to authority. They’re a very large news organization, and they’ve been around for a very long time, so they’ve presumably accumulated a lot of expertise about the journalism business, by trial and error if nothing else. But that alone isn’t enough. Authority isn’t, or shouldn’t be, just handed over to the biggest or oldest professional organizations by default. It has to be earned, and the would-be arbiters have to continually prove themselves worthy of it. And as we’ve seen, there are plenty of issues—from “anti-vaxxers,” to “Palestine,” to what is and isn’t “controversial”—where the AP’s judgment has fallen short on the important issues facing us today. When that happens, there’s no reason anybody should feel bound to write the way the AP Stylebook says to, just because it’s in the book. Everybody can and should be questioned, and people and institutions who think they’re “neutral” have to be challenged most of all.

1. At a bare minimum, decent climate journalism needs to include what Berkeley researchers call the “five basic climate facts” —“the consensus, mechanism, longevity, magnitude and immediacy of climate change.” But we could also add a sixth: the guilt of our politicians and economic elite. 

2. “Officer-involved shooting,” of course, is yet another propaganda term, akin to “dog-involved biting.”

3. Current Affairs uses “criminal punishment,” which, arguably, is a neutral term. The system processes people who are referred to as “criminals,” and it “punishes” them. “Punishment bureaucracy” works, too.