Lester Holt, David Muir & Other TV News Anchors Avoid Saying ‘Gulf of Mexico’ During Astronaut Splashdown

It appears TV anchors and reporters across the United States are bowing to pressure from President Donald Trump over his proposal to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

As pointed out by former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy in Sunday’s edition of his Status newsletter, anchors and reporters across various networks  avoided using the term “Gulf of Mexico” when covering the recent splashdown of the stranded NASA astronauts. It should never noted that they didn’t say “Gulf of America” either.

“Not one of the outlets could muster the courage to simply refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico, the water feature’s name since the 16th century,” Darcy wrote, per The Wrap. “Americans tend to believe the press is too independent and too proud to ever bow to government pressure. We assume that if a president ever tried to dictate language, the Fourth Estate would resist. We assume we’re immune from such pressures.”

Darcy went on to list examples of how reporters “danced around what precisely to call the body of water,” noting how they “tied themselves in knots, performing linguistic gymnastics to stay out of Donald Trump’s crosshairs while also tiptoeing around audiences who would have surely been incensed to see them bend the knee and call it the ‘Gulf of America.’”

On ABC’s World News Tonight, anchor David Muir referred to “spectacular images from off the coast of Florida,” while NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt took a similar approach, describing the astronauts as “splashing down off the Florida Gulf coast.”

CBS Evening News anchors kept it easy by referring to the Gulf of Mexico as simply “the Gulf.”

Jake Tapper on CNN came the closest to calling the body of water by its name when he pointed out how Trump’s administration refers to it as the “Gulf of America,” while the rest of the world calls it “the Gulf of Mexico.”

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Meanwhile, on MSNBC, NBC News correspondent Tom Costello went as far to apologize to viewers when he talked about the “splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.” He immediately corrected himself, saying, “Sorry, however you want to call the Gulf. It will be splashing down in the Gulf.”

On January 20, President Trump signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. “I took this action in part because, as stated in that Order, ‘[t]he area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America,'” he wrote in a proclamation.

Summing up the news networks’ refusal to call the water the Gulf of Mexico, Darcy wrote, “Each of the outlets made a willful decision to forgo referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico. While it may have been performed in a subtle manner, make no mistake: It was still an act of submission.”