A Law With No Teeth Bit a Radio Station

The law had no penalties, no enforcement mechanism, and no teeth. The university found its own way to enforce it anyway: by firing the one person who said so.

"I was told that deviations from the law may result in disciplinary action or termination of employees."

— Will Dahlberg, executive director and general manager of WBHM, in a letter to listeners

On October 1, a body of water in Alabama got a new name. The Gulf of America, it is now legally called, at least in any official state document, and at least on air. At WBHM 90.3, the public radio station in Birmingham, an NPR member station licensed to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the change was not announced with a map and a press release. It was delivered as a threat. In a letter to "friends and listeners," station executive director Will Dahlberg wrote that the university, having concluded that every broadcast counts as an "official communication," is now requiring staff to say "Gulf of America" instead of "Gulf of Mexico" in all coverage. Deviate, and "disciplinary action or termination of employees" could follow.

Dahlberg announced in the same letter that he was leaving the station. His resignation was to be effective October 16. On Monday morning, the university told him to pack his bags immediately.

The law behind the letter is the Gulf of America Act, passed by the Alabama legislature in late March and signed by Governor Kay Ivey. It requires "all state and local entities and their employees" to use the name Gulf of America in place of Gulf of Mexico. It contains no penalties for noncompliance. It mandates the change only "when practicable" and exempts anyone for whom compliance would "impose an operational or financial burden." The sponsor, state Rep. David Standridge of Hayden, defended it on the House floor in January as "an opportunity to make a patriotic statement," adding that "the president would embrace it."

Here is the part that should keep First Amendment lawyers up at night, because they already are: the text of the law never once tied the University of Alabama at Birmingham's hands. It does not mention media. It does not define how a station should handle NPR and Associated Press content that says "Gulf of Mexico," or what to do about the station's own code of integrity, which says the university should not "exert influence on WBHM's journalists and its independent editorial process." The university could have done the simplest, most legal, most boring thing in American public life. It could have ignored a law that demands the impossible, watched for a challenge, and protected its employees.

Instead it did the opposite. It took a toothless stunt of a law, manufactured a penalty the legislature never wrote, and pointed the gun at its own newsroom.

Translation: a statute with no enforcement mechanism became a firing order the moment a nervous administrator read it.

The rename itself is a year old. Before his second inauguration, Trump declared he would be "changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the 'Gulf of America,' which has a beautiful ring," because the water, in his telling, is "ours." He repeated the promise in his inaugural address, then signed the executive order hours after taking office, as if renaming a body of water shared with Mexico were a power a single president holds. The Associated Press refused to change its style. The White House barred AP journalists from events. The AP sued. A federal judge ruled in April 2025 that the government could not punish the wire service for refusing to use the new name, reinstating its access. An appeals court later walked part of that back. By October, the ACLU was briefing federal judges that the pattern of retaliating against disfavored reporters "puts U.S. in dangerous company."

The constitutional law on this question is not obscure. In 1943, the Supreme Court held that the government cannot force children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and wrote the line every compelled-speech case still orbits: "if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion." In 1984, in FCC v. League of Women Voters, the Court struck down a ban on editorializing by public broadcasters, holding that funding a station does not entitle the government to control its journalism. In March 2026, a federal judge rejected Trump's executive order to defund NPR and PBS.

The fixed star is not new. UAB's problem was deciding it didn't apply.

Meanwhile, the law's own supporters were careful never to say what it actually does to a newsroom. On the floor, the conversation was patriotism. Off the floor, the details were worse, in the way vague legislation tends to be. Aaron Terr of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression pointed out that the statute never says the naming rule applies only on the job. "If the law compels public employees to use a particular term for a body of water, even when they're off the clock, speaking as a private citizen, that would violate the First Amendment," he told WBHM's own local news team. He noted that no funding exists for the rework the law demands, and no penalties are defined, and warned that vague laws are "sometimes used by governments intentionally to give them this wide discretion to punish people for their speech."

The ACLU of Alabama's policy director put it plainly: "There are so many things that keep Alabamians up at night, and the name of a body of water, I can assure you, is not one of them." State Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison, a Democrat, observed that the law does nothing to address "the cost of living, energy, food, rising costs of everything." And it is not even a uniquely Alabama experiment. Florida has a similar Gulf of America law, and First Amendment scholars say the same analysis applies: when the government builds a public forum, public radio in this case, it does not acquire the right to script what gets said on it.

The institutional machinery that produced this is worth looking at, because it is so small and so telling. Governor Ivey is an ex officio member of the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees. That board publishes an annual freedom of speech report. The report is a single paragraph, copy-pasted each year with only the date updated, concluding that the system's free speech policies "have been repeatedly satisfied without a single alleged violation, which further speaks to their effectiveness." The same sentence, presumably, will be copy-pasted again next year, in a system where the general manager of its flagship public radio station was told to leave within days of telling listeners what the system was doing to his newsroom.

UAB officials did not respond to requests for comment. The Intercept, partnering with the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders, ran the story under the heading of a university "rolling over," and noted the pattern: law firms that cave, news outlets that settle, universities that capitulate, all staying in the good graces of an administration that has spent its year turning the First Amendment into a negotiation. It is also worth remembering that last week, with China's visiting press pool watching from outside the White House gates, Trump joked that China "has the friendliest press corps." Alabama, it turns out, took the compliment to heart.

The gulf has not moved. No water changed. No ship altered course, no mapmaker in New Orleans or Veracruz woke up confused. The Gulf of America exists in the same places the Gulf of Mexico does, which is to say it exists on a law book and on a red hat sold at an RNC fundraiser. A name is a word, and a word is a choice, and the whole point of a free press is that someone, somewhere on a public station, is allowed to make the true one.

The question was never whether Alabama can rename a body of water. The question is whether, after a university turned a name into a termination letter, a public employee in Birmingham can say out loud what something actually is without being fired for it. For now, the answer is no, and the station's new name has a beautiful ring to it.