I’ve always thought the mainstream media’s routine failure to use the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” beyond bizarre – and so journalistically dishonest that it should be the subject of comedy and parody.
I was delighted, therefore, to see that National Lampoon recently “broke” the story that the word “terrorism” will be eliminated from the dictionary. That tongue-in-cheek report was based on irresistible logic – if the word “terrorism” wasn’t used to describe the slaughter of hundreds of children and other innocents in a school in Russia, then the word has no place in the English language.
National Lampoon’s archives contain another dispatch reporting that a conference attended by CNN, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Reuters – all media outlets that typically use the term “militants” to describe terrorist murderers with genocidal intent – have agreed to a compromise and will stop calling terrorists “militants,” employing instead the term “really bad dudes.”
Any rational observer who has not followed the reports on terrorism would never believe that mainstream news organizations are so slanted and sleazy that they don’t call terrorism by its right name, preferring to sanitize, euphemize, legitimize, and, in effect, sanction and facilitate terrorism, mass murder, and genocide.
If you doubt that a media outlet is capable of such linguistic insanity, take a look at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s initial report on the schoolhouse slaughter in Russia. It appeared as a front-page story in the September 4 edition.
Consider how twisted and distorted the minds of the Inquirer’s editors and reporters must be to permit this journalistic monstrosity. The word “terrorist” (or “terrorism,” or “terror”) does not appear in the story even once. Here are the eight euphemisms the Inquirer actually used:
1. Chechen rebels.
2. Heavily armed captors.
3. Camouflaged fighter.
4. Islamic separatists.
5. Bandits.
6. Guerillas.
7. Attackers.
8. Hostage takers.
This is not just a semantic quibble. It is a question of an honest or dishonest description of reality. The Inquirer’s pathological verbal gyrations seem to be attempts to make murder, genocide, and terrorism look good. It appears to be the newspaper’s attempt to morally upgrade the slaughterers of innocents from terrorists and murderers to militants and activists.
Such dishonesty lends moral aid and comfort to the worst barbarism that can be imagined, and distorts the reality that media outlets like the Inquirer are supposedly reporting. If we had not sanitized terrorism over the last thirty or forty years, maybe we would have snuffed it out or contained it before it went out of control in recent years.
The Inquirer is not alone, for the same reluctance to call a spade a spade and a terrorist a terrorist is endemic among mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and wire services such as the AP and Reuters. It is also endemic among the three old-line television networks, National Public Radio, and many other broadcasts and magazines.
For example, consider USA Today’s February 10, 2003 report, “Palestinian militants are undeterred: Israel’s crackdown feeds anger, ranks of militias,” which used sixteen different words for terrorists without using the one appropriate description – “terrorist.” Among its euphemisms were: activist, militant, militia, guerrilla fighter, independent armed groups and Palestinian fighters. (For the full list, see my Jewish Press op-ed column “McPaper’s Blind Spot on Anti-Israel Terrorism,” which can be accessed at JewishPress.com by entering the keyword “denenberg” in the search function.
It can be said of that particular USA Today story that, to paraphrase Churchill, never has one paper used so many distortions to make murderers and terrorists, their missions and organizations, look better than they should. At least USA Today did refrain from calling the terrorists “freedom fighters.”
Sometimes a newspaper, such as The New York Times, will use the words terror, terrorism, and terrorist when any country is attacked other than Israel. In the August 3, 2004 issue of the Times there were 23 different stories that utilized the T-word involving events in Pakistan, Iraq, the U.S. and elsewhere. The only terrorist story in which Times reporters used only euphemisms for terrorists was the one about Israel (“3 Palestinians Who Spied for Israel Are Killed in Gaza”).
The Times has a habit of calling terrorists by their rightful name except when it’sPalestinian terrorists who kill Israelis, in which case the “paper of record” promotes them to the likes of militants and activists.
(For a full list of the synonyms used by the Times in place of “terrorist,” see my letter to the editor of the Times posted at my website thedenenbergreport.org. Needless to say, the Times did not publish it.)
By scrupulously avoiding the word “terrorists,” even when dealing with the schoolhouse slaughter in Russia, the Inquirer and too many other media outlets are no longer just anti-Israel; they are now pro-terror, pro-murder, and pro-genocide.
These once-mighty journalistic organizations have come to reflect the epitome of biased, fraudulent, and dishonest journalism, and are actually abetting terrorism worldwide by making it more acceptable in the forum of public opinion. They are a disgrace to journalism, and should be boycotted by readers and advertisers with even the slightest respect for truth and reality.
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