NY Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent has finally delivered a long-promised statement on the use/non-use of the term ‘terrorism’ to describe Palestinian violence.
Okrent couches the issue among other controversial matters that exasperate editors aiming to achieve neutral language, but concludes by agreeing with former Times Jerusalem bureau chief James Bennet that the T-word should appear more often in news reports:
I think in some instances The Times’s earnest effort to avoid bias can desiccate language and dilute meaning. In a January memo to the foreign desk, former Jerusalem bureau chief James Bennet addressed the paper’s gingerly use of the word “terrorism.”
“The calculated bombing of students in a university cafeteria, or of families gathered in an ice cream parlor, cries out to be called what it is,” he wrote. “I wanted to avoid the political meaning that comes with ‘terrorism,’ but I couldn’t pretend that the word had no usage at all in plain English.” Bennet came to believe that “not to use the term began to seem like a political act in itself.”
I agree. While some Israelis and their supporters assert that any Palestinian holding a gun is a terrorist, there can be neither factual nor moral certainty that he is. But if the same man fires into a crowd of civilians, he has committed an act of terror, and he is a terrorist… Given the word’s history as a virtual battle flag over the past several years, it would be tendentious for The Times to require constant use of it, as some of the paper’s critics are insisting. But there’s something uncomfortably fearful, and inevitably self-defeating, about struggling so hard to avoid it.
Read Okrent’s piece here, and see HonestReporting’s special report on this topic: ‘Calling Terror by Its Name’
