Thursday, July 07, 2005
BBC & Reuters discover terror (as opposed to "terror")
James Taranto observes:
The BBC Calls It by Its Name
"London Rocked by Terror Attacks" reads a headline on the BBC's Web site. This seems unremarkable, except that, as the Mediacrity blog points out, the BBC's "editorial guidelines," in Reutervillian style, state:
The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.
The Beeb does apply this rule sometimes, such as in this timeline of attacks against Israel, which nowhere refers by name to terror, terrorism or terrorists.
Even Reuters is leaving out the scare quotes in some dispatches: "Police said they suspected terrorists were behind the bombings," the "news" service reports from London.
That rash reversion to calling terrorism by its name was all a mistake, evidently, because today (July 12) London's Telegraph reports:
The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as "terrorists", it was disclosed yesterday.
Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC's website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as "bombers".
Phew.
