The media need not always mince words
It's important to not mix fact and opinion but that should not serve false equivalence, intellectual laziness and journalistic cowardice
Journalists covering global events face a constant buzzing in the ear: what words to use when there’s a narrative dispute. The issue is ever more acute in our frenzied era of societal polarization, entitled grievance politics, and never-ending spin – like efforts to brand an invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation.”
When you cannot please everyone, should you try to please no one—or just make a call? What if that looks like you’re taking a side? Must one always be impartial? After all, one reporter’s fairness is a reader’s false equivalence.
For a journalist these days, it seems someone somewhere—a Twitter mob, a mafiotic government, a raging community of exiles—is always waiting to pounce on a single word choice.
The conundrum begins with as simple a matter as titles. Is Vladimir Putin—like Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and countless others in history, from Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to Cuba’s Fidel Castro—to be called dictator or president? The former term seems more real; the latter seems less “opinionated,” but accords illegitimate despots the same legitimacy as Emanuel Macron.
What about Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the somewhat genuinely elected president of a country that jails opposition leaders and essentially controls the press? Should he be just called “president”—at the risk of seeming credulous? “Leader” seems a copout — and besides, everyone thinks they’re a leader nowadays, including corporate cogs.
In the current news cycle, should the U.S. government’s guarantee of all bank deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (and realistically elsewhere) constitute an “bailout?” The Biden administration says no, but the moral hazard is undeniable.
Should Kosovo be termed a “country,” even though it broke away from Serbia without achieving recognition from neither the mother country nor a substantial part of the world? And if the answer is yes, shouldn’t the same apply to the other breakaway regions in the world, ranging from northern Syria to the strange case of Taiwan? When is the recognition enough? Surely it doesn’t require a consensus, else Israel would not be a country (maybe it’s about the specific recognizers).
And while we’re on Israel, its conflict with the Palestinians has been a global vanguard in producing lexicographic headaches for overworked and underpaid journalists.
Should a cluster of freshly built homes in a unified Jerusalem be labeled a new Jewish neighborhood, or a settlement on occupied land? Was a recent incident where civilians were killed just an attack, or was it terrorism? Were the victims killed or murdered? Is the West Bank occupied (as the Palestinians insist) or disputed (a word whose definition seems to fit the situation)? If both are correct, which do you choose?
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