December 16, 2008
Moral equivalence alert: New York Times edition
When journalists plaintively wail, "Why do the unwashed masses despise us?" it's probably because of articles like the one penned by New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt, wherein he tries to explain why it's so darn hard for journalists to figure out when to call a terrorist a terrorist.
WHEN 10 young men in an inflatable lifeboat came ashore in Mumbai last month and went on a rampage with machine guns and grenades, taking hostages, setting fires and murdering men, women and children, they were initially described in The Times by many labels.
They were “militants,” “gunmen,” “attackers” and “assailants.” Their actions, which left bodies strewn in the city’s largest train station, five-star hotels, a Jewish center, a cafe and a hospital — were described as “coordinated terrorist attacks.” But the men themselves were not called terrorists.
Many readers could not understand it. “I am so offended as to why the NY Times and a number of other news organizations are calling the perpetrators ‘militants,’ ” wrote “Bill” in a comment posted on The Times’s Web site. “Murderers, or terrorists perhaps but militants? Is your PC going to get so absurd that you will refer to them as ‘freedom fighters?’ ”
The Mumbai terror attacks posed a familiar semantic issue for Times editors: what to call people who pursue political, religious, territorial, or unidentifiable goals through violence on civilians
Gee, if only there were a word to describe "people who pursue political, religious, territorial, or unidentifiable goals through violence on civilians." Hmm, it's on the tip of my tongue.... Oh well, I'm sure it'll come to me later. Let's get back to Hoyt's thumbsucker.
In the newsroom and at overseas bureaus, especially Jerusalem, there has been a lot of soul-searching about the terminology of terrorism. Editors and reporters have asked whether, to avoid the appearance of taking sides, the paper bends itself into a pretzel or risks appearing callous to abhorrent acts. They have wrestled with questions like why those responsible for the 9/11 attacks are called terrorists but the murderers of a little girl in her bed in a Jewish settlement are not. And whether, if the use of the word terrorist can be interpreted as a political act, not using it is one too.
[...]
Ilsa and Lisa Klinghoffer, whose father, Leon, was shot and thrown from a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1985, wrote a letter to the editor asking why The Times was referring to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the shadowy group that apparently orchestrated the Mumbai attacks, as a “militant group.” “When people kill innocent civilians for political gain, they should be called ‘terrorists,’ ” the sisters said.
Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said The Times may eventually put that label on Lashkar, but reporters are still trying to learn more about it. “Our instinct is to proceed with caution, not rushing to label any group with the word terrorist before we have a deeper understanding of its full dimensions,” she said.
[...]
James Bennet, now the editor of The Atlantic, was The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2001 through 2004. After his return, he wrote a two-page memo to Chira on the use of “terrorism” and “terrorist” that is still cited by editors, though the paper has no formal policy on the terms. His memo said it was easy to call certain egregious acts terrorism “and have the whole world agree with you.” The problem, he said, was where to stop before every stone-throwing Palestinian was called a terrorist and the paper was making a political statement.
Bennet wrote that he initially avoided the word terrorism altogether and thought it more useful to describe an attack in as vivid detail as possible so readers could decide their own labels. But he came to believe that never using the word “felt so morally neutral as to be a little sickening. 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.
The memo said he settled on a rough rule: He would use the words, when they fit, to describe attacks within Israel’s 1948 borders but not in the occupied West Bank or Gaza, which Israel and the Palestinians have been contending over since Israel took them in 1967. When a gunman infiltrated a settlement and killed a 5-year-old girl in her bed, Bennet did not call it terrorism. “All I could do was default to my first approach and describe the attack and the victims as vividly as I could.”
I do not think it is possible to write a set of hard and fast rules for the T-words, and I think The Times is both thoughtful about them and maybe a bit more conservative in their use than I would be.
My own broad guideline: If it looks as if it was intended to sow terror and it shocks the conscience, whether it is planes flying into the World Trade Center, gunmen shooting up Mumbai, or a political killer in a little girl’s bedroom, I’d call it terrorism — by terrorists.
Get that? Whether or not a killer is a terrorist depends on his motivations, or where he kills his victims -- not who he kills and how.
Murder a little girl in her Haifa bedroom and the killer is a terrorist.
Murder a little girl in her Gush Etzion bedroom and her killer is a militant.
I know, it sounds crazy, but it all makes sense -- if you went to the Columbia School of Journalism. To the rest of us, it sounds morally and ethically retarded, a textbook example of fuzzy-headed moral relativism.
Here's an easy-to-use definition of the distinction between a terrorist and a "militant":
A militant -- or "freedom fighter," if you will -- primarily targets the military and government of the enemy, while trying to minimize the number of civilian casualties. He seeks to undermine public confidence in the power structure of his opponents, seeking out and destroying the institutions of governance, chipping away at the morale of the police and military.
A terrorist seeks to instill fear throughout the entire population by killing as many civilians as possible, in locations of no strategic importance. Civilian casualties are not an unintended consequence of the terrorist's actions; they're the entire point of his existence.
A militant attacks a police station or an army outpost. A terrorist detonates a bomb in a pizza parlor.
So easy even a caveman can understand it.
But not a journalist.
Posted by Mike Lief at December 16, 2008 11:06 PM
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Comments
Great post. The New York Times is, perhaps, one of the most liberal newspapers around. Journalists are right up there with those who have begun to make a bad name for themselves. They are supposed to "report" the news in an unbiased, impartial way but never do- which often leads to problems and subsequently, a lack of trust from the public in what they are saying. Who can we believe?
Posted by: National Transport LLC at December 18, 2008 07:48 AM