The Media Drop

Canada’s Embassy magazine has a thought provoking article Wednesday from Vadim Fotinov about press freedom in Russia and, more importantly, the way the terror in Beslan has been covered worldwide.

The use of words other than “terrorist” to describe people who commit acts of terror has been a much-discussed point of late, especially by bloggers. Bloggers on both the right and left agree that kowtowing to interests other than reality shows a sad state of affairs when it comes down to it. On Tuesday, LGF’s Charles Johnson posted something that we’ve been curious about some time - “Why Reuters Won’t Say ‘Terrorist’” in their articles. They’re doing it because of the potential threat to their reporters “in volatile areas or situations.” While I don’t want to see any journalist get killed as much as the next guy, it’s almost like putting in the “if you don’t [x], the terrorists have won” comment to actual use, isn’t it?

This got enough interest by bloggers that one of them created a Movable Type plugin to replace certain words with “terrorist” whenever they were put into a post. [via Michelle Malkin] Sure, it’s all fun and games, but it leads to a more important point, which Fotinov makes crystal clear.

For example, many Russians have been surprised that quite a few Western journalists covering the terrorist attack in Beslan did everything to avoid using the word “terrorists”, replacing it in their reports with such euphemisms as “militants,” “attackers,” “radicals,” “rebels,” and “criminals”. It is not all that important whether this is the case of political correctness or the desire to adhere to the “official line”. What really matters is the fact that this linguistic exercise — with a touch of politics — has not escaped the attention of those readers, listeners and viewers in the West who are used to calling a spade a spade.

So if you’re one of the people who previously didn’t agree with the sentiment and thought it wasn’t really that big of a deal, you might want to reconsider a little bit - it does matter. Not only do we notice, but our peers halfway across the globe notice, too.