Jewish World Review Sept. 27, 2004 / 12 Tishrei 5765

Do Journalists Take Sides?

By Jonathan Tobin

Reuters spat with chain over use of ‘terrorist’ highlights a built-in bias

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | The echoes of Rathergate — the decision by CBS News' Dan Rather to broadcast a story that could affect the results of a presidential election based on fraudulent documents weeks before ballots will be cast — will be heard in the mainstream press for years to come.

But no matter what this sorry episode means for Rather's career or the election, the main impact will be to solidify the notion that the media is biased. That was a difficult pill for an old newsman like Rather to swallow, and he still maintains that the blunder was made in "good faith."

That, of course, is debatable. But his insistence, despite evidence to the contrary, that his decision was made in the tradition of journalism practiced "without fear or favoritism" is very much in line with a more recent tradition. This is one that maintains journalists must pretend to be objective, no matter how subjective they really are.

CULT OF OBJECTIVITY
Objective journalism is the ideal, but as much as we journalists like to polish this Olympian pose of disinterested reporting, the truth is, in many cases, it's a lot of bunk.

Dan Rather isn't the first and won't be the last journalist to buy into false evidence just because it confirmed his pre-existing notions of what the truth should be. And as notorious as this case is, it isn't nearly as important to our understanding of the way institutionalized bias can operate as other, less publicized issues.

Case in point is the way the press labels certain people and activities. Like terrorism.

The reluctance of many in the media to tag some people — or anyone for that matter — as a terrorist is an ongoing sore point for many readers, viewers and listeners.

Various news media style guidelines have made the use of the word controversial for journalists because it is regarded as subjective or judgmental. Indeed, Steven Jukes, the Reuters news service's former global head of news, famously said in the aftermath of Sept. 11 that: "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist."

While many newspapers and broadcast outlets were not afraid to label the 9/11 attacks as the acts of terrorists, this shibboleth against using the word has been generally observed when it comes to describing those Palestinian Arabs who deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians for mass murder.

Few in the secular media have challenged this assertion, thus allowing groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, whose singular purpose is the murder of Jews, to be routinely described as associations of "militants" or "activists," as if they were merely trying to organize a union at a textile factory.

This is the line taken by CNN, National Public Radio, The New York Times and Knight-Ridder newspapers. But lately, one exception has popped up — and the high priests of this cult of media objectivity are not happy about it.

The Canadian chain, CanWest Global Communications, publishers of 13 daily newspapers including The National Post in Toronto, has instituted a policy of calling terrorists "terrorists." This means that when their papers run world news articles from Reuters, CanWest editors are instructed to substitute the word for whatever euphemism the wire service has employed for these killers.

AN ‘EMOTIVE WORD’
To cite an example, one recent Reuters story described the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade as a group that "has been involved in a four-year-old revolt against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank."

Instead of this description, the National Post inserted the following: "The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group that has been involved in a four-year-old campaign of violence against Israel."

According to David Schlesinger, the current global managing editor for Reuters, this is an outrage. For him, the use of the word terrorist is an "emotive word." He told CBC News that this was an unacceptable slanting of the news. Excuse me?

The Al Aksa group has murdered hundreds and maimed thousands of Israeli men, women and children in relentless suicide bombings since September 2000. To describe Al Aksa as anything but a terrorist group is not only false, the Reuters line is itself a classic example of the media spinning the news to fit the frame of reference of one side in a dispute.

To describe the Palestinian campaign of terror as nothing more than a "revolt against Israeli occupation" is to buy into the myth that theirs is a battle for freedom, rather than an effort to destroy Israel and kill its people.

When Reuters and similar news sources obscure this fact and veil these atrocities in nonjudgmental copy, it is they who are editorializing, not the people at CanWest.

Scott Anderson, CanWest's editor-in-chief, told The New York Times that Reuters is off base. "If you're couching language to protect people, are you telling the truth? I understand their motives. But issues like this are why newspapers have editors."

He's right. But the question remains: Why don't more editors and newspaper chains — like the Knight-Ridder monopoly, which maintains its stranglehold on daily newspapers in Philadelphia — use their judgment and common sense on this issue, instead of following the herd of politically correct sheep?

Do they fear retribution?

Schlesinger hinted at this when he told the Times that CanWest's policy could possibly "endanger its reporters in volatile areas." Reuters is worried that the people it won't call terrorists will terrorize them.

But there's more to this issue than cowardice. For Reuters, the pretense of objectivity about a group of murderers is more important than telling the plain truth about their activities, especially when they seem to favor the murderer's cause.

As long as that is the conventional wisdom among journalists, the profession will continue the slide into the pit that people like Dan Rather and David Schlesinger have dug for us all.