By Jonathan S. Tobin
Echoes of CBS News anchor Dan Rather’s decision to broadcast a story that could have affected results of a presidential election based on fraudulent documents will be heard in the mainstream press for years to come.
But no matter what this episode meant for Rather’s career or the election, the main effect will be to solidify the notion that news media are biased.
That was a difficult pill for Rather to swallow, and he maintained that the blunder was made in “good faith.” That, of course, is debatable.
But his insistence that his decision was made in the tradition of journalism practiced “without fear or favoritism” is in line with a more recent tradition, one that maintains journalists must pretend to be objective, no matter how subjective they really are.
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 bunk.
And as notorious as this case is, it isn’t as important to our understanding of how institutionalized bias can operate as other, less publicized issues.
Case in point is how the press labels certain people and activities, like terrorism. The reluctance of news media workers to tag some people — or anyone for that matter — as terrorists is a continuing sore point for many readers, viewers and listeners.
An ‘emotive word’
Various news media style guidelines have made use of the word controversial because it is regarded as subjective or judgmental.
Steven Jukes, the Reuters news service’s former global head of news, famously made that claim after the Sept. 11 attacks: “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 attackers as terrorists, this shibboleth against the word has been generally observed in describing those Palestinian Arabs who target Israeli civilians for mass murder.
Few in the secular media have challenged this assertion, allowing groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, whose purposes are the murder of Jews, to be routinely described as “militants” or “activists,” as if they were 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 popped up.
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.” 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.
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, 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.”
To David Schlesinger, the current global managing editor for Reuters, this is an outrage. For him, 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, but the Reuters line is a classic example of a news media organization 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 use their judgment and common sense on this issue?
Do they fear retribution? Schlesinger hinted at this when he told the Times that CanWest’s policy could “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 officials, the pretense of objectivity about a group of murderers is more important than telling the plain truth about their activities, especially when these officials seem to favor the murderers’ cause.
As long as that is the conventional wisdom among journalists, the profession will continue the slide into the pit that people like Rather and Schlesinger have dug for us all.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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