Plan B Forum

wesw wrote:don t you mean consecutive comment?

double post has such negative connotations.....

On Tuesday afternoon, Brendan Bordelon of National Review Online (NRO) reported on the latest leaked email from Al Jazeera English that showed executive Carlos van Meek telling employees not to [use] the terms “extremist,” “Islamist,” “militant,” and “terrorist” in their news coverage to “avoid characterizing people.”

Van Meek’s email came following a deadly shooting earlier in the day at a hotel in Libya that killed at least eight (including one American). Writing to the outlet’s New York and Washington newsrooms, van Meek felt that it was pertinent to “bring to your attention some key words that have a tendency of tripping us up” considering “[o]ne person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.”

Bordelon summarized the email as such:

The word “extremist” was labeled off-limits. “Avoid characterizing people,” van Meek said. “Often their actions do the work for the viewer.”

“Do not use,” van Meek’s said of the term “Islamist.” He described it as “a simplistic label.”

According to van Meek’s instructions, Al Jazeera English employees are not to use the Arabic term “jihad.”

“Strictly speaking, jihad means an inner spiritual struggle, not a holy war,” he said. “It is not by tradition a negative term. It also means the struggle to defend Islam against things challenging it.”

Instead of “terrorists,” van Meek told his employees to use the terms “fighters” and “militants” — but only in certain contexts. “For example, we can use the term [militant] to describe Norwegian mass-killer Andres Behring Breivik or Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh,” he wrote.

Later, Bordelon succinctly pointed out that, despite a push by the Qatar-based news group to be seen as more appealing to Westerners: “nternal pushback on the network’s Hebdo coverage and continuing leaks of company emails illustrate persistent newsroom tension between Al Jazeera’s roots in Doha and the media outlet’s expansion into the United States.”

In addition to this story, Bordelon wrote about leaked internal emails that National Review Online obtained from the moments after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris that showed executives blasting the Western support for freedom of speech because of the magazine’s history of mocking Islam.

The full text of the leaked Al Jazeera email by van Meek and obtained by NRO can be found below (emphasis his):

From: Carlos Van Meek
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2015 10:06 AM
To: AJE-Newsdesk; AJE-Output; AJE-DC-Newsroom
Subject: Terrorists, Militants, Fighters and then some…

All: We manage our words carefully around here. So I’d like to bring to your attention some key words that have a tendency of tripping us up. This is straight out of our Style Guide. All media outlets have one of those. So do we. If you’d like to amend, change, tweak.. pls write to Dan Hawaleshka direct who is compiling the updates to the Style Guide and they will be considered based on merit. No mass replies to this email, pls.


EXTREMIST – Do not use. Avoid characterizing people. Often their actions do the work for the viewer. Could write ‘violent group’ if we’re reporting on Boko Haram agreeing to negotiate with the government. In other words, reporting on a violent group that’s in the news for a non-violent reason.

TERRORISM/TERRORISTS – One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. We will not use these terms unless attributed to a source/person.

ISLAMIST – Do not use. We will continue to describe groups and individuals, by talking about their previous actions and current aims to give viewers the context they require, rather than use a simplistic label.

NOTE: Naturally many of our guests will use the word Islamist in the course of their answers. It is absolutely fine to include these answers in our output. There is no blanket ban on the word.
JIHAD – Do not use the Arabic term. Strictly speaking, jihad means an inner spiritual struggle, not a holy war. It is not by tradition a negative term. It also means the struggle to defend Islam against things challenging it. Again, an Arabic term that we do not use.
FIGHTERS – We do not use words such as militants, radicals, insurgents. We will stick with fighters. However, these terms are allowed when quoting other people using them.

MILITANT – We can use this term to describe individuals who favour confrontational or violent methods in support of a political or social cause. For example, we can use the term to describe Norwegian mass-killer Andres Behring Breivik or Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. But please note: we will not use it to describe a group of people, as in ‘militants’ or ‘militant groups’ etc.

— Curtis Houck is News Analyst at the Media Research Center. Follow Curtis Houck on Twitter.

Lord Jim wrote:Looks like a blatantly ideological set of rules designed to deliberately sanitize, distort and mislead; (written in such a way as to look like fuzzy-headed PCism that would appeal to many American journalists)

Lord Jim wrote:If you can't call ISIS fanatics who behead innocent people and sell others into slavery, or the scumbags who mowed down innocent people in Paris (both acting in the name of their twisted version of Islam) "terrorists" or "Jihadis" or "Islamists" or even "Extremists" what are you supposed to call them? "Swell guys"?

How the AP Stylebook turns Islam into a dirty word

By IBRAHIM HOOPER

The Associated Press added the term “Islamist” to its influential Stylebook in 2012. That entry read:

“Islamist — Supporter of government in accord with the laws of Islam. Those who view the Quran as a political model encompass a wide range of Muslims, from mainstream politicians to militants known as jihadi.”

That same year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations approached AP about modifying the reference, suggesting that AP change its Stylebook to incorporate language similar to that used in the reference to “fundamentalist,” which states that the label should not be used unless a group applies the term to itself.

CAIR urged media outlets to drop the term because it has become journalistic shorthand for “Muslims we don’t like” and because it is used in an almost exclusively pejorative context and is often coupled with the term “extremist,” giving it an even more negative slant.

Islamophobes routinely use the term to disingenuously claim they only hate “political” Islam, not the faith itself. Yet they, and the media, fail to explain how a practicing Muslim can be active in the political or social arena without attracting the label “Islamist.”

In a 2013 update emailed to online Stylebook subscribers, AP modified the “Islamist” reference to:

“An advocate or supporter of a political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam. Do not use as a synonym for Islamic fighters, militants, extremists or radicals, who may or may not be Islamists. Where possible, be specific and use the name of militant affiliations: al-Qaida-linked, Hezbollah, Taliban, etc. Those who view the Quran as a political model encompass a wide range of Muslims, from mainstream politicians to militants known as jihadi.”

While CAIR welcomed AP’s move as a step in the right direction, concerns about the use of the term remained. In a statement, CAIR said: “The key issue with the term ‘Islamist’ is not its continued use; the issue is its use almost exclusively as an ill-defined pejorative.”

There are few, if any, positive references to “Islamist” by the media and few attempts to actually define the term or outline what criteria are used when applying the label.

The unremitting linkage of the term “Islamist” to violence and denial of religious and human rights harms interfaith relations worldwide, unjustifiably links the entire faith of Islam to the violence of a tiny minority of extremists (and some governments) and serves to alienate the vast majority of Muslims who know their faith does not endorse violence and resent being tarred with the same brush as terrorists.

When the term “Islamist” is used to describe both those engaged in wanton acts of violence and those engaged in peaceful political participation, the line between the two is blurred and peaceful faith-based activism is stigmatized and made the subject of suspicion. And the media’s use of “Islamist” is not equivalent to its use in academic circles, in which depth of analysis offers a less subjective definition.

By not dropping use of the term, the media are making a political and religious value judgment each time it is used.

The bottom line: Every journalist must determine whether there is such a thing as a “good” Islamist. If the answer is “no,” then the term is clearly a pejorative and should be dropped.

Ibrahim Hooper is national communications director for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations , the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization. He may be contacted at: ihooper@cair.com,

Al Jazeera memo illustrates the importance of word choice

by Roy Peter Clark
Published Jan. 28, 2015 3:48 pm

I’ve spent a lot of time and space over the last decade thinking and writing about political language, propaganda, censorship, and banned and taboo words. Every time the language wars begin heating up (illegal alien vs. undocumented worker), I find myself reverting to a set of first principles:

What is the literal meaning of the questionable word or phrase?
Does that word or phrase have any connotations, that is, associations that are positive or negative?
How does the word correspond to what is actually happening on the ground?
What group (sometimes called a “discourse community”) favors one locution over another, and why?
Is the word or phrase “loaded”? How far does it steer us from neutral?
Does the word or phrase help me see, or does it prevent me from seeing?

This list of questions is inspired by an internal document leaked from Al Jazeera English and published by the conservative magazine National Review Online, NRO.com. The memo was written by news executive Carlos Van Meek and attends to the usages of words such as extremist, terrorist, Islamist, and jihad.

Here is the full text of the email by Van Meek as published on newsbusters.org, a site whose stated mission is to expose liberal bias in the media:

* * *

So how should we interpret this advice from Al Jazeera’s Style Guide? It will depend, in part, upon which language club you belong to. If you identify with Rush Limbaugh and use terms like Islamo-Fascist, then you are likely to see attempts to limit use of “jihad” as a form of Arabic political correctness, even propaganda.

What if you consider yourself a politically moderate Muslim Arab-American? Perhaps from your perspective you see the language policies of Al-Jazeera as a necessary step to creating, dare I say it, a more fair and balanced approach to reporting. It was S.I. Hayakawa in his famous book Language in Thought and Action who stipulates that any true report depends upon the avoidance of “loaded words.” All the words highlighted in the memo – with the possible exception of “fighters” – are loaded. Their use over time has led to an inevitable set of associations. Use words like Islam, jihad, terrorist in a cluster, and I am, involuntarily, imagining the rubble of 9/11.

Here is a key obstacle to writing responsibly in our political culture: We seem to be losing neutrality as a value. What if I reject both “illegal alien” AND “undocumented worker”? What if I see the first as dysphemism and the second as euphemism? What if I offer an alternative, such as “illegal immigrant”? I will be attacked from the right as politically correct, and from the left as insensitive for categorizing a person as illegal.

Consider this range of language:

Al Jazeera also put out this video to explain their rationale for this style.

TERRORIST————————–FIGHTER————————HERO.

As the style book argues: One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. But another set of questions must follow for the journalist: Should these two persons be treated as if their claims are equally legitimate? What is the evidence of terrorism or heroism? Is the arrival at a neutral word like “fighter” creating a false and unworthy balance?

Here’s what I like about Van Meek’s memo:

*He makes a distinction between avoidance of a word by a reporting staff and its overall banishment. If sources are using some of these words, so be it, they can appear in sound bytes.

*He expresses a preference for describing the specific actions of a person or group and their consequences. A decade ago, when we were arguing whether Iraq was experiencing a “civil war” or “sectarian violence,” my response was something like: “Who cares. Show me what these people are doing. Let me categorize it based on my experience.” If you show me a person wearing a mask cutting off the head of another man whose supposed crime is that he is a journalist or health worker, you don’t have to label him as an extremist. I get it.

*The standards and practices described in the guidebook are not fixed. They can be revised based upon a process established to improve them.

Source

If you show me a person wearing a mask cutting off the head of another man whose supposed crime is that he is a journalist or health worker, you don’t have to label him as an extremist. I get it.

Econoline wrote:If you show me a person wearing a mask cutting off the head of another man whose supposed crime is that he is a journalist or health worker, you don’t have to label him as an extremist. I get it.