Wednesday 8 September 2004

The media and terrorism.

As far as I can see, The Guardian's editorial line is still determined to avoid the word "terrorist", though the atrocity is actually so bad that a few of their columnists are using the word. The BBC have come up with "hostage-taker": factually accurate, of course, though I wonder why they couldn't use "killer", which is equally accurate and, when you think about it, morally ambiguous. If you're willing to use the word "gunman", why not acknowledge what the guns were used for?

So it's good to read this:

One feels ashamed to be an English-speaker. More that 330 innocent people are dead. Most of them are children.

Some were shot in the back as they fled. But the children were not yet buried before much of the media in the United States and Britain began their pointless and predictable ritual of second guessing, and then blaming, the Russian authorities. The same stale misconceptions and misinformation were once again rehearsed. All so easy, all so mindless.

... where is the elementary decency of our media?


Quite.

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