I took a good-natured heckling over comments I made in yesterday’s piece on Style Over Substance. It was noted that perhaps I completely overlooked that the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades is, in fact, a terrorist group, and should not be referred to as a mere militant organization.
To which I responded “ah, but you have miss-interpreted my point” (missed it, by a country mile).
You see, I take no position on whether or not the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are militant or terrorist — the name Martyrs Brigades notwithstanding. That wasn’t the issue, nor was it Reuter’s complaint against CanWest. Let me be clear *cough*:
The global managing editor for Reuters, David Schlesinger, called such changes unacceptable. He said CanWest had crossed a line from editing for style to editing the substance and slant of news from the Middle East.
“If they want to put their own judgment into it, they’re free to do that, but then they shouldn’t say that it’s by a Reuters reporter,” said Schlesinger.
In essence, Reuter’s Schlesinger is pissed that CanWest would editorialise the content of one of its newsfeeds without identifying it as such — and rightly so.
From Reporting For The Media – Seventh Edition:
Remaining Objective P.46: Journalists express their opinions only in editorials and commentaries, which usually appear in a section of the newspaper or a part of the news broadcast reserved for opinion. News stories should remain free of opinion.
There is an entire chapter dedicated to objectivity, and a section on avoiding -isms, but terrorists, thugs, evil-doers, militants, brigades, martyrs, and so forth, are over-used words that serve less to inform and more to demonize or polarise; not by journalistic practice as much as by those groups’ own actions. For sake of emotional clarity, I’ll skip it.
Now, you may argue that niggling over journalistic practice is inconsequential. Certainly; it may be. However, we all have standards to live up to. If a contractor builds you a deck and it isn’t built to code, and collapses, you’ll sue. Whether or not it killed your mother-in-law when it fell isn’t the point. So excuse me if it should appear that I am defending the labelling of a “militant” group; I am not.
Standards are standards. If a suicide bomber blows up a bus full of people, should we blow up conventions of reporting that guarantee journalistic integrity — an integrity that we free peoples rely upon to check and balance our political processes and ensure our freedoms?
Didn’t think so.