Okrent got them to admit it, almost, on this one.
dokrent - 5:37 PM ET April 30, 2004 (#27 of 27)
The Times's Language Describing Sheik Ahmed Yassin
Andrew Irving of Manhattan, who identified himself as “a daily reader of the paper who cares that it conveys facts with the words it uses and the stories it runs,” wrote in a while ago to question the language The Times has used to identify Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas who was killed by the Israeli military in March.
Mr. Irving particularly challenged the description of Yassin as Hamas’s “spiritual leader.” Coupled with the information that Yassin was leaving a mosque when he was killed, Irving argued, this suggested that Yassin “was a kind of spiritual cheerleader/bystander, rather than an active driver, strategist and decision-maker in Hamas.”
Nowhere in The Times’s coverage is the choice of words more flammable than in the paper’s reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’ve been noting objections from both sides (although, I’ll acknowledge, many more from pro-Israel readers) for months, trying to discern whether there’s a pattern, as some charge, revealing one-sidedness. I’m nowhere near a conclusion on this larger question, but on this one – on Sheik Yassin – Mr. Irving is right.
“Spiritual leader” may be correct, but only in the way that it’s accurate to say that Texas is bigger than Rhode Island; there’s much more to the story, and the two words can leave a mistaken impression. No one on either side seems to disagree with the assertion that Sheik Yassin was an ideological and political figure as well, and that in his sermons he endorsed killing as part of the Hamas strategy. The problem isn’t that “spiritual leader” does not convey this – it’s that it conveys something very, very different. |
