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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (188724)	10/3/2001 4:22:00 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

Another polluted media source to avoid - Reuters. George Will on This Week Sunday: "It's often been said that in war the first casualty is truth, and one of the ways you attack the truth is by corrupting the integrity of language, which I suggest Reuters News Service has done by saying that they will not now use the word 'terrorist.' This is what they've said: 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. We abstain from judgment and believe that the word "terrorist" is a loaded term, preferring to use a more specific word such as gunman, bomber, etc.' "Well, let's look at this for a minute. 'Loaded term'? Certainly 'terrorist' has a pejorative connotation -- so does rapist, fascist, assassin, murderer. So what? Now, Reuters says, 'We're going to use a more specific word.' Well, 'terrorist' is a noun that denotes something very specific: someone who inflicts violence, someone who inflicts violence randomly and randomly against civilians. Now, are there questionable cases as to whether terrorist applies here or there? Of course. There are questionable cases as to what counts as a cookie, but we don't ban the word 'cookie.' "Now, clearly, if we're going to use the word 'terrorist' at all, we can probably agree that it fits someone who flies a commercial airliner into a skyscraper. I think it's time, perhaps, that we took a warning from this man. This is George Orwell, who in 1946, in an essay called, 'Politics and the English Language,' said, 'if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.' I suggest that Reuters has been corrupting our language by saying 'terrorist' is somehow uniquely judgmental, I have a suggestion: throughout this crisis, when you see a story on the crisis by Reuters, skip the story." Good advice.