The War of the Words

In December, Daniel Okrent became the NY Times′s first "public editor" — something between an ombudsman and a special prosecutor, brought in to restore the paper′s tarnished reputation in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal and the sacking of executive editor Howell Raines. This is Okrent′s contribution to the "Week in Review" for week ending 6 March 2005.

Nothing provokes as much rage as what many perceive to be The Times′s policy on the use of "terrorist," "terrorism" and "terror." There is no policy, actually, but except in the context of Al Qaeda, or in direct quotations, these words, as explosive as what they describe, show up very rarely.

Among pro-Israeli readers (and nonreaders urged to write to me by media watchdog organizations), the controversy over variants of the T-word has become the stand-in for the Israel-Palestine conflict itself. When Israel′s targeted assassinations of suspected sponsors of terrorism provoke retaliation, some pro-Palestinian readers argue that any armed response against civilians by such groups as Hamas is morally equivalent. Critics on the other side say The Times′s general avoidance of the word "terrorism" is a political decision, and exactly what Hamas wants.

Here′s what I want: A path out of this thicket, which is snarled with far more than "terror" and its derivative tendrils. I packed the preceding paragraph with enough verbal knots to secure the QE2, so I′ll untangle them one by one.

"Pro-Israeli" and "pro-Palestinian": Adem Carroll of the Islamic Circle of North America has pointed out to me that both epithets represent value judgments. Are Ariel Sharon′s policies pro-Israel? Not in the minds of his critics on the Israeli left. Is Mahmoud Abbas′s negotiation policy pro-Palestinian? I doubt that supporters of Islamic jihad believe it is.

"Israel-Palestine conflict": I′ve heard from ardent Zionists who deplore this usage because, they say, "There is no Palestine."

"Targeted assassinations": The Israel Defense Forces use this term; Palestinians believe it implicitly exonerates Israel for the deaths of nearby innocents. The Times tries to avoid it, but an editor′s attempt at a substitute on Jan. 27 - "pinpoint killings" - was even more accepting of the Israeli line.

"Settlers": Are they merely settlers when they carry out armed actions against Palestinians?

"Groups such as Hamas": According to the European Union and the United States government, which are both cited regularly by an army of readers, Hamas is a terrorist organization. According to Times deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner: "We use ′terrorist′ sparingly because it is a loaded word. Describing the goals or acts of a group often serves readers better than repeating the term ′terrorist.′ We make clear that Hamas seeks the destruction of Israel through violence but that it is also a significant political and social force among Palestinians, fielding candidates and running clinics and day care centers." According to many Times critics, that just won′t do.

There was one more bugbear in that overloaded paragraph up top: "Media watchdog organizations." That′s what you call the noble guardians on your side; the other guy′s dishonest advocates are "pressure groups." Both are accurate characterizations, but trying to squeeze them into the same sentence can get awfully clumsy. It′s also clumsy to befog clear prose by worrying over words so obsessively that strong sentences get ground into grits. But closing one′s ears to the complaints of partisans would also entail closing one′s mind to the substance of their arguments.

The Armed Conflict in the Area Between Lebanon and Egypt may yield the most linguistically volatile issues confronting Times editors, but I′ve encountered a ferocious tug-of-war between advocates of each of the following as well: Genital mutilation vs. genital cutting ("would you call ritual male circumcision ′genital mutilation′?"). Liberal vs. moderate ("you′re simply trying to make liberalism look reasonable and inoffensive" as in calling Michael Bloomberg a "moderate Republican"). Abuse vs. torture ("if the Abu Ghraib victims had been American soldiers," The Times "would have described it as torture"). Partial birth vs. intact dilation and extraction (the use of the former demonstrates that The Times "has embraced the terminology of anti-abortion forces"). "Iraqi forces" vs. "American-backed forces" ("aren′t the Sunni insurgents Iraqis?"). Don′t get me started on "insurgents," much less homeless vs. vagrant, affirmative action vs. racial preferences, or loophole vs. tax incentive.

Now a rugby scrum has gathered around the Bush Social Security plan. Republicans tout "personal accounts"; Democrats trash "private accounts." In this atmosphere, I don′t think reporters have much choice other than to use "private" and "personal" interchangeably, and to interchange them often. Once one side of an ideological conflict has seized control of a word, it no longer has a meaning of its own; opting for one or the other would be a declaration that doesn′t belong in the news reports.

Hijacking the language proves especially pernicious when government officials deodorize their programs with near-Orwellian euphemism. (If Orwell were writing "Politics and the English Language" today, he′d need a telephone book to contain his "catalog of swindles and perversions. ") The Bush administration has been especially good at this; just count the number of times self-anointing phrases like "Patriot Act," "Clear Skies Act" or "No Child Left Behind Act" appear in The Times, at each appearance sounding as wholesome as a hymn. Even the most committed Republicans must recognize that such phrases could apply to measures guaranteeing the opposite of what they claim to accomplish.

When the next Democratic administration rolls around, Republicans will likely discover how it feels to be on the losing side of a propaganda war. (The Clinton White House wasn′t very good at this: somehow, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 , which remade federal welfare policy, never hit the top of the charts.)

The Times shouldn′t play along. If the sports section calls the Orange Bowl the Orange Bowl, even if its formal name is the Federal Express Orange Bowl, why can′t the news pages refer to the Public Education Act of 2002, or the Industrial Emissions Act of 2005? Similarly, editors could ban the use of "reform" as a description of legislative action. It′s even worse than "moderate," something so benign in tone and banal in substance that it can be used to camouflage any depredations its sponsors propose. Who could oppose health care reform, Social Security reform or welfare reform, and who could tell me what any of them means? You could call the rule barring (or at least radically limiting) the use of these shameless beards the Save the Language Act.

Of course, reform of the use of "reform," or a consistent assault on any of the linguistic cosmetics used by politicians and interest groups to disfigure public debate, could bring on charges of bias (a word which itself has almost come to mean "something I disagree with").

But I think in some instances The Times′s earnest effort to avoid bias can desiccate language and dilute meaning. In a January memo to the foreign desk, former Jerusalem bureau chief James Bennet addressed the paper′s gingerly use of the word "terrorism."

"The calculated bombing of students in a university cafeteria, or of families gathered in an ice cream parlor, cries out to be called what it is," he wrote. "I wanted to avoid the political meaning that comes with ′terrorism,′ but I couldn′t pretend that the word had no usage at all in plain English." Bennet came to believe that "not to use the term began to seem like a political act in itself."

I agree. While some Israelis and their supporters assert that any Palestinian holding a gun is a terrorist, there can be neither factual nor moral certainty that he is. But if the same man fires into a crowd of civilians, he has committed an act of terror, and he is a terrorist. My own definition is simple: an act of political violence committed against purely civilian targets is terrorism; attacks on military targets are not. The deadly October 2000 assault on the American destroyer Cole or the devastating suicide bomb that killed 18 American soldiers and 4 Iraqis in Mosul last December may have been heinous, but these were acts of war, not terrorism. Beheading construction workers in Iraq and bombing a market in Jerusalem are terrorism pure and simple.

Given the word′s history as a virtual battle flag over the past several years, it would be tendentious for The Times to require constant use of it, as some of the paper′s critics are insisting. But there′s something uncomfortably fearful, and inevitably self-defeating, about struggling so hard to avoid it.