Thesaurus Phrasing
Words are tricky, which is unfortunate seeing as I now depend on them to make my living. At work, I'm paid to choose words to make an event as precise and concise as possible. Everything I write is read out loud so I have to fight the urge to use too many adjectives or complex sentence structures that might make writing more interesting but that make speaking sound silly.
Sunday morning I was writing about Iraq. I was updating the plight of the two Italian women who are being held by Zarqawi. It turns out that they were initially kidnapped by thugs then sold to Zarqawi's group. A few minutes before I sat down to put the story together, I noticed the producer had changed my copy to read "handed over for money." Huh? I buzzed him and asked if he could change it back because somehow that phrase just didn't have the same impact. He told me that no, his argument being that slavery doesn't exist anymore, you can buy and sell people and sold has too many unwanted connotations.
Right. Tell that to Zarqawi. You also can't cut people's heads off but that doesn't mean I write his head was removed from his torso with a sword. Or how about he had nonconsensual sexual intercourse with the women for rape. But the point is they were sold. That was part of what was making the story so outrageous. That this is a new development in the whole lets-kidnap-foreigners campaign. I didn't agree with the producer's argument but there was little I could do because he has the ultimate veto on the show. Fortunately he buzzed me back about 5 minutes later to tell me he'd thought about it and had changed his mind to agree with me. So sold it was.
But the other part of all this is whole objectivity issue. I do have to make sure I don't right anything libelous or misleading. So there are all these verbal disclaimer phrases that we get stuck using. One os my "favourites" goes along the lines of militants loyal to radical Shi'a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. God forbid we call them al-Sadr's fighters because I guess technically they aren't really his army.
But the whole thing does bring up a lot of questions. For example, when is a terrorist a terrorist and when is he just a militant? At what point does militancy become terrorism? How many suicide car bombings outside Iraqi National Guard recruiting offices or Israeli check points does it take?
CanWest/Global and Reuters want to know. Reuters is accusing CanWest newspapers of misusing the word terrorist in edited Reuters copy stories about Iraq and the Middle East.
(see http://toronto.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=tor_canwest040917)
I know all this stuff is culturally sensitive. I know we are at a really critical point where increasingly there is the danger of falling into a Western world against an Arab world. I don't want that to happen and I want to do my best to keep people, and myself for that matter, from thinking that every Arab person is evil and wants to blow me up. I know that it is difficult because we only see the bad because that is the news. But it is important.
Compounding the problem is that I do see al-Sadr's fighters as terrorists. I don't believe that they are fighting for the liberation of the Iraqi people from US occupation (or should I say US-led-coalition). I think they are power hungry criminals who want to seize power through terror so that they can run their own shitty dictatorship of oppression. And their shitty campaign of violence, aimed I might add against huge numbers of ordinary Iraqis (like those queuing at Iraqi National Guard offices), is keeping Iraqis terrified and locked in their houses. Iraqis who could actually help the world to see that not every Arab is a terrorist.
When we look at numbers of people killed since the start of the War, there have now been over 1000 US casualties and something like ten times that for Iraqis. But large numbers of the Iraqi casualties aren't because of Americans but because of these friggin "militants." So are they terrorists?
Sunday morning I was writing about Iraq. I was updating the plight of the two Italian women who are being held by Zarqawi. It turns out that they were initially kidnapped by thugs then sold to Zarqawi's group. A few minutes before I sat down to put the story together, I noticed the producer had changed my copy to read "handed over for money." Huh? I buzzed him and asked if he could change it back because somehow that phrase just didn't have the same impact. He told me that no, his argument being that slavery doesn't exist anymore, you can buy and sell people and sold has too many unwanted connotations.
Right. Tell that to Zarqawi. You also can't cut people's heads off but that doesn't mean I write his head was removed from his torso with a sword. Or how about he had nonconsensual sexual intercourse with the women for rape. But the point is they were sold. That was part of what was making the story so outrageous. That this is a new development in the whole lets-kidnap-foreigners campaign. I didn't agree with the producer's argument but there was little I could do because he has the ultimate veto on the show. Fortunately he buzzed me back about 5 minutes later to tell me he'd thought about it and had changed his mind to agree with me. So sold it was.
But the other part of all this is whole objectivity issue. I do have to make sure I don't right anything libelous or misleading. So there are all these verbal disclaimer phrases that we get stuck using. One os my "favourites" goes along the lines of militants loyal to radical Shi'a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. God forbid we call them al-Sadr's fighters because I guess technically they aren't really his army.
But the whole thing does bring up a lot of questions. For example, when is a terrorist a terrorist and when is he just a militant? At what point does militancy become terrorism? How many suicide car bombings outside Iraqi National Guard recruiting offices or Israeli check points does it take?
CanWest/Global and Reuters want to know. Reuters is accusing CanWest newspapers of misusing the word terrorist in edited Reuters copy stories about Iraq and the Middle East.
(see http://toronto.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=tor_canwest040917)
I know all this stuff is culturally sensitive. I know we are at a really critical point where increasingly there is the danger of falling into a Western world against an Arab world. I don't want that to happen and I want to do my best to keep people, and myself for that matter, from thinking that every Arab person is evil and wants to blow me up. I know that it is difficult because we only see the bad because that is the news. But it is important.
Compounding the problem is that I do see al-Sadr's fighters as terrorists. I don't believe that they are fighting for the liberation of the Iraqi people from US occupation (or should I say US-led-coalition). I think they are power hungry criminals who want to seize power through terror so that they can run their own shitty dictatorship of oppression. And their shitty campaign of violence, aimed I might add against huge numbers of ordinary Iraqis (like those queuing at Iraqi National Guard offices), is keeping Iraqis terrified and locked in their houses. Iraqis who could actually help the world to see that not every Arab is a terrorist.
When we look at numbers of people killed since the start of the War, there have now been over 1000 US casualties and something like ten times that for Iraqis. But large numbers of the Iraqi casualties aren't because of Americans but because of these friggin "militants." So are they terrorists?
posted by Unknown at 10:14 p.m.
1 Comments:
Jaks, I think you right about overuse of the word terrorist. And we haven't even waded into the whole arena of Bush and "teh-rer." Putin is a good example of what happens when the word falls into the hands of people who justify their own dubious behaviors with the word. But at the same time in the case of Beslan, I'd argue there simply is no other way to describe a group of people that would keep over 1-thousand people, mostly kids, in a gym in those conditions. It truly was horrific. So it's a tough argument in a case like that.
Come on....I know others of my brainiac friends MUST have something to say on this issue....
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