Jotman has awarded his first Fox News Award* of 2009 to Associated Press for a headline relating to Obama's plan to close Guantanamo Bay that misleadingly refers to "terrorists' rights."**___
*The Fox News Award is a feature at Jotman.com that began early 2008. It goes to a media organization that has gone the extra mile during the course of the week to make the public more stupid. (Otherwise corrupting the ethic of creativity and global citizenship.)
**Hat-tip Greenwald.
Eureka!
ReplyDeleteI am sure they will be most pleased with the coveted award!
I do think (and intend on expanding this idea in time) that more and more 'terrorist' in usage is becoming a pseudo code term of bigotry/racial abuse. It is applied to any unfavoured group and its members (not new) but something about it's context in various media stories suggests it is also becoming a pejorative against the 'other' where politeness of discreet privilege rules out the old terms of abuse. The language changing but not really the underlying attitudes. I've noticed it in right wing Israeli popularist media for example where 'terrorist' has become interchangeable with 'Palestinian'.
Looks as if the Gaza war contributed to this trend in a big way.
ReplyDelete"We do violence toward them, but they are not like us; they are /with /supportive of /sympathetic with /resemble ... terrorists."
-- as you point out, it's become a term that allows one group of people to think of other people as not fully human, and thereby absolves us of guilt or responsibility.