Captain Obvious to the rescue.
Via WACH:
A conservative journalist says that a guidebook used by many media organizations to make decisions on style and word choice is imparting a liberal bias in the mainstream press with its rules for reporting on issues like immigration and terrorism.
Rachel Alexander, a senior editor at The Stream, complained on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday that the 2017 Associated Press Stylebook caves to political correctness in new entries, compounding a rhetorical slant that she believes has been growing in recent years.
“The mainstream media claims that it’s not biased, but it’s got this bias built into its own words,” she said. “And we’re seeing these words increasingly scrubbed from news articles and replaced by politically correct words instead.”
One change for 2017 that concerned Alexander was the new guidance on describing “migrants.”
“Migrants normally are people who move from place to place for temporary work or economic advantage,” the Stylebook says. “The term also may be used for those whose reason for leaving is not clear, or to cover people who may also be refugees or asylum-seekers, but other terms are strongly preferred: people struggling to enter Europe, Cubans seeking new lives in the United States.”
“Refugee” and “asylum-seeker” are defined separately as terms to be used for people who are forced to leave their homeland to escape persecution.
“It’s frankly ridiculous and it’s sanitizing the English language,” Alexander said of the book’s linguistic recommendations.[…]
Criticisms arose in 2013 when the AP first announced changes to its use of “illegal immigrant” and “Islamist,” as well. At the time, the news organization insisted it was just trying to be accurate and to avoid labeling people instead of behavior.
“It’s kind of a lazy device that those of us who type for a living can become overly reliant on as a shortcut,” then-Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explained at the time. “It ends up pigeonholing people or creating long descriptive titles where you use some main event in someone’s life to become the modifier before their name.”
Media experts say the AP is likely striving to be accurate and to avoid offending marginalized populations, but simple word choices inevitably do impact the way the audience understands an issue.