Journalist accuses AP of ‘censoring conservative words’ in Stylebook – WJLA

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group)

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.

Its frankly ridiculous and its sanitizing the English language, Alexander said of the books linguistic recommendations.

She expanded on her case against the Stylebook in a column for The Hill on Sunday.

More often than not, style writers have been more interested in censoring conservative words while promoting language that liberals tend to favor, she wrote, ticking off a number of examples of recent changes:

Although the Fox segment claimed the Stylebook calls for writers to avoid using the word terrorist, the 2017 Stylebook contains no entry on the term. An AP spokesman once told the Washington Post that reporters should shy away from independently identifying anyone as a terrorist and only refer to them that way if the FBI or another official source does first. Reuters and the Washington Post have similar policies.

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.

We all know that language matters and language is powerful, and the words that people choose to use insert value judgments whether it is intentional or not, said Nikki Usher, an associate professor at the George Washington University School of Media & Public Affairs and author of Making News at The New York Times.

Despite complaints from the right about specific examples, Usher said conservatives have often done a better job of framing issues in their terms than liberals have. She was hesitant to assign political motives to the AP editors who decide which words should be recommended.

These are people who have made it their lifes work to think about words. Its not just a bunch of journalists in a room making arbitrary decisions, she said.

In many cases, such as reporting on the LGBTQ community, the APs guidance encourages writers to use the term that people prefer to use to describe themselves.

Its a reflection of good journalism, not political correctness, Usher said.

A former AP standards editor made exactly that argument in a blog post on the process of compiling a new Stylebook in 2015.

We dont see APs news report as a tool for social engineering, wrote Tom Kent. But if a suggestion will make our report fairer, more considerate or more balanced, were interested.

While that may be the intent, John Carroll, a professor of mass communication at Boston University and a former journalist, said a perception of bias is difficult to avoid on issues where the language used by the press helps frame the public debate.

I think in theory what the AP Stylebook is trying to do is be as specific and as neutral as possible, but when you hold some of the guidelines up to the light in a certain way, it looks like theyre trying to influence the reader in a particular ideological direction, he said.

In the case of abortion, pro-life and pro-choice were essentially marketing terms that each side used to put the other side on the defensive.

If those are the terms that are going to be used, both of them carry overtones that could influence people in terms of how they view the players, Carroll said. Changing it to anti-abortion and pro-abortion rights is arguably more neutral.

At times, though, he suggested the APs efforts at balance are off base. Describing migrants as people struggling to enter Europe is a phrase that is so vague, its virtually meaningless.

Once language gets weaponized, then it can turn you pretty much into a pretzel to try to avoid seeming to take sides, Carroll said.

Alexanders complaints follow two years of candidate and President Donald Trump railing against political correctness.

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct, Trump said when questioned about his long history of insulting women at the first Republican debate in 2015. Ive been challenged by so many people, I dont frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesnt have time either.

A July 2016 Pew Research Center poll found a wide partisan gap in perceptions of political correctness. While 78 percent of Republicans said too many people are easily offended by language, 61 percent of Democrats said people need to be more careful to avoid offending others.

There was a similar split between Trump supporters and Hillary Clinton voters. Four out of five Trump voters said people are too easily offended, but three in five Clinton supporters said people need to exercise more caution.

It is not surprising, then, that a guidebook for journalists that wades into heated debates and attempts to defuse loaded language makes some waves.

The 2017 edition of the Stylebook is often more nuanced than critics suggest. While it spells out situations in which migrant or refugee are inappropriate terms, it does not advise against using them entirely.

Every guideline is a choice, Carroll said, and every choice opens the AP up to attacks from the left or the right.

At a time when the president and his allies are constantly trying to discredit the mainstream press and public trust in the media is at historic lows, targeting a guidebook that many media outlets rely on to set their standards could advance that effort.

If theres an interest in dividing the public over which news is reliable and which news isnt, going after the AP Stylebook could be an effective way to separate the two sides, Carroll said.

The AP rejects allegations that its guidebook is biased, maintaining that its goal is to encourage fair and balanced reporting.

The AP Stylebook offers guidance for journalists and others on spelling, language, punctuation, usage and journalistic style. Its guidelines are aimed at clarity, accuracy and objectivity in the news report, an Associated Press spokesperson said in an email Tuesday.

Usher noted that the genesis of the AP was the desire to create standardized, objective news that would be neutral enough to fit in with newspapers across the country.

It standardizes American journalism so that every time you get a news story, it roughly looks and reads the same, she said of the Stylebook.

Not everyone in the mainstream media is a fan. Casey Stinnett, managing editor of the Liberty County Vindicator in Liberty, Texas complained of its arbitrary and sometimes goofy mandates in a recent column titled, I despise the AP Stylebook.

However, Usher said most news organizations develop their own in-house styles, and even if they borrow heavily from the AP Stylebook in setting those standards, no publication is required to accept its guidance.

Its not some monolith that you have to listen to, otherwise your journalism doesnt count, she said.

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Journalist accuses AP of 'censoring conservative words' in Stylebook - WJLA