Words Matter

Why Not Call A Terrorist a Terrorist?

The United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, are among several dozen countries that have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, and all three major television news outlets, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and other legacy media outlets, will not use the word terrorist to describe Hamas.

The Black Panthers were militant. Hamas is a terror group.

That is not rocket science. It is straightforward, especially for news outlets reporting on the Middle East. The legacy media, however, avoids putting terror and Hamas in the same sentence.

The Associated Press style guide on the Israel-Hamas war, for example, says that the terms terrorism and terrorist have become too politicized and often are applied inconsistently. The AP made an exception after 9/11 and referred often to al Qaeda as terrorists. But not Hamas.

The world affairs editor for the BBC, John Simpson, said last October that terrorism "is a loaded word," and that "it's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys."

Media bias is insidious on the big issues that dominate the news cycle. They can influence public opinion in something as simple as the words selected to report events. In this case, avoiding the word terror is meant to soft-pedal Hamas’s actions. The New York Times even managed to avoid the word terrorists in their initial report on the pillaging of rape, murder and abduction carried out by Hamas on October 7.

Shunning the words terror or terrorists normalizes Hamas and its atrocities. Lots of groups covering everything from climate change to social justice are correctly dubbed militant. Extinction Rebellion, for instance, the militant eco-warriors, chain themselves to one another to block traffic, and engage in high profile incidents of “environmentally themed graffiti” on some of the world’s great art works. Extinction Rebellion is undoubtedly a militant group. And the mainstream press refers to them as such, sometimes even as extremist. But Extremist Rebellion does not fire rockets and send suicide bombers into civilian gatherings, nor has it unleashed an attack in which rape, kidnapping and murder were its tools of ‘resistance.’ If they did, they would correctly be classified as a terror group. Same as Hamas, but likely without the political cover of the legacy press.

There should be no debate over October 7. It was a terror attack and those who carried it out were terrorists. By using militant when it comes to Hamas, the press is normalizing its horrific acts of terrorism.

Six months on from October 7 and I no longer know what it would take to get the legacy press to correctly call Hamas a terror organization. I know, unfortunately, that simple good journalism is not enough.