Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Reuters: Replace "hard-liner" with "conservative"

The Godfather noticed the change at Reuters, the news organization whose policy forbids using the term "terrorist" (since, according to them, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"):
Surfing around yesterday my RSS feeds, and I have some Yahoo! News feeds on my RSS, and I got one from Reuters. One of the things that occasionally you will find on an RSS feed is a wire story rewrite. You will see the original with red lines through what has been revised, red lines through what was eliminated. Let me read to you the first version of this story about the Iran presidential election from Reuters dated yesterday. "Hard-line President-Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" I have trouble reading between the lines here yesterday, "sparked western fears about Iran's nuclear program and helped push oil prices over $60 on Monday but EU analysts warned against any hasty judgments." They replaced "hard-line President-Elect Mahmoud" with "ultraconservative President-Elect Mahmoud." We've encountered this countless times before, folks, where the mainstream press takes the tyrants, the dictators, the thugs of the world and calls them "conservatives" and "ultraconservatives" and that's what Reuters did.

They started out "hard-line" president-elect and changed it to "ultraconservative" president-elect "faced an uphill task on Monday to assuage concerns." That was replaced with "sparked Western fears about Iran's nuclear program," and there are other things, "in the West that he will adopt a tougher policy on Iran's nuclear program and roll back freedoms at home." All that was stricken out, replaced with "ultraconservative president-elect Mahmoud sparked western fears about Iran's nuclear program and helped push oil prices over $60 on Monday." That's the final version;
See? Reuters finds the term "terrorist" to be unpalatable, but has no qualms equating the terms "tyrant" and "conservative." I'd expect that comparison from the moonbat wing of liberals and Democrats, but a supposedly "objective" news source?

Nope...no liberal media bias.