More moral confusion
Not to say depravity:
Calling these terrorists “suspects” in the midst of the carnage they so obviously perpetrated is worse than the usual banality of mainstream journalism. It is craven. Faced with the visible image of terrorists at work, these newspapers responded with the insipid posture of professional neutrality.
Nor can these photo captions be excused as one person’s mistake. They passed through too many hands for that. They ran in prominent locations in several British papers and must have survived multiple editors. They remained posted, captions unchanged, long after the mass slaughter became known.
What do these captions tell us about British news organizations, beyond their misguided sense of professionalism? First, they show that the papers see terrorism primarily as a legal issue. That’s why terrorists are called suspects, even when they are caught in the act. With the zany pretentiousness of a Monty Python character, they take the honored Western legal presumption of “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” and apply it, willy nilly, to acts of war and terror.
In doing so, they recapitulate the fundamental flaw of the Clinton Administration’s anti-terror strategy. Under Clinton, the Justice Department and FBI treated potential terrorism the same way they did any other criminal activity. For them, the central goal of law enforcement agencies was not to prevent terror or catch potential terrorists before they could act but to apprehend them after the fact and produce evidence of their crimes that would be admissible in court.
The British newspapers’ captions show that they are trapped in the same mindset, determined to presume everyone innocent until they have been duly convicted in a fair trial. The effect is to label those responsible for mass killing with the same delicate language that is (rightly) applied to someone accused of stealing orange marmalade from Harrods’s.
The last paragraph spells it all out quite nicely. Read it. Apparently, for liberal “journalists” both at home and abroad, judgment and moral conclusions are something to be reserved exclusively for use against conservatives, anti-statists, Christians, George W Bush, and others not likely to take action against the offense. For real-life psychotic killers making war on Western civilization, it’ll always be cowardly weaselspeak like “alleged” and “suspected.” Hey, anything stronger (read: closer to the truth) might get these stalwart, heroic “journalists” killed, y’know.
- Entries
