He Said It Better Than I Could

Found a December 2004 Front Page Magazine interview of Steven Vincent that clearly illustrates the problem with the mainstream media's biased language:

Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word ?guerillas.? As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms ?insurgents? or ?guerillas? to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase ?paramilitary death squads.? Same murderers, different designations. Yet of the two, ?insurgents??and especially ?guerillas??has a claim on our sympathies that ?paramilitaries? lacks. This is not semantics: imagine if the media routinely called the Sunni Triangle gunmen ?right wing paramilitary death squads.? Not only would the description be more accurate, but it would offer the American public a clear idea of the enemy in Iraq. And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war.
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The most despicable misuse of terminology, however, occurs when Leftists call the Saddamites and foreign jihadists ?the resistance.? What an example of moral inversion! For the fact is, paramilitary death squads are attacking the Iraqi people. And those who oppose the killers--the Iraqi police and National Guardsmen, members of the Allawi government, people like Nour?they are the ?resistance.? They are preventing Islamofascists from seizing Iraq, they are resisting evil men from turning the entire nation into a mass slaughterhouse like we saw in re-liberated Falluja. Anyone who cares about success in our struggle against Islamofascism?or upholds principles of moral clarity and lucid thought?should combat such Orwellian distortions of our language.

Thank you, Steven. We'll miss you.

"And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war."

The mainstream media quickly decided that showing footage of people jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers on 9-11 would inflame public opinion, and therefore that footage was never again to be shown. Likewise with the various pictures and videos of terrorists shooting and beheading civilian prisoners. Yet the pictures from Abu Ghraib were plastered all over the airwaves and front pages for weeks on end, and the ACLU sued the Department of Defense to get even more pictures and video released under the Freedom of Information Act.

It seems that only those things that undermine public attitudes toward the war are acceptable "news."