By Geoffrey Nunberg, Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist at Stanford University.
"We did not … defeat a brutal dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins." That was President Bush addressing troops in Baghdad during his holiday drop-in, picking two terms from the long list of epithets for the bad guys in Iraq.
A CBS News report last week used five different names in the space of a couple of paragraphs. It was headed "Series of Strikes on Iraq Rebels," and it went on to say, "U.S. forces assaulted dozens of suspected guerrilla positions, killing six alleged insurgents … amid a U.S. drive to intimidate the resistance…. Soldiers arrested an organizer of the fedayeen guerrillas."
Thugs, assassins, rebels, guerrillas, insurgents, resistance and fedayeen — everybody has been struggling to find the right term for the enemy in Iraq. True, as long as it's unclear who is behind the attacks, it's probably prudent to cover all the bases.
But the variation also signals a deeper problem in interpreting the news coming out of Iraq. The media may be making a valiant effort to cover the good news, but no one's sure what story line to wrap around the bad. Just which movie are we screening here?
LA Times, free registration required
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
