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.Read the entire piece.
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.
I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest if these were Israeli gunmen, they wouldn't be identified as "suspected" gunmen.
It's a sad day, indeed, when we can't plainly describe what the entire world sees in front of us.
Related items here and here.
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