by Richard Landes

Starting the day after 9/11, major news outlets showed real caution about the word 'terrorist' — worried it might sound biased, or provoke backlash.

That caution has held for twenty-five years: attacks get described as having 'unclear motives,' attackers shouting Allahu Akhbar! are reported as making 'incoherent statements,' and any direct mention of the ideology behind an attack gets softened or delayed.

Here's the strange part: the same outlets showing that much caution about naming an attacker's motive have, at the same time, run some of that attacker's own propaganda as straight news — unverified claims of atrocities, passed along without the scrutiny a good reporter would apply to any other unconfirmed claim, especially one so inflammatory.

This produced a strange industry: because Western media proved so willing to run staged or exaggerated footage as fact, a small cottage industry emerged specifically to produce that footage — faked scenes designed to be picked up and broadcast.

What started as a fringe activity in the early 2000s is now, with smartphones and social media, closer to a national pastime.

One especially telling case: during a 2002 military operation, one side claimed thousands of civilians had been massacred. Western outlets repeated that claim for weeks.

When journalists finally got access, the actual count was 56 people — most of them combatants, in a ratio that was, if anything, unusually restrained for urban fighting.

The correction never got a fraction of the coverage of the original claim.

The pattern that emerges:

Caution about naming your enemy, combined with credulity about your enemy's own claims, adds up to suicidal journalism.