Three days after Hamas rampaged through southern Israel, an editor at Voice of America offered some lexical guidance in a staff-wide email: Avoid calling the perpetrators “terrorists.”
The Oct. 7 Hamas attack, which killed around 1,200 people in Israel and claimed some 240 hostages, could be called “terrorist acts” or “acts of terror,” wrote Carol Guensburg, VOA’s associate editor for news standards. But she advised VOA to “avoid calling Hamas and its members terrorists,” except in direct quotations from sources.
The guidance embodies the fraught conversations in newsrooms about how to describe the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
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