AR-News: (US) A Terrorist by Any Other Name ...

[Animalconcerns Info]

WASHINGTON — A terrorist by any other name is still a terrorist, even
when politically correct media outlets refuse to call them such under
claims of maintaining the standards of objectivity.
...
While the duty of the Fourth Estate is to keep the powers that be
honest, the Bush administration is in part to blame for mistaken
language used by the news. The media frequently rely on official
sources to get the information it needs, often using the very
language that is handed to it. When the Bush administration meekly
uses phrases that don't depict reality, it's no wonder that
inaccurate language is repeated.

For instance, the FBI sent out its weekly police bulletin on
Wednesday describing recent activities by sister outlaws the Animal
Liberation Front (search) and Earth Liberation Front (search), groups
that the FBI has called domestic terrorists (search) responsible for
600 acts of violence since 1996. In the bulletin delivered to 18,000
law enforcement authorities, the FBI referred to ALF as "animal
rights activists."

Among the crimes ALF has laid claim to -- torching a barn on an Erie,
Pa., fur farm, setting fire to a Chicago storefront accused of
selling exotic animal hides, and spray-painting the home of a trader
who sells stocks for a holding company that owns an animal testing
lab.

No matter how disgusted one is by animal testing, in what can only be
a bad joke, the animalliberationfront.com (search) provides readers a
how-to lesson on becoming a "cell" and committing violent acts on
one's own. The author says keeping down expenses is first priority in
order to raise funds for supplies, and boasts "my only expense is gas
money."

That should shock ELF, whose eco-terrorism includes the 1998
firebombing of a building at Vail ski resort in Colorado and this
month's arson of a San Diego apartment building said to have caused
$50 million in damage. Last week, the ELF ravaged vehicles at four
car dealerships in San Gabriel Valley, Calif., setting fire to many
of them and defacing others.

Curious, how environmentalists define pollution, yet the Los Angeles
Times defined ELF's actions as the work of "vandals" and "radical
environmentalists."

The San Francisco Chronicle picked up AP, which rehabilitated that
word again, calling ELF "a loose organization of militant
environmentalists." The San Diego Union Tribune borrowed heavily from
other reports, coming up with similar language.

Yes, the media are often preoccupied with saying the right thing in
order to gain access to sources on all sides, and yes, it is equally
abhorrent to make a crisis out of a problem that does not rise to the
level. But trying to play down the dirtiest of deeds with
neutralizing language is an injustice to those victimized by the
deeds.

full story:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96131,00.html

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