It’s something to do with avoiding the dreaded value judgement. (Mustn’t use the term ‘terror’ re Israel unless it’s to quote verbatim.)
So we have a series of headlines : Jerusalem ‘lorry attack’ injures 15. I’m not quite sure why they’ve put lorry attack in single quotation marks - perhaps they’re using droll humour and satirising themselves.
Next example - scare quotes are gone, and the headline is: Jerusalem lorry attack injures soldiers.
Finally they acknowledged the presence of a driver: Jerusalem attack: Four dead after lorry driver rams soldiers.
Honest Reporting congratulates the BBC on its ‘progress’.
A later piece has a video of the attack in which four people were killed and 13 injured. It is also on YouTube, where several bizarre comments have appeared, criticising the cowardly Israelis for running away.
Unbelievable.
Craig (adding an update): The driver has gone again. It's back to inanimate objects. The headline now reads: Jerusalem lorry attack: Four Israelis soldiers killed.
Craig (adding an update): The driver has gone again. It's back to inanimate objects. The headline now reads: Jerusalem lorry attack: Four Israelis soldiers killed.
Unbelievable ?
ReplyDeleteHardly
Rather
Entirely predictable..
sadly, you're probably right.
DeleteNote that whenever the BBC reports on a shooting in the US, it's never "Gun kills people at...."
DeleteThank goodness they re-edited that headline. Don't want to give the impression that the BBC caves in to pressure from the Zionist Internet Brigade, right?
ReplyDeleteI once posed some editorial guideline questions to the BBC about their use of 'quotes', "quotes", questions as headlines and other forms of one degree of separation advocacy.
ReplyDeleteYou will never guess how that worked out.