Words Matter; Equal Tragedies, Unequal Coverage; Does Right-Wing Media Spread Islamophobia?
STELTER: Welcome back. Thanks for staying with us. One of the big debates in journalism this week is about the way we talk about ISIS, the impact of the very words we choose to describe the terrorist group. On MSNBC this week, Lawrence O'Donnell called out the press on one specific word choice.</s>LAWRENCE O'DONNELL, MSNBC HOST: Stop calling Abdelhamid Abaaoud a mastermind. You can call him the ringleader of the attacks in Paris. You can call him the organizers of the attacks but stop glorifying this homicidal maniac, who flunked out of high school.</s>STELTER: Is he right? Can a word make such a difference? It's been debated here this week at CNN and other networks as well. Let's bring back our panel and discuss the ethics of this coverage, bringing in NPR News editorial director, Michael Oreskes; Frank Sesno of the George Washington University and veteran political observer Jeff Greenfield. Jeff, what is the appropriate call? Is it mastermind? Is it ringleader? Does it matter at all?</s>JEFF GREENFIELD, POLITICAL ANALYST AND AUTHOR: It matters a bit. I'm not sure it matters that much. I think the point is to not make these people 20 feet tall. I've seen a couple of analyses in fact of the attack. And it said it did not take an evil mastermind genius to pull it off. The argument about words goes right through this debate. I --</s>GREENFIELD: -- noticed today a "New York Times" article that referred to Islamic extremists. And we know this is enormous argument. Why won't the president label this? Why does Hillary Clinton call them jihadists? What's the game here? I think it matters -- I think the substance of what's going on matters a lot more than the words. But I think journalists ought to be careful.</s>STELTER: Michael, let me ask you about something we saw online this week, a lot of press critics and some consumers complain that there was much, much more focus on Paris than there was on an attack in Beirut a day or two before then. And of course, this weekend, on Friday, we saw what happened in Mali. There have been other recent terror attacks in Nigeria and Kenya. Bill Keller (ph), who used to be the executive editor of "The New York Times," told your NPR media correspondent, David Folkenflik, that there is a hierarchy of news. Here's what he said. "All deaths are equal to the victims and their families. But all deaths are not equal in the calculation of news value." Do you agree?</s>MICHAEL ORESKES, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF NEWS AND EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, NPR: Well, I wouldn't frame it that way. First of all, I think, just as human beings, I would hope we would hold all life sacred, regardless of our own backgrounds or beliefs and that none of us would view ourselves as all-powerful enough to judge the value of any life against some other life. I don't think that's what journalists are doing. Every day in a hundred ways, journalists make choices about what to cover and how much to cover it.</s>STELTER: Why did Paris get so much more attention than Beirut?</s>ORESKES: Well, let me just finish the thought. The death of a pope gets a lot more attention than the death of a B movie actor, unless, of course, that B movie actor was also President of the United States and helped to end the Cold War. We're always ranking events. Now Beirut was a terrible event. And it did, in fact, get quite a bit of coverage, certainly on NPR and, in fact, our colleagues at Public Radio International did a truly heart moving (sic), rending piece the morning of the Paris attack about a fellow named Adel Turmos (ph), who threw himself on one of the bombers in Beirut and took the full power of the blast on himself. He was killed but he saved his daughter and probably many other people in that busy area. And that was all said before the Paris attacks. It is certainly true that the attack in Paris, for many, many reasons, received more attention all over the world than and of these previous attacks. And a lot of that has to do with how individuals and communities react. Paris is the world city. There's probably no place on Earth that more people, more places all around the world connect to. So I won't pretend that they got equal amounts of attention. And it's now clear, looking back, that the downing of Russian jetliner, the attack in Beirut and then the attack in Paris were all part of one very large story, which was the assertion by ISIS of a kind of world power that we hadn't before this -- we being Western intelligence and others -- hadn't expected of them. So the news of those three events together clearly is a large story.</s>STELTER: And one more subject about the recent coverage. Let me go to Frank on this. In the wake of the breaking news, like in Paris, there's so much misinformation. I'm thinking reports of the attackers used PlayStation 4s, not confirmed. The Eiffel Tower going dark in tribute; actually the lights go off every night. Then there were these reports about the woman killed in the raid that several days later she was mistakenly said to be Europe's first female suicide bomber. This is the cover of the "New York Post" covering that story. Of course, the "New York Post" was not at all alone on this one. It turns out that it was a male, not a female, in that case. So, Frank, what would you like to see the press do more of to clear up this kind of fog of misinformation, even when it's official sources, government sources that are telling us this information that turns out not to be right?</s>FRANK SESNO, DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF MEDIA AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: Well, there's not much actually you can do if official sources are telling you information in real time that turns out not to be right. We've had this conversation before. So the media has to be transparent about it. It has to attach this information to the sources. It has to say this is happening. But I want to go back to a point that was made earlier because what the media should be spending its time on, what newsrooms everywhere should be preoccupied with and whether you want to pick at words, that's fine. The bigger issue here is how are you going properly contextualize this story? Michael was talking about the coverage that was given to Beirut. That's true. But much more attention, as we know, was given to Paris. What is news? News is that which is unusual, unexpected and significant. Paris had all of those things. And it broke out and made itself separate and apart from what has happened in Lebanon and Iraq and elsewhere where this has been not a daily occurrence by any means but is more common. However, however, the media need to do a much better job at looking at how they frame these issues because actually there was a very thoughtful piece in "The Atlantic" -- Michael, I'm sure you've seen because an NPR piece was called out -- that said the Paris bombings focused on the victims and those who lost their lives; much of the Beirut coverage referred to this Hezbollah stronghold. And it was put in a context of war. We have to do, we, the media, need to do -- you, the media -- need to do a much better job at presenting the public with a more --</s>SESNO: -- complex, nuanced, careful look at these things that put them in context.</s>STELTER: Jeff, I see you're disagreeing.</s>GREENFIELD: No, I don't disagree. But I think there's a broader point. You have a 1,300-year schism in the Islamic world. You have 100 years worth of maps that were drawn when the Ottoman Empire ended that divided tribes in ways that made no sense. You have a Saudi Arabia that people are urging, come in, they're our allies, that have spent billions of dollars and decades spreading throughout the Islamic world Wahhabism, one of the most dangerous, intolerant fuels of this kind of anger. I would like to see in terms of the coverage that, as much as possible -- and I understand the limits of time and space -- that particularly on a 24-hour news network, those underlying facts keep being put before the public so they can put ISIS in the frame that makes some sense.</s>STELTER: Jeff, Michael and Frank, thank you all for being here this morning. It's been a wonderful conversation. Up next here, are refugees terrorists? Those words being put together in the same sentence. We're going to pull out our "Red News, Blue News" glasses to look at the coverage critically -- next.