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Media Avoids "Terror" to Describe Violent Campaign Against Pride Displays
Far-right violence and threats are reaching into retail giant Target, intimidating the retailer into removing merch and moving Pride displays to the back of their stores. Why can’t the media call a spade a spade?
Descriptions of far-right violence in the mainstream press has been muted as reporters mince words, referring to ongoing efforts to use violence and threats to drive queer people out of public life with euphemisms. Articles from the BBC and the Washington Post both chose the word “controversy” to describe an atmosphere where threats of violence intimidated Target into moving Pride displays to the back of their stores and remove some items. NBC’s story referred to “a wider national debate over civil rights for transgender people.”
To investigate whether news stories were systematically preferring the language of controversy to the language of violence, terrorism, or right-wing extremism, Assigned conducted several Google news searches on the story. These are not intended to be an exhaustive or foolproof method of surfacing all mainstream stories about the violent extremist campaign against Target, but it should provide a rough measure of the sort of language that is rare or common in these stories. (The descriptions of our search results were accuate at the time of publications, but following the search links may yield different results than those we saw on Wednesday morning.)
Descriptions of far-right violence in the mainstream press has been muted as reporters mince words, referring to ongoing efforts to use violence and threats to drive queer people out of public life with euphemisms. Articles from the BBC and the Washington Post both chose the word “controversy” to describe an atmosphere where threats of violence intimidated Target into moving Pride displays to the back of their stores and remove some items. NBC’s story referred to “a wider national debate over civil rights for transgender people.”
To investigate whether news stories were systematically preferring the language of controversy to the language of violence, terrorism, or right-wing extremism, Assigned conducted several Google news searches on the story. These are not intended to be an exhaustive or foolproof method of surfacing all mainstream stories about the violent extremist campaign against Target, but it should provide a rough measure of the sort of language that is rare or common in these stories. (The descriptions of our search results were accuate at the time of publications, but following the search links may yield different results than those we saw on Wednesday morning.)
https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/media-avoids-terror-for-violent-campaign-against-pride-displays