It's "Terrorism" Not "Terror"

It took the media how many years before they admitted that the Bush/Cheney axis duped them into believing that the Invasion of Iraq was based on falsities conjured by Cheney and his cohorts? Let's see, was that five long years?

And how much longer is it going to be before the media admits that they have again been the slaves and dupes of Bush, Cheney and the Bush administration? In what way? By thoughtlessly, mindlessly repeating the word "terror" when they mean either "terrorist" or "terrorism."

This is not an issue of grammar. It is an issue of the way the issue of terrorism and the war on it are framed.

If you accept that this is a "War on Terror," then you are accepting a set of terms which believes that "terror" is not an abstract concept but is somehow a concrete definition of a discrete set of conditions that is universal. It isn't. Aside from a definition that might come from the dictionary, Bush's intentional use of the word "terror" rather than "terrorism" is meant to strike terror in people's hearts.

And he's succeeded. Rather than examine the issue as one of terrorism, perpetrated by discrete groups, terror evokes a global sense of peril, that no matter where one is, one is unsafe. This is patently untrue.

After all, Al Qaeda did not send all that anthrax through the mail. That was domestic. Terrorism. Not "terror."

It is actually quite shameful the way that Bush has chosen to frame the subject in this way, to create fear-mongering and perpetuate a sense of imminent peril. Shameful. We have more to fear from what he has done to our economy. And the fact that we will continue to pay for these mistakes by the big businesses that supported him--think big auto and big oil.

Indeed, Bush was quite successful in making people fear for their lives four years ago, which is how he won the re-election. People felt unsafe, though it is clear that they had nothing to fear. Nothing has happened to the American people over the last four years on our soil that was not instigated by Big Business and the mentality of The Rules Don't Apply To Me.

So when is it that the media, including NPR shows like All Things Considered and PRI shows like The World, are going to demand that their reporters report accurately.