The British Broadcasting Corporation has made itself look ridiculous by issuing orders that its reporters are not to refer to Saddam Hussein as an ex-dictator. Apparently using the word "dictator" would compromise the BBC's neutrality and call its objectivity into question.
Unfortunately, the BBC is not alone. In much of the American mainstream media, terrorists are referred to as "militants" or "insurgents." Rioters are called "demonstrators."
....During World War II, legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow never pretended to be neutral as between the Nazis and the Allies. Yet you would have trouble today finding anyone in the media with anything resembling the stature and integrity of Ed Murrow.
Honesty does not require posturing. In fact, the two things are incompatible. Nor does objectivity require neutrality.
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Thomas Sowell, ping! 
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Thanks, Kathy in Alaska!
For years, there were people who denied that there was a famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and others who said that millions died during that famine. Did the truth lie somewhere in between?The leading scholar who argued that millions starved during Stalin's man-made famine was Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, often described in the media as a right-wing think tank. When Mikhail Gorbachev finally opened the official records in the last days of the Soviet Union, it turned out that even more people had died during the famine than Dr. Conquest had estimated.The truth is where you find it -- and you don't find it with a preconceived "balance" expressed in mealy mouth words. One truth that is clear is that you won't find it in the New York Times, which values prizes over integrity, much like the BBC:
Lying N.Y. Times Keeps Tainted Pulitzer
NewsMax.com ^ | 11/21/03 | Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
Posted on 11/22/2003 12:43:37 AM PST by kattracks
Just because the left-wingers at the New York Times ran propaganda for Ed Asner's favorite genocidal dictator, Joseph Stalin, doesn't mean the paper has to return a tainted Pulitzer Prize.
"The board determined that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case," Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler claimed today.
After a worldwide outcry from Ukrainians and other decent human beings, a Pulitzer subcommittee in April launched a "review" of pro-Soviet propaganda written by the Times' useful idiot Walter Duranty, who in 1932 was handed the prize. Duranty somehow failed to report how Stalin's deliberate famine in the Ukraine killed as many as 7 million people to force communism on them.
Although Duranty wrote pro-Soviet propaganda for the Times from 1922 to 1941, Gissler said the award was given for 13 articles written and published during 1931, before the famine.
"But Duranty eventually was exposed for reporting the Communist line rather than the facts. According to the 1990 book 'Stalin's Apologist,' Duranty knew of the famine but ignored the atrocities to preserve his access to Stalin," the Associated Press pointed out today.
But why should facts matter to the Old Gray Lady?
Perhaps the paper's poisoned Pulitzer could at least be switched to the category of fiction.
Since they do call Pinochet a dictator, it would seem that in stories where they point out that we "armed" Hussein, he would be termed a dictator. I don't care to find out if my idea is correct, but I suppose it is.
