I refuse to call illegals by any other name, no matter how insensitive people are going to claim it is. Because that is next, papers and news orgs will fall in line and minorities here illegally will begin claiming discrimination in a louder voice and pretty soon saying ‘illegal’ when referring to someone will be akin to hate-speech.
Ugh.
ABC NEWS – The Associated Press, the largest news-gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”
The news came in the form of a blog entry authored by Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll on Tuesday afternoon, explaining that the decision is part of the company’s on-going attempt to rid their Stylebook of labels.
“The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that ‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally,” Carroll wrote.
The company’s decision comes after years of controversy over the term. Fusion, the ABC-Univision joint venture, does not use “illegal immigrant” because we believe it dehumanizes those it describes and we find it to be linguistically inaccurate.
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Kathleen Carroll also noted in the Tuesday blog post that the AP prefers to label “behavior” rather than “people,” writing that instead of using the term “schizophrenic,” the AP now prefers saying that one is “diagnosed with schizophrenia.”
(h/t: Drudge)