CNN Defies the Ministry of Truth:
All morning today, readers of CNN.com have seen a front-page story on Bush's visit to Pakistan whose accompanying picture has varied but whose caption has (so far) invariably contained the phrase, "the so-called war on terror". To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, that's one small step for a news organization, a giant leap for truth in the mainstream media.
Here's a screen cap from this morning:
PAY NO ATTENTION! YOU DO NOT REMEMBER THE FIRST VERSION OF THIS POST! WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR!
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE REMAINDER OF THIS POST! THE MINISTRY WILL RECTIFY IT SHORTLY!
Now, this is hardly the first time anyone has attached the qualifier "so-called" to the phrase "war on terror". But if you do a Google News search on "so-called war on terror", you find that where it is used by a major American newspaper or media outlet it is almost always in an op-ed piece or letter to the editor.
This isn't surprising. "So-called" is a loaded phrase, with both a literal (or "denotative") meaning, and an implied attitude (or "connotative meaning"). Literally, "so-called" is simply a qualifier indicating that the word or phrase that follows is not a neutral or objective description but one associated with a particular viewpoint, authority, population, or attitude. If I were reporting on Rush Limbaugh's description of feminist politics, for example, I would quite properly write something like, "Limbaugh believes that so-called 'feminazis' represent a threat to traditional families", or "Limbaugh believes that 'feminazis' represent..." to distance myself from Limbaugh's terminology.
But of course that distancing, that unwillingness to adopt another's words as my own, carries political implications. It signals that I do not consider the phrase in quotation marks to be a neutral part of the common language. It suspends the phrase, puts it in question.
We all know, if we think about it, that "war on terror" is not a neutrally descriptive phrase for U.S. policy, but rather an Orwellian phrase that was devised for specific political purposes, in order to equate any and all actions taken by the Bush Administration with the prosecution of a war in the old-fashioned Greatest Generation sense. And that small qualifier "so-called" represents CNN's refusal to pretend otherwise.
Is it too much to hope that this may represent a trend?
(On edit)
The actual story on CNN.com has the sentence, "But the war on terror was front and center." So strictly speaking what we have is one caption writer at CNN applying a qualifier... and CNN staff allowing it to stand, for what it's worth.