DailyStandard

The Man Who Would Be Dissident Until he's proven guilty in a court of law, the wires will be kind to Osama bin Laden. by Richard Starr 11/07/2001

UNDER THE IRONIC HEADING "Saudi Solzhenitsyn?" the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto noted in his "Best of the Web" column yesterday that CNN.com is identifying Osama bin Laden as a "Saudi-born dissident." This is what happens when news organizations bend over backwards not to be "judgmental." Because they're allergic to calling the guy a terrorist, they end up making him sound like some Persian Gulf Patrick Henry who wants to improve the royal dictatorship in Riyadh, rather than replace it with an even bloodier theocratic tyranny.

Unfortunately, CNN is not alone. A Nexis search of news stories from the last month turns up more than 500 instances of the "dissident" usage. And this doesn't even count Reuters stories (not searchable in Nexis), which alternate between "Saudi-born dissident" and the less morally offensive "Saudi-born militant."

The worst offender is Agence France Presse, which seems to have made it house style to refer to the mastermind behind the September 11 mass murder as "Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden." The most tendentious is the Panafrican News Agency (PANA), which refers to him as "the Saudi dissident blamed for the 11 September terrorist attacks in the US." That "blamed" is a subtle touch. And the most inadvertently hilarious is an October 19 AFP story, which refers to "Osama bin Laden, the Afghan-based Saudi dissident," not to be confused with Adolf Hitler, the Berlin-based racial theorist.

Most journalists, of course, can dispense entirely with the epithets and assume that their readers know who bin Laden is. But the form of a wire story demands that it be understandable to a naive reader. Hence the need for a recurring shorthand that, in bin Laden's case, conveys both his Saudi origins and the fact of his complicated relations with the Saudi government, which stripped him of his citizenship in 1994. The "exiled Saudi terror kingpin," would do nicely if these news agencies were less besotted with treating bin Laden like a defendant who must be presumed innocent in the court of public opinion.

Here, then, is the tale of the Nexis tape, for a search of all news stories in the database over the past month:

"Saudi-born dissident" = 104 hits "Saudi-born terrorist" = 30 hits "Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden" = 334 hits "Saudi terrorist Osama bin laden" =85 (and these were usually prefaced with the qualifiers "accused," "suspected," or "reputed."

The two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun award goes to the Cox News Service story that referred to the "reputed exiled Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden."

-- Anonymous, November 07, 2001