Alt-Right or Alt-Wrong
When The Washington Post published a profile last week of Richard B. Spencer, a prominent leader of the so-called alt-right, readers were quick to respond. By Monday, the article had drawn more than 2,600 comments.
Many of them had a similar message.
“Please, please stop referring to a white Christian supremacist movement as the ‘alt-right’ — a phrase that sounds like a subgenre of rock music,” one reader wrote.
Another was more pointed: “STOP CALLING THEM ‘ALT-RIGHT.’ THEY ARE RACISTS, WHITE SUPREMICISTS, NAZIS.”
Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have increased the intensity of debates over language and broadened their audience. That could prompt news organizations to more quickly examine the words they use, said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab.
“Journalists who are on Twitter are seeing the negative reaction to a word choice, a headline choice, whatever it may be,” he said, adding that he expected to see more rapid action from news organizations in response to such criticism.
But while it is inevitable that certain terms, especially ones that may be politically charged, will provoke some level of debate, the solution, many journalists say, is to describe rather than label.
Parsing a term heavy with connotations is “hard work” said Cameron Barr, a managing editor at The Washington Post. But he added: “It’s incumbent upon us to provide clear and dispassionate definitions of what these things mean.”
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