Politico’s Banned Words

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” ― George Orwell, 1984

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” ― George Orwell

Politico has surrendered to mentally disturbed woke millennial staffers.

“The entire dynamic is totally backwards.”

Some of the banned words and phrases:

• biological woman
• biological female
• waiter/waitress
• mankind
• manhunt

Revealed: Politico’s banned words

Inside one media company’s surrender to progressive pieties

By: Amber Athey, The Spectator, March 6, 2023:

In my new book, The Snowflakes’ Revolt, I examine how progressive millennials have infiltrated and influenced American media over the past decade, taking ideas from college campuses into the newsroom and pushing the editorial line further to the left than ever before. Among the many prominent organizations where this has happened is Politico. One sign of the shift at this Washington news mainstay came in December 2020, when staff revolted after conservative commentator Ben Shapiro guest-authored the outlet’s flagship newsletter, Playbook. A few months later newsroom activists, unsatisfied by Politico’s response to their concerns, quickly seized on a new culture war battle — transgender issues.

The showdown centered on a March 2021 article titled “GOP seizes on women’s sports as unlikely wedge issue.” The article, by political reporter Gabby Orr, explored how Republicans sought to position themselves as defenders of women’s sports against transgender athletes. The row over the article didn’t generate as many headlines as the bust-up over Shapiro, but internally it was a decisive moment that marked a sea change in how the publication reported the news.

As a source briefed on the situation explained to me, Orr was informed by Politico’s director of editorial diversity initiatives Robin Turner that two colleagues had voiced concerns about her story. Turner wanted to arrange a meeting to discuss them. During the meeting, Orr was asked about her employment history at the Washington Examiner, a center-right outlet, and asked why the story omitted any transgender voices — though it had extensively quoted Kate Oakley, senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, an activist organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ issues.

Orr’s colleagues also complained that she quoted conservatives, such as American Principles Project director Terry Schilling and former White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, without “contextualizing” their comments. Schilling had pessimistically praised left-wing activists for their ability to convince the American public that transgender people were facing a wave of violence even though when “you look at the numbers… it’s, like, forty people.” Orr, her colleagues argued, should have explicitly told readers that those remarks were offensive and transphobic.

One attendee took issue with the phrase “biological women,” which appeared three times in the piece, but only in direct quotations. Her colleagues again described the phrase as offensive to transgender readers.

At the end of the meeting Turner suggested that Orr’s colleagues serve as “sensitivity readers” — making sure Orr wasn’t causing offense — prior to publication of future stories about transgender issues. Interestingly, the problem didn’t arise when Orr wrote a 5,000-word Politico magazine cover story on the same subject only six months earlier, extensively quoting trans people without drawing internal complaints.

Multiple sources point back to a bad-blooded Zoom meeting about Shapiro guest-editing Playbook as the moment that emboldened Politico staff to start pushing back on colleagues who did not write about issues in the overtly partisan way they desired. The sources also confirmed that multiple other Politico reporters were given warnings about their coverage of transgender issues.

[ … ]

A style guide sent to staff in January 2022 reads more like a game of Media Matters mad libs than a document for journalists. It suggested some noninclusive words that Politico reporters should avoid using in their work.

YOU CAN’T SAY THAT: Politico’s banned words

• Mankind
• Man-made
• Manhunt
• Crack the whip: unacceptable because of origins in slavery
• Waiter or waitress: server should be used instead
• Biological gender, biological sex, biological woman, biological female, biological man, or biological male
• Illegal immigrant or illegal alien
• Cake walk: “originated during slavery” and thus perpetuates “racist motifs”
• In reference to illegal migration: onslaught, tidal wave, flood, inundation, surge, invasion, army, march, sneak and stealth
• Anchor baby
• Chain migration: this is a term used by “immigration hard-liners”
• Peanut gallery: “the cheapest seats often occupied by Black people and people with low incomes”
• Third-world countries: too “derogatory”

The guide also warned that reporters should not say that a transgender person “identifies as” a certain gender, or describe the current situation at the border as a “crisis,” because “while the sharp increase in the arrival of unaccompanied minors is a problem for border officials, a political challenge for the Biden administration and a dire situation for many migrants who make the journey, it does not fit the dictionary definition of a crisis.” It also cautioned reporters against portraying migrants as a “negative, harmful influence.”

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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