September 22, 2004
TRAINED OBSERVERS
Reuters, the newsagency that won't call terrorists terrorists, is now yanking bylines from rewritten stories:
Having their bylines appear in newspapers is an unexpected bonus for news agency reporters. But now Reuters has asked Canada's largest newspaper chain to remove its writers' names from some articles.
The dispute centers on a policy adopted earlier this year by CanWest Global Communications - the publisher of 13 daily newspapers including The National Post in Toronto and The Calgary Herald, which both use Reuters dispatches - to substitute the word "terrorist" in articles for terms like "insurgents" and "rebels."
The insurgent rebel organisation known as the New York Post has been inserting "terrorist" in Reuters copy for some time. Sleepy Reuters bosses don’t seem to have noticed.
Posted by Tim Blair at September 22, 2004 02:47 AMThis on Reuters v. Canwest, from Norman Spector over at The Shotgun, blog of the Western Standard:
Remember the story of Deanna Wrenn, the Charleston, W.Va., stringer whose dispatch on Jessica Lynch the "news" service turned into an anti-American screed? "I asked Reuters to remove my byline," she said. "They didn't."