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Voice of America, while editorially independent, is funded by the U.S. government. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Three days after Hamas rampaged through southern Israel, an editor at Voice of America offered some lexical guidance in a staff-wide email: Avoid calling the perpetrators “terrorists.”
The Oct. 7 Hamas attack, which killed around 1,200 people in Israel and claimed some 240 hostages, could be called “terrorist acts” or “acts of terror,” wrote Carol Guensburg, VOA’s associate editor for news standards. But she advised VOA to “avoid calling Hamas and its members terrorists,” except in direct quotations from sources.
The guidance embodies the fraught conversations in newsrooms about how to describe the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Some journalists believe that the term “terrorist” conveys a value judgment that punctures the media’s objectivity, and that such terms as “militant” or “combatant” would be more appropriate.
But now Republican lawmakers are objecting to the word choice at VOA, an editorially independent news organization that is funded entirely by the U.S. government, to the tune of $267.5 million this fiscal year.
“We believe that VOA’s editorial policy against the use of the term ‘terrorist’ contradicts VOA’s principle of providing ‘accurate, objective, and comprehensive’ news,’” wrote Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) in a Nov. 7 letter to its parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). “Indeed, we seriously question how VOA’s editorial policy advances the interests of the American taxpayers who generously fund this news organization every year.”
Six other Republican senators signed the letter: Ted Cruz (Tex.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), Pete Ricketts (Neb.), John Barrasso (Wyo.) and Deb Fischer (Neb.). All sit on committees with jurisdiction over the agency’s funding.
The letter referred only to Hamas and made no mention of Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has killed thousands of Palestinians.
VOA’s editorial operations are formally fenced off from government influence by a statutory “firewall,” but the letter is nonetheless a sensitive matter for USAGM and VOA. The agencies depend on Congress for their funding, and they have historically attempted to avoid fights of any kind with lawmakers.
The issue here appears to be Guensburg’s use of the verb “avoid.” Hagerty and his colleagues seemed to interpret the word as a prohibition. But in a letter to the senator sent Monday, USAGM chief executive Amanda Bennett attempted to clarify VOA’s approach, noting that the guidance is not always binding.
“There is no policy prohibiting the use of the words ‘terror,’ ‘terrorism,’ or ‘terrorist’” at VOA or the other five news organizations under the agency’s umbrella, Bennett wrote. The organizations “counsel care and attention in the use of the words but do not place any restrictions on the appropriate use” of those words.
Bennett included data showing that iterations of “terror” had been used in 39 percent of VOA stories that mentioned Hamas between mid-August and mid-November.
Guensburg’s Oct. 10 email did not address how to describe Israel’s military response. A VOA spokesman, Nigel Gibbs, declined to comment.
The Associated Press Stylebook, perhaps the most influential guide to language usage in news reporting, says the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” have “become politicized, and often are applied inconsistently.” It therefore recommends journalists avoid the words and instead describe “specific atrocities, massacres, bombings . . . and other such actions.”
President Biden and his administration have repeatedly referred to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack as “terrorism,” and to Hamas as “terrorists.” The U.S. State Department has designated the organization, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, as a foreign terrorist organization since 1997.
VOA has used the terms in news stories before the latest Gaza conflict. A story published on its website Aug. 18 was headlined, “Afghanistan Reemerging as a Terrorism Incubator.” Another story, published a few days later, referred to ISIS as a “terror group.” Its Extremism Watch Desk, established in 2015, focuses on “Islamic State, Al-Qaida and other terror and extremist groups.”
In his letter to Bennett, Hagerty called Guensburg’s distinction “an absurd and vacuous moral relativism that is specifically generous to Hamas’s genocidal objectives.”
He added: “VOA has created an editorial double standard in which it appears to accept the description of the Islamic State, Al-Qaida, and other officially designated terrorists groups as terrorists, but not Iran-backed Hamas, which explicitly seeks to destroy Israel and kill Jews.”
Bennett did not directly address that allegation. She instead promised that VOA and other news organizations overseen by USAGM “are reviewing their policies as well as training and implementation of these policies.”
