New York Times adjusts language on Iraq

This just in: From the self-adulating, ant-war, anti-Bush, Dutch-owned Editor & Publisher, stark news that the war in Iraq is now a "civil war".

In the wake of the highly-publicized NBC and MSNBC decision to start referring to the conflict in Iraq as a "civil war," other media outlets, which have long used phrases such as "sectarian violence," are re-considering their language in this regard.

Quick to embrace the phrase, Bill Keller of the anti-war, anti-Bush, America-bashing New York Times, happily agreed. No other paper seems to have scurried to make that choice. And for good reason.

"Words have power, and naming it a civil war does begin to shape people's perception of what's happening there," Thomas Hollihan, a professor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication who studies political rhetoric, told the Los Angeles Times.

But is it true? Shouldn't that be the criteria? You'd bloody well have thought so.

But, then, the New York Times' Walter Duranty failed to even notice a deliberate famine in the Soviet Union that killed an estimated 20 million because he was so enamored with the grand new experiment of communism. It's likely he, too, stayed in the green zone in Moscow all that time.