PressEthic

It's been two days since Matt Lauer announced that NBC and MSNBC would freely use the term "civil war" to describe the sectarian violence in Iraq. In that time, countless bloggers, columnists and executives have written stories and made statements explicating exactly where they fall in the debate.

The White House has consistently refused to term the violence a "civil war," for reasons that depend on one's political affiliation. Whether they genuinely do not believe the situation qualifies as such (as is their official position), or they don't want to be held responsible for escalating the conflict depends on whose page you are reading.

While the debate over whether the situation in Iraq "officially" qualifies as a "civil war" will likely continue, NBC's decision has prompted other media outlets to issue statements about their official policy on the phrase. An Editor & Publisher article outlines the basic policies of some of the most prominent newspapers and includes interesting perspectives from executive editors and reporters at these papers.

On Monday's "Hardball," the Post's Pultizer Prize winning reporter Dana Priest said that she "absolutely" believes that "the level of violence equals a civil war." Despite that certainty, she noted that the Post has "not labeled it a civil war...We try to avoid the labels, particularly when the elected government itself does not call its situation a civil war..."

Think Progress attacked her for that statement, arguing (rightly so) that, "The Washington Post’s job is not to act as stenographers for officials in positions of power, but rather to report facts as they exist on the ground."

The Bush administration's unwillingness to refer to the sectarian violence in Iraq as a "civil war" resulted in the mainstream media's resistance to this term as well. We have seen the power of rhetoric over the course of the last six years and have watched the media go from wide-eyed acceptance to critical doubt. The decision to use the phrase "civil war" belongs to each individual media outlet, but it's time to stop acquiesing to the administration's manufactored rhetoric.