Prompted by recent events, the Communication Department hosted a symposium titled “The Language of War and the Ethics of Journalism” yesterday afternoon. Students and community members filled Cubberley Auditorium to attend this event, which was organized in cooperation with Stanford’s Ethics in Society Program and the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Theodore Glasser, professor of communication, moderated the panel and opened the program by speaking of the importance of studying the nuances of language and ethics in the press now that the United States is involved in numerous campaigns against terrorism.

The panelists reiterated Glasser’s belief in the timeliness of the topic.

“Words have become weapons, especially in the ‘War on terror,’” said Peter Sussman, two-time president of the Northern California Chapter of the SPJ and editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for 29 years. “We need to look at journalistic ethical obligations during this time.”

Sussman emphasized the restrictive ambiguity of the term “war” as impeding journalistic integrity and the media’s ability to report responsibly.

“What is war now?” he asked. “The word has become ambiguous. We seem to be in a perpetual state of war against ill-defined enemies — even extending to such phrases as the ‘War on poverty’ and the ‘War on drugs.’

“Is the press partially responsible for a shift in the term ‘war’?” Sussman said. “Have we deterrorized its meaning? Should we now as journalists restore to the word the shock and awe it once possessed? I believe we live in an era with uncomfortable echoes of the McCarthy era, where our enemies were scattered throughout the country and within our government as well.”

Kathleen Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, also questioned press responsibilities during periods of conflict. Jamieson expressed his belief that the media has become more lax in its role as a government watchdog, citing the failure of the media to sufficiently investigate and criticize the Bush administration’s failure to find any so-called “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.

“Maybe they will be found — I’m not here to assess whether or not such weapons exist,” she said. “But the fact that over a month after the war has ended, the press has still failed to hold the Bush administration responsible for their ardent claims of these weapons’ existence, illustrates that the media has drifted in its language. The press has tried to hold the administration responsible, but the lack of critique by elites in government positions has hindered it.”

Jamieson used the example of the recent Washington Post headline, “Concrete Evidence of Illegal Weapons Lacking” to show the media’s use of qualifiers such as “concrete” and “illegal” to avoid tackling the issue.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a senior researcher at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information, also spoke of the intricacies of language in war journalism.

“The tenor of war language has changed over the past century, and with it the ethical obligations have changed,” he said.

He offered an example of how the word “regime” is loaded with subtleties and used only to describe unstable governments.

Nunberg summarized what the panelists had said about the importance of journalists being conscious of their use of language and understanding the ethical implications of their writing when he said , “The use of the word regime in the U.S. media is the best predictor I know of for imminent U.S. military action.”