In keeping with the tone of the rest of the corporate media, features writer for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer Eric Levitz tripped over himself over the weekend to label the reports that Israeli babies were decapitated an “overstatement.”
Levitz openly acknowledged in an X thread that “babies were found headless” but stopped shy of accusing Hamas of beheading them. In fact, he said babies being found without their heads “does not prove” they were beheaded.
“(The verb behead has multiple definitions, and is sometimes used to mean decapitate; the report indicates that Hamas did behead babies in that sense,” Levitz added in a parenthetical. “But the term can also connote a form of execution using a knife, and we do not have confirmation of beheading in this sense).”
After facing an avalanche of criticism, Levitz later complained that his post was “misconstrued” as “an apology for Hamas.” He was “insist[ing] on precision,” he said.
On the contrary, his explanation just exposed him as yet another cog in the corrupt media machine that has spent the past few weeks trying to draw a distinction between headless babies and beheaded babies and burned-alive babies and those barbarically murdered in countless other unspeakable ways.
But it’s a distinction without a difference — and it’s made all the more curious by the corporate media’s habitual language manipulation and equivocating. Why is it that the same media footsoldiers who split hairs parsing out whether a headless child can accurately be called “beheaded” have no qualms about calling a singular trans-identified person “they” or calling an elective abortion an exercise in “reproductive rights” as if the preborn child’s rights were considered in the matter?
This is what happens when today’s self-appointed arbiters of information, and the so-called journalists they employ, “surrender” words for the sake of a narrative. Because whether Levitz knows it or not, and contrary to his claim, the left’s fight over language isn’t about “precision.” It’s about politics. For years, the corporate media have ditched linguistic accuracy to promote their favorite causes.
For instance, have you ever noticed the way the media throw around euphemisms like “pro-choice” for abortion supporters and “anti-abortion rights” for pro-lifers? A quick little web search turns up countless big media organizations that use this nasty tactic: ABC, The Atlantic, Politico, BBC, Forbes, NPR, NBC, Axios, PBS, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The Hill, Time Magazine, and New York Magazine, which employs Levitz. Good luck finding a corporate outlet that doesn’t use this corrupt framing.
Notice also how corporate media use terms like “abortion clinic” and “abortion doctor” for people and places that perform abortions, as opposed to the far more accurate “abortion facility” and “abortionist.” After all, while clinics are places of help and healing, and doctors take the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm,” abortion intentionally ends an innocent human life. Yet you won’t see corporate media journalists producing social media threads analyzing the accuracy of these terms.
The same goes for the lexicon of sexual politics. The media endlessly parrot phrases like “gender-affirming care,” “gender-reassignment surgery,” and “sex change” ad nauseum, yet never do they pause to consider that there’s nothing “affirming” nor “caring” about permanently altering the healthy body of a confused or mentally ill person. Nor can one “reassign” something that was never “assigned” in the first place. Nor can a person change his or her sex. They likewise readily publish terms like “cisgender,” “nonbinary,” “trans man,” or “trans woman,” which are a plain insult to science.
It’s not just so-called culture war issues, either. The media take the same tack with less nefarious things, such as calling massive government spending an “investment” when we’ll never see a return on it. Or referring to certain groups as “communities” to pretend they’re a monolith — like the “LGBT community” (as if men pretending to be women who make up the “T” aren’t destroying the “L’s”) or the “black community” (as if all people with dark skin vote and think and act alike).
These words and phrases the media use every day belie their stated concern for accuracy. The word choices have nothing to do with reflecting reality and everything to do with reshaping it in Democrats’ image.
Thus, their collective chipping away at our primary means of communication has resulted in poisons like political correctness and braindead Marxism, which erodes society with ignorant and iconoclastic rallying cries like “silence is violence.” It’s the epitome of language capture, and its aims have become painfully clear.
There’s a reason there is no major media outcry when dictionaries and newsroom style guides manipulate definitions to best disarm the left’s political opponents. The left and its media minions are not afraid to sacrifice language and definitions on their partisan altar to get what they want. From libraries to living rooms, Ukraine to universities, to elections and abortions and mostly peaceful protests — the media machine has memorized each script and recited it daily.
That’s probably because the left understands something very important about language that too many on the right don’t: If you set the terms of the debate, you’ve already won it.
The next time the people who refer to men as “she” want to chastise the public for calling the diabolical decapitation of babies “beheadings,” reject it. As with murders in the womb, so with murders in Kfar Aza — the corrupt press don’t deal in accuracy, precision, or fact. They’re far more interested in political games, like questioning the legitimacy of confirmed baby beheadings for weeks while publishing terrorist propaganda as truth.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist.
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