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After Obamacare Rollout Disaster, NPR Tells Its Reporters To Stop Using Term “Obamacare” So Much…
You can pretty much guarantee if the rollout was a smashing success NPR wouldn’t have written this memo to their reporters.
Via Mediaite:
Is it “Obamacare” or the “Affordable Care Act”? The terms have become increasingly interchangeable since it was first signed into law in 2010. But as we learned from Jimmy Kimmel last week, Americans don’t necessarily realize they’re the same thing. Now, one major news organization is taking steps towards a clarification on when to use each term in its reporting.
NPR’s standards editor Stuart Seidel has sent a memo to editors and reporters asking them to “avoid overusing ‘Obamacare’” and make sure that the first reference to the law in all pieces is the “Affordable Care Act.” The memo came in response to a letter from the Maynard Institute’s Richard Prince who said “the term can no longer be defended as neutral.”
Seidel wrote to NPR staff:
“‘Obamacare’ seems to be straddling somewhere between being a politically-charged term and an accepted part of the vernacular. And it seems to be on our air and in our copy a great deal. (I haven’t counted, and I’m not going to count: numbers don’t add up to good journalism.) But word choices do leave an impression. Please avoid overusing ‘Obamacare.’ On first reference, it’s best to refer to the ‘Affordable Care Act’ or ‘the health care law.’ On later references, feel free to use ‘Obamacare’ but mix it up with other ways to refer to the law.”
You can pretty much guarantee if the rollout was a smashing success NPR wouldn’t have written this memo to their reporters.
Via Mediaite:
Is it “Obamacare” or the “Affordable Care Act”? The terms have become increasingly interchangeable since it was first signed into law in 2010. But as we learned from Jimmy Kimmel last week, Americans don’t necessarily realize they’re the same thing. Now, one major news organization is taking steps towards a clarification on when to use each term in its reporting.
NPR’s standards editor Stuart Seidel has sent a memo to editors and reporters asking them to “avoid overusing ‘Obamacare’” and make sure that the first reference to the law in all pieces is the “Affordable Care Act.” The memo came in response to a letter from the Maynard Institute’s Richard Prince who said “the term can no longer be defended as neutral.”
Seidel wrote to NPR staff:
“‘Obamacare’ seems to be straddling somewhere between being a politically-charged term and an accepted part of the vernacular. And it seems to be on our air and in our copy a great deal. (I haven’t counted, and I’m not going to count: numbers don’t add up to good journalism.) But word choices do leave an impression. Please avoid overusing ‘Obamacare.’ On first reference, it’s best to refer to the ‘Affordable Care Act’ or ‘the health care law.’ On later references, feel free to use ‘Obamacare’ but mix it up with other ways to refer to the law.”
