AT FOX, TRANS PEOPLE ARE THE NEW SUICIDE BOMBERS

Media Matters reports that Fox News is siccing its language police on wire service stories about trans people:

... Fox News’ website is altering articles from The Associated Press and Reuters to replace the phrase “gender-affirming care” with the terms “sex change” or “sex reassignment” ... and frequently removing or replacing references to “care” or “medical care.” ...

In the most glaring example of editorial malfeasance, Fox News altered a quote from Oregon state Sen. Lynn Findley included in an AP article. The outlet changed a quote in which Findley, a Republican, asserted that under a compromised bill previously opposed by the state’s GOP, “parental rights will not be ignored regarding minors seeking abortion and gender-affirming care.” Fox News changed the last term to read “sex reassignment care” instead, without giving any notice to readers that the quote had been altered.

There are some signs that it is Fox News’ intent to mislead its audience. For instance, some of the same AP articles Fox News altered also have changed headlines that frame legislation banning all gender-affirming care for trans youth as being only about surgery. One article, which changes “gender-affirming care” to “sex reassignment,” focused its headline entirely on “sex reassignment surgeries.”

In that last example, AP's headline is "Louisiana House Passes Bill to Ban Gender-Affirming Care for Minors." The story's second paragraph says that bill prevents minors from receiving care "such as hormone treatments, gender reassignment surgery or puberty-blocking drugs." At Fox, the second paragraph also includes the list of prohibited procedures, but the headline -- which is all many readers will notice -- is "Louisiana House Passes Bill Prohibiting Doctors from Performing Sex Reassignment Surgeries on Minors," as if other interventions are unaffected.

Sending wire service copy to an Orwellian team of rewriters is an old tradition at Fox. Two decades ago, when I started this blog, I wrote several posts about Fox's practice of replacing the phrase "suicide bomber" with "homicide bomber." Any idiot could tell you that what's makes suicide bombings especially horrifying is the suicide aspect -- we're wired to anticipate that a person standing in our midst won't willfully self-destruct -- but Fox didn't think the term "suicide bomber" made the perps seem evil enough. Also, Ari Fleischer and others in the Bush administration had adopted the term, and Fox considered itself the administration's other press office. At Fox, this led to ridiculous headlines such as "Homicide Bomber Kills One in Israel." (Well, duh -- if someone was deliberately killed, we know it was a homicide.) And as Atrios noted at the time, George W. Bush himself didn't even follow the practice -- he killed these killers "suiciders." But the language was changed at Fox, because freedom.