The Boston Phoenix , MA
March 12 2009

The Globe and the g-word

When I read today’s Globe story on the State House memorial for George
Keverian, I was struck by how the paper did and didn’t describe
Keverian’s ancestry–and I’m guessing a few other readers were,
too. Keverian, the Globe noted, was "[t]he son of Armenian immigrants
who had fled systematic killing in Turkey…."

As you’ve probably guessed, the missing word was "genocide." Given
that the paper didn’t use that term–and that, as the paper has
previously noted, the debate over whether to call the slaughter of
Armenians by Turks "genocide" or not is a charged issue with profound
diplomatic implications–I wondered: has Morrissey Blvd. decided to
err on the side of linguistic caution on this particular subject?

Not so, says Ellen Clegg, the Globe’s deputy managing editor for news
operations and the keeper of the paper’s style book.

"For many years," Clegg tells DQM, "it was Globe style to avoid the
word ‘genocide’ in stories about mass deaths of Armenians in the WWI
era in the Ottoman-Turk empire. In 2003, after internal discussion and
review, we changed the style."

The change, Clegg says, was announced in a memo from her predecessor,
Mike Larkin, which stated:

Effective immediately, we are suspending the Globe policy prohibiting
the use of the word genocide in relation to the events of 1915-20 in
which more than 1 million Armenians died in the Ottoman-Turk empire.

Recent scholarship has established that the events meet the criteria
of a genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention of 1948, and an
independent panel has concluded that journalists, among other groups,
would be justified in using the term.

"However," Clegg continues, "I see that our internal online stylebook
was never updated. There is no entry at all for genocide. We are just
beginning a review of our stylebook, and this is clearly one of the
things that will need to be fixed."

oteme/archive/2009/03/12/the-globe-and-the-g-word. aspx