I have watched enough cable television news in the past seven days to suit me for a year.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people in Boston and around the country feel the same way. Between the bombings on the East Coast and the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, [it was a hell of a week](http://www.theonion.com/articles/jesus-this-week,32105/).
But I’m not sick of cable TV news because of what happened, I’m sick of the news because of the news coverage itself. Beyond the fact that CNN and other news organizations [got a few minor details wrong](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/04/boston_bombing_breaking_news_don_t_watch_cable_shut_off_twitter_you_d_be.html), the terminology used by the television anchors and reporters upset me so much that I found myself yelling at the TV in the newsroom.
The peeves deal with jargon — a trap that even good reporters can fall into from time to time. It happens to reporters who get too close to their beats to remember that the general public doesn’t understand the lingo used by officials.
Jargon is what changes “thrown from the vehicle” into “ejected from the vehicle.” It’s what changes money raised for campaigning into a “war chest.” It turns a man into a “male” and a woman into a “female.” It turns “ran away” into “fled on foot.” Et cetera.
Jargon gets used for a lot of reasons. Academics write in academese so that they can fit in with other academics and so that people will take their ideas seriously — even if we can’t make out much of what they’re writing because it is so hedged, passive and indirect. Government officials write in bureaucratese because we wouldn’t trust them if they wrote in plain English — which doesn’t sound very official anyhow. Sports writers fill their prose with slang and nicknames for sports events because it marks them as “insiders” and helps the readers at home to feel that way too.
TV reporters use jargon for all these reasons. On camera, it sounds much more important to use the terminology employed by authorities. It lends the reporters and anchors an air of officialness and credibility. I’d also argue that it the official language is used to keep viewers slightly afraid and therefore more likely to come back to that particular network to find out what it is they should be afraid of next. (I’m [hardly](http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2013/03/11/fear-mongering-abc-there-sinkhole-underneath-your-house-its-sinkhole) the [first](http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2013/02/20/networks-promote-white-house-fearmongering-sequester-cuts-ignore-it-wa) to accuse TV news of fearmongering, by the way.)
I’m going to leave behind the ridiculous “shelter in place” jargon that infected Friday’s coverage (How hard is it to say “Police have urged residents to stay in their homes.”) because there’s a more important piece of jargon that was batted around Friday: IED.
We all know what an IED is, right? It’s a military acronym for “improvised explosive device” that came into prominence during the fighting in Iraq. Typically, we think of IEDs as the roadside bombs that destroy military vehicles and kill and maim troops.
In fact, that association is so strong that I dare say it’s impossible to use the term “IED” without connoting images of dusty Iraqi roadways and tan Humvees.
So when reporters on the streets of Boston are calling the bombs “IEDs,” they are connoting something: Conflict in the Middle East, the “War on Terror.”
Keep in mind, this term was being used long before police and federal agents had named suspects, long before we found out those suspects were not in fact from the Middle East but were Bostonians originally from somewhere near Russia.
Using “IED” to describe the “bombs” these guys allegedly made is wrong because it immediately labels the suspects as terrorists on par with the insurgents the Army fought in Iraq, and that is an unfair comparison when few facts are actually known about their motivations or indeed about the accused bombers themselves. [I’m not the only one who feels this way, either](http://thisweekinblackness.com/2013/04/18/stop-calling-the-boston-bombs-ieds/).
On top of that, I argue that IED is just plain inaccurate. A bomb made at home in your garage with planning and intent (I assume) is not “improvised.” It’s a bomb.
Perhaps we can only call a bomb a “bomb” if it came from the bomb factory premade? Then everything else must be improvised, right?
You readers are probably rolling your eyes at me as much as the people in the newsroom were on Friday, but I’m an editor and it’s my job to care about words.
So until that changes, I’ll call a bomb a bomb and leave the improvised devices to MacGuyver.