By Hans Peter Ibold, an assistant professor of journalism at Indiana University
| McClatchy-Tribune News Service
From now on, no one will be described in an Associated Press news story as an “illegal immigrant,” “illegal alien,” “illegal,” or as “undocumented.”
The AP announced in April that its vaunted Stylebook will not sanction these commonly used terms. Or, for the Tweeters and sound-bite seekers: The AP banned some words.
Hey, that sounds like totalitarian style!
Yes, you should get riled up when such a definitive guide asks its readers not to use terms deemed offensive.
Because it’s not just a few newsroom nerds and grammarians who abide by the annually updated Stylebook. Thousands of AP news organizations around the world follow the Stylebook’s recommendations. And it’s the style of choice for most professional journalists and journalism schools.
If the Stylebook declares a term verboten, then that term pretty much vanishes from the roughly 1,300 U.S. newspapers that cooperatively own the AP, as well as from all stories that adhere to AP style.
