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A Consideration of How Reporters Use the Word 'Evil'
In April Newsweek magazine published a report on Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic that described his bad-boy frown as "the face of evil." The American press is now routinely accused of "demonizing" unappealing foreign fanatics, but defining someone as being "evil" is a more serious matter. Applied, often casually, to a violent defier of the United States's wishes, the excursion into language of denunciation suggests unpardonable behavior that requires the strongest punishment.
The word "evil" stretches the fabric of the journalistic vocabulary, which usually tends to be political, not moral in its characterizations of leaders and their actions. Before journalists resort to using this word, as they have done frequently to describe Milosevic as the Kosovo crisis deepened, they often need prodding from propagandists and politicians. Their use of it does not occur in a vacuum. Nor are journalists much good at defining the word, even as they are using it. But they recognize the circumstantial evidence.
Before the American press describes a foreign leader as an "evil" figure, he must reveal the recognizable characteristics. This leader must be portrayable as a mad personality beyond repair, reform or redemption, a person who deserves the worst punishment the Pentagon or the CIA can devise. Journalism provides the omens and sets the stage for promise of such retribution. "One day," Newsweek concluded, "evil will get its just reward."
Such a leader must also exhibit a combination of pathological symptoms perhaps complicated by bad habits. Milosevic has been portrayed as an unstable character, clinging to power at any cost, and a bit of a drunk. To earn such a designation, a leader must do things that can be explained only as products of an evil nature. He must deliberately create enough suffering to take his place with the procession of cruel tyrants who have brought chaos to the 20th Century. Two men, Stalin and Hitler, whose names are synonymous with evil, lead this procession. And whatever its ruling ideology, national traditions, politics, laws...