On Day 7 of the pro-Palestinian protests on the Columbia University campus, Osama Abuirshaid stopped by the student encampment.
The executive director of American Muslims for Palestine walked through the tent city, then made a fiery speech to the gathered crowd.
“This is not only a genocide that is being committed in Gaza,” Abuirshaid said. “This is also a war on us here in America.”
Forty-eight hours later, Abuirshaid appeared at another campus — George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he delivered another speech.
Correct. If journalists know something as a fact, they should state it, and share the source of that fact. If they don’t know something, but have a guess, they can say that it’s their own inference.
But to use weasel words to lead the reader to infer things that are not factually supported is, well, not a good look.
If the reader is inferring things, that is a good thing.
Infer
That said, if the article itself is inferring things, one could argue that is a use of weasel words by the publication. However, this is not the case when they give specifics, explaining their qualified statement(s). A qualified statement in and of itself is not “weasel words.”
Infer