"Professional Journalist" mag calls for ending use of "illegal alien"

This is one of those reports that seems so outrageous that one searches for confirmation.

Seems Megyn Kelly of Fox News found an article in the on-line version of the journal of the Society of Professional Journalists, in which the author wrote that journalists of all stripes should stop using the phrases "illegal alien" and "illegal immigrant," and instead substitute "undocumented worker" or similar.

The reasoning is fascinating: First, the author claims the "illegal" part of the phrase offends hispanics. (He doesn't say whether legal hispanic immigrants are offended, or just the illegal ones.)

The second rationale is equally odd: "Simply put, only a judge, not a journalist, can say that someone is an illegal."

Well sure, if we were in court and trying to reach a formal determination on a specific individual I could understand the desire for a judge's input. (And I thought a jury might have some input to this question as well.) But the author's squeamishness at using the phrase in any venue other than a courtroom strikes me as...propaganda.

Sort of like refusing to use the term "Islamic terrorist" in a news story because no judge had made the legal determination yet.

One wonders if the author would even be willing to concede that even in the abstract, either an illegal immigrant or an Islamic terrorist exists.

In any case, seeing as how the first source of the report was "Faux News," and being properly trained by my leftist betters to be skeptical of that source, I clicked through to the original article. Sure enough, here it is.

This kind of "thinking" seems all too common among advocacy journalists.