Adam Serwer on NYT’s deflection of critcism w/ charges of “political correctness”

First: what year is this, Bill Keller – 1995? I know the NYT longs for the days of endless stories about Bill Clinton & the First Penis, but this is ridiculous. Second: As Serwer smartly notes, Keller’s refusal to engage on the substance regarding the NYT’s embargo on the term “torture” leads to him accusing critics of doing – well, exactly what the NYT has been doing.

Clipped from www.prospect.org

It’s a good rule of thumb that anyone responding to a criticism by accusing someone else of enforcing “political correctness” is factually incorrect. That’s because if the actual facts of the criticism were in dispute, they’d dispute them.

Employing a misleading euphemism in order to avoid offending a side in a political dispute is the definition of “tendentious political correctness.”