Quote of note:

When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attacked what she called Bush's "misleading privatization plan," a Washington Post news story immediately noted that "Bush has never advocated privatizing the entire program." This is the formulation that newspapers use when they want to alert readers that a politician is lying.

Mouthing the GOP's Words
Jonathan Chait
April 22, 2005

President Bush and his allies are probably going to lose his fight to privatize Social Security. But in the course of losing they have won an astonishing victory: They have established the precedent that a political party can unilaterally force the news media to change its terminology essentially. Push them hard enough, and the media will render verboten any previously agreed-upon phrase, no matter how widely accepted.

Up until very recently, the notion of allowing workers to divert their Social Security taxes into individual savings accounts was universally known as "privatization." Its most fervent advocates called it that. (The Cato Institute, one of the earliest champions of privatization, established a "Project on Social Security Privatization" in 1995.) Bush himself used the term. So did Karl Rove.

Late last year, though, Republican polls found that the public reacted far more favorably to "personal" accounts than to "private" accounts. So, overnight, they banished talk of "privatization" and "private accounts," accusing any journalist who dared use the phrase that they themselves had used mere weeks before of insidious bias. When a reporter asked about "privatization" earlier this year, Bush scolded: "You mean the personal savings accounts? We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions." A reporter told PR Week magazine that the White House staff informed him that if he wrote "privatization," "you have signaled you're against the White House."