Asking these and other questions would expose many of the significant differences among the groups that the White House lumps together under “Islamofascism.” It could be argued that such distinctions are little more than nuances, but while politicians have a vested interest in keeping things black and white, the press cannot afford such a luxury. We need to be in the nuance business.

The press and this administration, like any co-dependents in a six-year relationship, are not without their baggage. There were no WMD in Iraq and Saddam had no connection to the attacks of 9/11, yet the administration managed to convince many Americans that its version of reality was the truth. While the press did eventually muster a challenge to the White House’s line, it also played a central role in allowing that line to take hold.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, the unprecedented combination of the speed and nonstop nature of the news cycle and the willingness of the candidates to say almost anything they felt was necessary to win (no matter how tenuous its connection to reality) led to a suggestion from us that newsrooms deploy truth squads — essentially teams of reporters with appropriate expertise to help reporters in the field factcheck and contextualize the claims coming from the campaigns. Some papers took us up on it. Perhaps therein lies the seed of a solution to the dilemma of how to handle “Islamofascism.” If editors had some boilerplate language to insert when appropriate that would give readers at least some sense of why the term is misleading, it could help repair some of the damage done by this type of propaganda.

It sounds cumbersome, but so did the extra sentence or two to explain why sources were granted anonymity. The need to be precise, and to give readers as much help as possible in navigating a complex world, is worth the effort.

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