Somewhere in every newsroom there is a document nobody outside the building reads, and it decides more about what you think of a story than the reporter does. * It is called the style guide. Officially it is a book of rules about hyphens, capital letters and whether you write "percent" or "%". Unofficially it is where an organisation writes down which words it is prepared to say about the world — and those decisions are argued over for years, occasionally in public, occasionally in Parliament. * **What a style guide actually is** * Every serious outlet has one. The Associated Press has the AP Stylebook, which most of American journalism has copied for a century. Reuters has the Handbook of Journalism. The BBC has its Editorial Guidelines. The Guardian and Observer publish theirs openly online, which is rarer than you would hope. * Ninety per cent of any style guide is genuinely boring housekeeping: dates, titles, numerals, when to abbreviate. Its real function is consistency, so that a wire story filed in Nairobi and edited in London reads like it came from one organisation. * The other ten per cent is the interesting part. That is where the guide rules on contested words — the ones where choosing a term is choosing a position. And because the guide is a written rule rather than one reporter's instinct, it applies to every story the outlet publishes, forever, until somebody fights to change it. * **The word that starts the biggest fight: "terrorist"** * The BBC's editorial guidance is unambiguous about it: "We should not use the term 'terrorist' without attribution." The guidance frames the reasoning plainly, noting that terrorism is a difficult and emotive subject with significant political overtones and that care is required with language carrying value judgements. Instead of the label, it directs journalists to words that describe what the person actually did — "bomber", "attacker", "gunman", "kidnapper", "insurgent", "militant". * This is not a technicality nobody notices. In October 2023, the BBC's application of that rule to its coverage of Hamas produced a public row involving serving cabinet ministers. Press Gazette reported on 11 October 2023 that Defence Secretary Grant Shapps called the broadcaster's approach "verging on disgraceful" and said Hamas members were terrorists "pure and simple", not "militants". Then Foreign Secretary James Cleverly and Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer made similar criticisms. Labour leader Keir Starmer said the BBC "needs to explain" itself. * The BBC's veteran correspondent John Simpson defended the rule in terms that go to the heart of what a style guide is for: "calling someone a terrorist means you're taking sides and ceasing to treat the situation with due impartiality." * Whatever you make of that argument, notice what it reveals. The BBC is not saying the acts were not terrible. It is saying that a label is a judgement, and it has written down, in advance, a rule about who gets to make it — the outlet, or a named source the outlet quotes. * **Reuters made the same call, and it nearly broke the newsroom** * Reuters has held a version of this policy for decades. It came closest to public collapse after the September 11 attacks in 2001, when global head of news Stephen Jukes reiterated in an internal memo that the agency would not use the word. * Jukes later explained it to Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz in the sentence that has followed the policy ever since: "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist... We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing field." * It did not go down well internally. In early October 2001, chief executive Tom Glocer and editor-in-chief Geert Linnebank issued a statement conceding that the memo "had caused deep offence among members of our staff, our readers, and the public at large" — while restating the underlying rule: "Our policy is to avoid the use of emotional terms and not make value judgments concerning the facts we attempt to report accurately and fairly." * A style guide rule that requires the head of the company to apologise for it, and then keeps it, is a rule the organisation actually believes in. * **When the guide changes, the coverage changes** * Style guides are not fixed. Two of the clearest examples of a rule change rewriting how a whole subject gets covered: * On 2 April 2013, the Associated Press announced it was dropping "illegal immigrant". Senior vice-president and executive editor Kathleen Carroll put it directly: "The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term 'illegal immigrant' or the use of 'illegal' to describe a person." Because thousands of outlets follow AP style by default, one entry in one book changed the vocabulary of American immigration coverage in a week. * In May 2019, the Guardian updated its guide on the environment. "Climate emergency", "crisis" or "breakdown" became preferred over "climate change"; "global heating" over "global warming"; "climate science denier" over "climate sceptic"; "wildlife" over "biodiversity"; "fish populations" over "fish stocks". Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner's reasoning was that the paper wanted "to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers", and that "the phrase 'climate change', for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity." * Both changes were defended as accuracy. Both were attacked as politics. Both are, honestly, a bit of each — which is exactly why the guide exists rather than leaving it to whoever is on the desk at 11pm. * **What this gives you as a reader** * Three usable habits. * First, when a word surprises you, ask whether it is a choice or a rule. If one outlet says "militant" and another says "terrorist" about the same person, that is very rarely one reporter's opinion. It is two institutions applying two written policies. Knowing that stops you attributing to a journalist a decision made above them years ago. * Second, apply the consistency test. A naming rule is only a principle if it survives contact with the outlet's own side. Watch how a paper labels violence by groups it dislikes and violence by governments it supports. Where the same act gets "terror attack" in one story and "strike" or "operation" in another, the style guide is not the problem — the selective application of it is. That test works in every political direction, and it is the fastest bias check available to a reader. * Third, go and read the guide. The Guardian's and Observer's is published in full online, and the BBC's editorial guidelines are public. It takes ten minutes to look up the entries for the two or three words you argue about most, and it is a strange, clarifying experience — the arguments people have in comment sections turn out to have been settled inside these organisations, in writing, decades ago. * The style guide is the closest thing journalism has to a written constitution: mostly dull, occasionally explosive, and the only place where an outlet has to say out loud what it will and will not call things. Read it before you accuse a reporter of choosing a side. Then check whether the outlet follows its own rule when the story is about its friends.