Two of the standard-bearers for style and ethics across the news industry sent a message to journalists everywhere last week: When reporting about the group that’s dubbed itself “the alternative right,” make it clear that their movement isn’t simply a hip new twist on conservatism — and that, in fact, its racist beliefs and goals demand comparisons to America’s most infamous kind of hate groups.

John Daniszewski, the Associated Press vice president for standards, told the AP’s reporters and the countless journalists across the industry who use its stylebook to be clear about what the alt-right is to readers.

In a November 28 blog post with the new guidance, he wrote that a story’s initial reference of the “alt-right” — always in quotation marks — should be accompanied by a description to help readers understand that it is “an offshoot of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism,” or, to put it plainly, “a white nationalist movement.”

The New York Times was even stronger, instructing its writers to put the phrase in quotes or preface it with “so-called.” They must then clearly express what the group stands for, every single time, avoiding even letting the phrase stand alone without its link to white nationalism — even in a headline. Assistant masthead editor Clifford Levy shared the text of the new rules December 2.

Let’s avoid using “alt-right” in isolation, without an explanation (which means it will rarely be appropriate in headlines). We don’t need to adopt one-size-fits-all boilerplate, but any description can touch on some key elements, based on our own reporting about the “alt-right”: It’s a racist, far-right fringe movement that embraces an ideology of white nationalism and is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist. It is highly decentralized but has a wide online presence. Followers rail against multiculturalism and what they see as “political correctness.” So, for example, we might describe someone as “a leader of the so-called alt-right, a far-right fringe movement that embraces white nationalism and a range of racist and anti-immigrant positions.”

Guidelines from the AP, Times, and several others have arrived not a moment too soon. The alt-right movement had been earning plenty of attention throughout the election cycle, especially for its members’ fervent support for Donald Trump.

But it was thrust into the spotlight the weekend after the election, when the National Policy Institute held an alt-right conference in Washington, DC. There, its leader Richard Spencer delivered remarks calling America “a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity.” In a video shared by the Atlantic, Trump’s victory and Spencer’s statements were cheered by the crowd with Nazi salutes and chants of, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” That Sunday evening, Trump announced his chief strategist and senior counselor would be Breitbart News editor Steve Bannon, who once bragged that his publication was “the platform for the alt-right.”

It quickly became undeniable that the alt-right was no longer a small-time fringe group that lived on Twitter and 4chan — it had evolved into a formidable movement with political clout in the White House, all while openly spouting messages of white supremacy, xenophobia, misogyny, and other extreme ideas. News organizations know their decisions about how to describe a modern group with an age-old racist message will shape how Americans understood it.

Journalists are weighing tradition and clarity when writing about the alt-right

Journalists can’t just use any words and description they want: They’re bound by professional ethics, tradition, and a strong incentive to avoid libel suits that could result if subjects are mischaracterized. That’s why a crime is always “alleged” unless there’s been a conviction, and even a confessed killer isn’t a “murderer” unless a court has said so. The result: In many cases, words used in reporting can seem weak compared with harsher terms that would resonate more with audiences and that many would argue are the truth.

Similarly, there’s a strong tradition in journalism of using the names that people and organizations want to be known by. “It comes from the ideal of reporting the news as it is, not what you want it to be,” Paul Levinson, a professor of media and communications studies at Fordham University, said.

In the case of “alt-right,” white nationalist Richard Spencer is credited with coining the term for the largely internet-based movement when he launched his Alternative Right blog in 2010. Its core ideals are defined by white nationalism, racist ideas around white identity, and the preservation of Western civilization.

As Vox’s Dylan Mathews has reported, the so-called alt-right is a loose, online-based group that also includes people like libertarians and neoreactionaries in its ranks. A close look reveals it’s “the product of the intersection of a longstanding, long-marginalized part of the conservative movement with both the most high-minded and the basest elements of internet culture. This and other distinctions, he argues, make it more complicated than warmed-over white supremacy.

But according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the differences are insignificant. In fact, the name is one key part of a package, along with neat dressing and a clean-cut appearance, that makes the alt-right seem more palatable — and maybe even inviting — to those fed up with status quo conservatism. “We have to look good,” Spencer once told Salon’s Lauren Fox, explaining that no one would want to join a movement that appeared “crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid.” In the SPLC’s view, the innocuous name and efforts to appear sophisticated have a clear goal: to make a kind of extreme racism that is generally regarded as destructive and immoral appear mainstream.

That’s why Sophie Bjork-James, a postdoctoral anthropology fellow at Vanderbilt University who studies contemporary white supremacist movements, says she’s “very passionate about this idea that we need to be very careful with that term. ‘Alt-right’ sounds much more palatable than ‘neo-Nazi.’ It is an attempt at reframing a violent ideology as a palatable political position.”

Despite concerns over the alt-right’s deceptive branding, many publications have found it sufficient to call the alt-right by its desired, Spencer-created name. Sometimes they’ll add that it is “associated with” or “connected to” white nationalism, white supremacy, or neo-Nazism — and sometimes they won’t.

Take, for example, the Washington Post’s November 22 profile of Spencer, which waited a few paragraphs after it first mentioned the phrase “alt-right” to mention that the group wanted to create an “ethno-state” that would banish minorities, and described the way critics characterized the “alt-right” — racist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi — but presented the characterizations as perspectives rather than facts. Or the November 23 New York Post story that called Spencer a white nationalist but described the alt-right in its chosen words: “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”

“Any effort to assign a different label to them can be at best challenging and at worst misleading and dangerous,” said David Boardman, dean of the school of media and communication at Temple University. At the same time, he says, "alt-right" seems “a woefully soft descriptor for the radical positions of this movement.”

That’s why suddenly seeing “alt-right” everywhere (without the “white nationalist” clarification, especially) may be doing a disservice to readers. “To call this the alt-right without defining it as white supremacist ideology is to normalize that ideology,” said Bjork-James.

The problem isn’t just that shirking the “white nationalist” descriptor would leave readers less than fully informed. It’s that without this description, “alt-right” distracts from the agendas of those like Spencer in a way that may attract and radicalize new supporters.

“My concern is that if we help to normalize these ideas as just part of the political spectrum, then it can make it seem less radical than they are and less connected to racial violence — because if people espouse racist ideas and racial rhetoric, there’s always some kind of a correlation to racist violence,” Bjork-James said. “And if we don’t describe them for what they are, we’re kind of giving other white people a path to think these are legitimate ideas and a chance that more white people will become radicalized in adopting these ideas.”

Anti-hate activists and scholars of far-right movements aren’t the only ones who have these concerns or who have criticized the media for, in their view, giving in to the alt-right’s desire to look good.

Author Jodi Picoult and journalist Soledad O’Brien were among the many who used Twitter to urge that Spencer and his ilk be called “neo-Nazis” or “white supremacists.”

If we’re gonna call white supremacists alt-right, then surely we should describe Dylann Roof as an alt-right terrorist. — Anil Dash (@anildash) November 28, 2016

Words matter. Alt-right = Neo-Nazi. "The Holocaust did not begin with killing. It began with words." - US Holocaust Memorial Museum. — Jodi Picoult (@jodipicoult) November 22, 2016

.@washingtonpost stop using “alt-right”!! They are white supremacists, racists, white nationalists… https://t.co/ooOx8w01XT — Jodi Jacobson (@jljacobson) December 2, 2016

At least one publication, ThinkProgress, has decided to drop “alt-right” almost altogether. “ThinkProgress will no longer treat ‘alt-right’ as an accurate descriptor of either a movement or its members,” its editors wrote on November 22. “We will only use the name when quoting others. When appending our own description to men like Spencer and groups like NPI, we will use terms we consider more accurate, such as ‘white nationalist’ or ‘white supremacist.’”

There are journalism experts who agree that this would be the right move, even for more mainstream publications. Deborah Gump, director of the journalism program at the University of Delaware, says publications should drop “alt-right” completely: “I’d suggest avoiding the term altogether. Don’t label. Explain a person or a group by their actions and statements. Let the facts speak for themselves,” she said, pointing out that even Spencer himself once admitted in an interview with NPR that “in some ways the ‘alt-right’ is arbitrary.”

As Jeff Cohen, a media critic and associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College, pointed out, journalists actually do have some leeway to decide when replacing or rejecting names is appropriate.

“An abject case was the US invasion of Iraq, which was dubbed ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ by the White House and Pentagon, and a couple of the cable news channels adopted that name as their very own name for their invasion coverage,” he said. “By contrast, some groups or movements are not afforded the right to name themselves — for example, you might see mainstream media reporting on ‘a self-described democratic socialist’ group or individual, as if to raise doubts about the legitimacy of the self-description.”

What makes the difference? In Cohen’s view, the degree to which political movements or groups or enterprises are allowed by mainstream media to get away with their own self-identification has to do with one main factor: “how ‘establishment’ those groups are or how much those groups intimidate mainstream media.”

Boardman from Temple University said there is, in fact, precedent for news organizations rejecting a self-assigned label, particularly when that label is politically loaded. One example is the term “pro-life,” which is the preferred label of many groups who oppose abortion rights. “While most news outlets used that term in earlier decades, most now reject it in favor of ‘anti-abortion’ or ‘anti–abortion rights’ or ‘anti-choice,’” he said.

So far, no major, mainstream publications have abandoned or replaced “alt-right” in this way — but none have said they won’t link the alt-right to white nationalism either.

It looks like the growing consensus in the industry hovers around Cohen’s view: “It would not seem unethical for skeptical or independent-minded news outlets to use phrases such as ‘a white racist organization that describes itself as alt-right,’ or ‘a white supremacist group that describes itself as alt-right,’” he said. This mirrors the AP’s commitment not to “limit ourselves to letting such groups define themselves,” instead reporting “their actions, associations, history and positions to reveal their actual beliefs and philosophy, as well as how others see them.”

For now, it seems that major publications will continue to use the term “alt-right.” That’s arguably a win for the group’s branding and recruitment goals. But there’s also a growing commitment to make it plain to readers what this modern name attempts to conceal: an age-old set of chilling beliefs and policy goals — the threats of which don’t change with labels.