The BBC has instructed staff to avoid describing the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as a “kidnapping” and to use less loaded alternatives such as “seized,”according to a leaked internal memo shared online by British journalist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones.
Maduro was apprehended in a US military raid on Caracas over the weekend and flown to New York to face US drug trafficking and weapons charges, which he denied during his first appearance before the court. Maduro insisted that he had been “kidnapped.”
However, according to the leaked memo, the BBC management now “de-facto bans… journalists from stating that the US ‘kidnapped’” Maduro, with acceptable terms being ‘seized’ and ‘captured’.