UK forces say “incident” in Gulf waterway near Iran
BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - British forces said on Friday there had been “an incident” in the northern Arabian Gulf after an Iraqi sailor reported seeing up to seven British or American military personnel being seized by an Iranian ship.
In an article attributed to Reuters it talks about an incident in the “Arabian Gulf”. Now, I know where the Persian Gulf is, but I have no idea where the “Arabian Gulf” is situated.
This is clearly very confusing to the reader, and you need to be more careful in only using internationally recognized names for this body of water. People expect to see accurate reporting from Reuters, and this kind of sloppy journalism only helps cast doubt about the editorial process at your organization.
Ron M.
This wasn’t a great performance. Our style on this body of water is The Gulf. Persian Gulf implies the waterway belongs to Iran. Gulf is neutral. We should not have used Arabian Gulf in the story, nor should we have used Persian Gulf in the graphic which accompanied the story online: GBU Editor
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4 comments so far
“Persian Gulf implies the waterway belongs to Iran.”
Your style guide should be directing that you use an internationally accepted name for each given body of water. What a bizarre bit of reasoning you gave there.
- Posted by PTThat’s complete bull !!
do you refer to the english channel as the “Anglo-French Channel”.
- Posted by AdityaPoppycock! The body of water has been called the Persian Gulf for at least a century.
I’m afraid your desire to not offend anybody is not only leading to vagueness and redicing accuracy, it is also becoming, itself, offensive.
Please don’t treat your readers like idiots.
- Posted by Random NumbersWhy is there a discussion on this issue? How about we just call it as it is, The Persian Gulf. Did someone just wake up one morning and decide to change history without any regard and it became a debatable issue??
- Posted by Omid M