I don't understand where this recent obsession about using neutral language in reporting is coming from. Using neutral language doesn't mean unbiased. Very convincing yet very biased pieces can be written in the most neutral language.
It's fine to describe situations where people lose their lives as "tragedies", for example. It's possible to go overboard by projecting emotions onto the audience that they don't actually have.
If they purport to be objective journalism (and not all articles need be that) then yes, definitely.
Seems that Axios plays a little loose with these guidelines outside of politics (their main wheelhouse). I think it's probably a mistake, to the extent that they are interested in keeping their reputation for good journalism.
Yes. Articles written in an emotionally charged way in order to influence their readers are a flavor of brainwashing - telling the reader what to think, or even worse, trying to influence them without their knowledge or consent.
Furthermore, the fact that an individual or organization is trying to emotionally manipulate you at all is a huge red flag. The best possible scenario is that they're doing it because they think that they know what's good for you better than you do, and after that it's a toss-up between "they want to make money" (ads) and "they want to control you" (authoritarians).
Emotional manipulation is also a classic tool of tyrants, and is necessary in cases where suppression of the population through pure brute force isn't feasible.
Yes, "There's always a value judgement being made about what is important to report." - but that's unavoidable, because reporters have limited resources. Adding in emotionally-charged (or straight-up manipulative) language makes the bias strictly worse. The fact that totally unbiased reporting is impossible is not an excuse to embrace more bias than is necessary.
> It's fine to describe situations where people lose their lives as "tragedies", for example.
I respectfully disagree, for the reason that news organizations actively pick-and-choose words like this that are emotionally charged and don't have precise meanings in order to slant their articles. While most events that a news organization would describe as a "tragedy" are indeed so, some of them are not. Moreover, even if that word isn't used, readers will understand when events are tragedies anyway - the number of people who weren't aware that a plane crash was a "tragedy" unless it was explicitly pointed out to them (and who were then convinced by the use of that word) is an incredibly tiny sliver of the population.