The Associated Press issued guidance on the term “alt-right” on Monday, recommending that the term itself be used only with context and a look at the group’s history and actions.
John Daniszewski, the AP’s vice president for standards, made the case for getting specific:
Avoid using the term generically and without definition, however, because it is not well known and the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience. In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist.
Also, he wrote, it’s “’alt-right’ (quotation marks, hyphen and lower case.)”
