A Reuters editor argued that terms such as “illegals” and “urban” are harmful in a Wednesday lecture on countering offensive “tropes” in media coverage.
Countless seemingly neutral terms in media coverage can advance “racial, ethnic, religious or gender-based stereotypes,” Reuters Global Race and Justice Editor Kat Stafford told fellow journalists in presentation slides. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism hosted Stafford’s Wednesday talk as a webinar titled, “How Reporters Can Get Ahead of Misinformation.”
Reuters Editor Kat Stafford argues that terms like “illegals” and “high-crime communities” are offensive in media coverage in a slide presentation on Jan. 21, 2026. (Screenshot/Kat Stafford)
“This is an example of some of the harmful tropes — there are, unfortunately, a lot — but these are some of the buckets … in my mind that I’ve kind of put them in,” Stafford said. Her slides flagged the terms “urban,” “at-risk groups,” “high-crime communities,” “invasion,” and “unassimilated” as inappropriate.
The terms “radicalized” and “illegals” also fuel “misleading narratives that portray communities, particularly Black, Muslim, immigrant, or LGBTQ+ groups, as threats rather than people,” one of Stafford’s slides said.
Her advice to journalists comes during ongoing national media attention toward immigration enforcement in Minnesota in recent weeks, which has led to the arrests of numerous violent convicts, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“You have that criminal trope, right, where you see language such as ‘this is a high-crime community,’ you know, ‘radicalized’ youth or people, where you’re seeing communities described as inherently dangerous,” Stafford told her audience.
“Swarms, invasions, infested, crime-infested areas, right?” she said. “These are terms that strip people or communities of their humanity and portray them as these kinds of invading forces, right?”
Reuters Editor Kat Stafford gives fellow journalists a list of “harmful” terms in media coverage in a video presentation on Jan. 21, 2026. (Screenshot/Kat Stafford)
Stafford also claimed that Asian people were wrongly blamed online for the COVID-19 pandemic after China’s government allowed the virus to escape from a lab in Wuhan and tried to cover it up.
“With COVID-19, we saw at the beginning, there was a lot of efforts … and viral posts blaming Chinese and other Asian-American or Asian communities for the spread of the virus, right?” she said. “And so, it’s our responsibility to make sure that we are covering these misleading claims appropriately and backing it up with fact-based reporting.”
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