Here’s another example of the bizarre relativism of “objective” news reporting — the New York Times describes John McCain’s support for private accounts in Social Security as “an approach that Democrats call privatization”:

Mr. McCain also stuck by his support for allowing workers to invest a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in stocks and bonds, an approach that Democrats call privatization and that Mr. Obama has used to suggest Mr. McCain would subject retirees to excessive market risk.

Actually, John McCain called it “privatization” as recently as 2004 (via Think Progress):

Without privatization, I don’t see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits.

And of course, McCain wasn’t the only one — literally dozens of conservatives called it “privatization” before 2005. But once Republicans discovered that the word polls poorly, they ran away from it. The sad part is that the New York Times has acquiesced to their insistence that the term is some sort of Democratic invention.

Update 9/23 10:19 PM: Media Matters has more.