From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. This week in Redwood City, California, the case was closed on a national obsession.

The jury of Scott Peterson's peers recommended a sentence of death, having found him guilty of the first-degree murder of his wife and the second-degree murder of the fetus she carried, or as the media put it.

Peterson faces the death penalty or life in prison for the murders of his wife Lacey and unborn son Connor.

An emotional effort to convince jurors that Peterson deserves the death penalty for the murders of his wife and their unborn son Connor.

He did what he did. Killed not only his wife, but his unborn child.

Earlier this year, Congress passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, otherwise known as Lacey and Conner's Law. And it seems news outlets are changing their terminology to match.

Stories about the Peterson verdict in the Washington Post and the New York Times

referred to both the fetus and the unborn child.

The Chicago Tribune stuck with fetus, but not for long.

In the first revision of the Tribune style book since 1989,

fetus will no longer refer to what a woman carries in her third trimester.

That is to be called an unborn child.

The anti-abortion group concerned women for America

took note of what it called an ironic double standard.

The group observed that when Scott Peterson kills,

he murders an unborn child.

But if a woman ends her pregnancy, she aborts a fetus.

Connor was technically a fetus.

We asked Chicago Tribune Public Editor Don Wickliff and Deputy Managing Editor Randy Wiseman

why his paper will no longer apply that word in the third trimester.

Randy says he began with research.

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