Choose Your Words Wisely

Too many years ago, in a journalism class at a recognizable southern university, the Maven had the unfortunate experience of having a news story hurled back at him by a very grumpy professor. The Maven's crime? Using a complex word when a more simple and direct word would have been a better choice. 
Our local media seems to have issues with choosing the correct word more often than not. There are a couple of plausible explanations for this, which the Maven will delve into as we go along.

First example: WANE TV's story revealing the victim of our city's most recent homicide.

The man was "suffering" from gunshot wounds. How do they know he was suffering? Logic would indicate that, but the use of the word "suffering" can be construed as an opinion, as opposed to stating fact. The use of "suffering a gunshot wound" is a "news speak cliche" and is better replaced with a phrase "the victim of an apparent gunshot wound".  

But wait, there's more. Our friends in the WOWO newsroom also seem struggle from time to time.
Again, a news story about the city's most recent killing. 

As you can see, the word "incident" is used where "killing", "shooting", "murder" would better tell the story. Is this an attempt to soften the blow to the audience, or just someone's idea of "that will sound good on my resume tape I'm sending to Dayton this weekend"? Don't know.
While were at it. What is the WOWO fetish of using the word "individual"? Actually, this one is easy. It's laziness  Cut and paste directly from the press release because "we don't think our audience is sophisticated enough to tell."