OK, for as long as I can remember the media has talked about the Arab organization 'Hezbollah' with everyone using the same version of the name. Now that the organization is so much in the news, why have different news organizations suddenly decided to change the spelling they use? So far today I've seen 'Hezbollah,' Hizbollah,' 'Hizbullah' and 'Hezbullah.'

So what's up????

Are the media now suddenly afraid they'll piss-off the Arabs if they spell the name differently from what the Arabs want used?

The same thing was done twenty or more years ago when all the Chinese spellings were suddenly changed to use 'X's' in place of 'Ch's' so that names like Chang became Xiang. I thought it was stupid then to try to make English versions of Chinese words more closely match what someone perceived was a more proper pronunciation but the talking heads still pronounced the words the same. So what was accomplished beyond making the words more difficult to figure out?

Now they're doing it with Arabic words. Don't they have enough to report on with all the Middle East problems without having to get into analyzing traditional spellings?