It's not just simple "confusion"

It's not that they're confused. It's just that they've adopted (and expect all of so adopt) "Newspeak".

For those readers unfamiliar with the term, George Orwell coined that word for his dystopian novel 1984.  "Newspeak" is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate. To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking. 

Newspeak thus limits the person's ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will, which are "thoughtcrimes" (a Newspeak word), acts of personal independence that contradict the ideological orthodoxy of the Party. 

Mr Orwell wrote 1984 in 1943. By the real1984, Newspeak was well established as the language of liberal "democracy". The use of the phrase "mostly peaceful demonstrations" by the liberal commentariat to characterize race (and other) riots is a classic example of how the lickspittle media substitute their "truth" for reality to make the masses believe that "black" is "white", and truly white.