Something the Press Wants Kept Secret

From Instapundit, comes this Telegraph story that the BBC apparently doesn't want to a report to be made public. Why? Because, if reports are accurate, it indicts their coverage of the Middle East. In particular, it might just show that it covers Israel negatively (big surprise).

The Liberating Veil

From Tim Blair comes this news and picture in The Age.

Any theories on how the veil is liberating? I am confused. Forty years ago, women were taking off their bras in the name of liberation....

Photo: AFP

Passive Voice Watch and War on Terror

From today's The Corner, an interesting observation regarding current reporting. It reminds me of George Orwell's essay on politics and English language.

Press Passivity [Michael Rubin]

A writer with whom I spoke about two weeks ago pointed out a very interesting trend in the press reporting and political commentary about the war on terrorism. All too often, reporters and politicians use the passive voice.

Take British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in yesterday’s USA Today: “It's widely argued now that the existence of the camp is as much a radicalizing and discrediting influence as it is a safeguard for security.” Well, who argues? A McClatchy story yesterday read, “Nearly 2,700 Iraqi civilians were killed in the city in September.” Well, who killed them? Baathist insurgents or Iranian-backed militias?

If the public read that Iranian-backed militias killed nearly 2700 civilians, we might be less willing to reward their murderers. From today’s New York Times: “Most of the 500 municipal workers who have been killed here since 2005 have been trash collectors.”

Again, someone did the killing. Why hide it? It’s important to know what we are up against.

I’d submit two conclusions: Journalists do not use the active voice because they do not know the subject of the action—in which case their editors should send them back to ask tough questions—or the editors wish to absolve the subjects for political reasons. Either way, it’s poor journalism and irresponsible punditry. Sorry to be a grammar nerd, but it’s time to have a passive voice watch.

Posted at 1:34 PM

UPDATE: Jonah adds a few more observations:

Re: Press Passivity [Jonah Goldberg]

Michael makes an excellent point. I'd add a few of other possible causes of the passivity:

Laziness: By phrasing things passively, reporters don't have to actually track down real quotes and assign accountability.

Copycatting: If the New York Times uses a certain style, it will catch on, regardless of the merits.

Globalization: Reuters has a policy of not using the word "terrorist" objectively in part because they are a global news service and some of their customers object when you call their preferred team terrorists. Similarly, CNN doesn't call anyone a "foreigner" because CNN fancies itself a global news service as well. Passive voice reporting might be a related phenomenon because it allows news outlets to avoid offending various consituencies, ideological and geographic.

Groupthink: Because the press as a "class" see the war with considerable unanimity, editors don't catch things which simply "sound right."

Condescention: When Iraqis kill Iraqis, some may reason, they aren't fully formed moral actors, but manifestations of Bush's folly simply acting the way Third Worlders do.

None of these are mutually exclusive and I'm sure there are others. Indeed, most of them overlap considerably. I just think that when trends like thos pop-up there are lots of reasons for them.

Posted at 2:00 PM

UPDATE 2: Curiosity (and some free time) got the best of me, so I went and found an on-line version of Orwell's essay, called "Politics and the English Language". In addition to his always timely observations about language and politics, it contains good advice for writers, such as this:

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.

But, more apropos to Rubin and Goldberg above, Orwell talks about politicans and government publications: political orthodoxy of any kind purposefully hides full accounts of events and its actors.

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.

Why? Because using the passive seeks to hide the hand of the puppeteer, focusing on the puppet or the results instead. It locates the action in a vacuum; it is a sleight of hand that most of us used when we hide the fact that our loose tongue got somebody else in trouble--"It came to be known that Mr. X does not like you." Political parties, Orwell says--and journalists are not exempt their own political pressures--, that the euphemisms (of which passive voice is a kind) allow to speak of an event in a diminished way. Passive voice then allows the speaker to hide the actor.

More:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Why? As brutal as the images main street media's coverage of the ravages that daily pour out of Iraq, they are only brutal with a part of the whole picture. And I am not merely talking out their ignoring the good news--which they do. I am talking about the subsequent diminishing of the role of the actors that results from focusing on the action. Part of it may in fact be the result of tv images always getting, by the very nature of the way events unfold, the carnage of the bombs or bullets, and not the immediately preceding action of the actors perpetrating their barbarities. At any rate, active voice connects actor to act; vivid action verbs do it to startle the reader out of his somnobletic Sunday afternoon reading to encounter an incarnation of a particular action that a particular person has done to particular people or person. There are three foci. Passive only two.

For instance: Compare this sentence

Bledsoe threw Glenn the football

with

The football was thrown to Glenn (by Bledsoe).

Mark Twain's advice was: choosing the best word over an acceptable word was the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. Active voice strikes, passive glows. Passive voice does not quickens, it deadens.

Such phraseology [eg, euphemisms and passive voice] is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Again, Orwell is concerned with members of the political class corrupting language, politics, and public opinion. But surely he would not discount the impact that the press has in the same realm? They are, after all, framing how many or most of us understand the way the world is. They do have, however, less and less control in this since cable news and talk radio expanded the perspectives possible. And, of course, the Internet has exploded the control and access to sources of news from the hands of a few to countless numbers of people throughout the world. In this light, as Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan and others have said, the Internet has done for people what the Gutenberg printing press did for people in the Reformation. It took the interpretation and reading of Scripture from the Church and gave a Bible (and its interpretation) to the mass of Europe's people.

For a free people, we do count on our government officials and leaders to give us as complete and unvarnished accounts of events affecting our lives and country. Despite mistakes in the recent past, I don't have any doubts that the Bush administration did and continues to do the best it can. (This was the prudential wisdom of keeping Clinton's heads of FBI and CIA well into his first term). But it is also necessary and good that the press exists to challenge, refine or refute what the government reports. However, it seems that the press is more ideologically wedded, as a political class, not to an accurate coverage of an unpredicatable situation whose outcome is by no means certain--in other words, a war--but to a position that seeks through a paritial coverage to lead its readers and viewers to turning this war into another Vietnam.

UPDATE 3: Michael Rubin says that Isaac Chotiner over at The New Republic's blog, The Plank, picked up on his original comment, listed above, and appears to defend, as Rubin says it, omitting the subject. It will be interesting to see his reply, if any.

Education: For Now or Always?

Contrast

"No general education should be timeless," he said. "There’s no question it’s [education] a response to the world we live in now."

With

[1.22]. . . . But he that desires to look into the truth of things done, and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable. And it is compiled rather for an EVERLASTING POSSESSION, than to be rehearsed for a prize.

Michael Steele's Letter to Democrats

From the guys at Powerline comes news of this letter Steele directed to several Democrats regarding the latest of a train of low, partisan tricks trying to discredit a black Republican's run for US Senate from Maryland. I don't think it needs any further introduction. Its pretty self-explanatory.

October 4, 2006

Dear Congressman Cardin, Governor Dean, Chairman Lierman and Senator Schumer:

For several months, I have been trailed by Democrat operatives filming my public events. At these events – speeches, press conferences, county fairs and parades – my every word and move has been recorded.

I realize this has become a part of modern campaigning and I welcome the scrutiny. In fact, I always make a point to say a friendly hello to whomever the Democrat Party sends to follow me. However, recent actions have crossed the line from political activity to an invasion of privacy.

On the morning of September 30, I participated in a homecoming ceremony for the Army National Guard 243rd Engineers. The event – as fitting for the occasion – was non-political. Republicans and Democrats joined together to welcome home brave men and women returning from Iraq and I attended in my official capacity to spend time with the troops and their families.

While speaking with two mothers whose sons had died in Iraq, I noticed the ever present Democrat operative filming our conversation. A conversation with parents who have lost a loved one in combat is private in nature and has no place in partisan politics, and certainly not in the smear campaign you have waged against me even before I entered the race for United States Senate. The filming of this conversation demonstrates a callous disregard for families who have lost a loved one and is an indefensible invasion of privacy.

Unfortunately, I have come to expect such ugly, gutter politics from you. Congressman Cardin, while saying you have expressed outrage to “all concerned parties” for the racist comments on your senior staffer’s blog, you have yet to apologize to me. Chairman Dean, your personal pollster, Cornell Belcher, advocated racist attacks to “knock” me down and “discredit” me, and yet I have received no apology from you. And, Senator Schumer, your staffers pled guilty to a crime when they stole my credit report and violated my privacy and that of my family, but I have had no apology from you either.

I did not think until this past Saturday, however, that such ugliness would intrude upon the return of our troops from Iraq. As I told your colleague, Congressman Steny Hoyer, who attended the event, this action represents a new low in Maryland politics and has no place in this campaign.

My campaign is focused on having a conversation with the voters of our state about the issues affecting Maryland and I am committed to building bridges over that which divides us. But, ugly partisan political tricks only work to divide our communities and represent the very type of political behavior voters are sick of.

If your respective organizations are as concerned as I am about the use of such poor judgment by your staff(s), you would take immediate steps to hold all responsible parties accountable.

I eagerly await your prompt response.

Sincerely,

MICHAEL S. STEELE

(Hat tip: Paul at Powerline)

Prime Minister Howard's Speech at the Quadrant

Glenn Reynolds pointed out a news story on this speech by Howard, given at the 50th Anniversary celebration of Quadrant, an Australian conservative journal of literature and ideas. I found it at the Prime Minister's website. It looks good. Though it really doesn't seem to focus on what the news story says it does.

As a matter of fact, the Australian article focuses unduly on what it calls Howard's "scathing attack" of the left's intelligentsia. They are more concerned with reporting that Howard bashed the left--quoting his litany of indictments as if they were reporting to the principal the string of names the bully lobbed against the weakest of the playground.

They don't appear to be overly concerned with sharing the premise of Howard's arguments: that the West has been in the throes of a battle of ideas for the last 60 or so years. And the main pivot points were individualism and collectivism, liberty under the law and overwhelming inevitable historical forces, liberal democratic and totalitarian governments. Or concerned with the conclusion of the Cold War: that those who advocated the West's ideals stood at the end of the day while the others were swept into the ash heap.

Today, the battle continues. Though this time, instead of capitalism, a great religion is hijacked by a minority who have been corrupted by the same ideas that were thought to be vanquished in the Cold War. The tyranny of our day is the resurrected tyranny of yesterday in different trappings, religious and not anti-capitalistic and atheistic, medieval and patriarchical not educated, tolerant, and sophisticated (though their western intellectual progenitors and advocates are).

There. A better summary of Howard's speech. But don't take my word for it, read it for yourself.