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 footballwith
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.
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