There are special-interest groups that move from newsroom to newsroom, offering style ‘tips’ to enforce favorable coverage of their pet causes.
A journalist who obscures the truth is hardly a journalist at all.
D o you want to know a secret?
There are special-interest groups that move from newsroom to newsroom, offering style “tips” to enforce favorable coverage of their pet causes.
Planned Parenthood is one such group. It regularly provides language guidance to major publications, tasking them not-so-subtly to consider using terms such as “near-total abortion ban” and “anti-choice” instead of “heartbeat bill” and “pro-life.” Other pro-abortion groups, including Ipas, also share journalism “resources” on the supposedly correct way to cover abortion — er, sorry, reproductive health.
It’s probably not a hard sell in the first place to convince major newsrooms to use language that favors the pro-abortion side of the debate. Still, it’s important to understand that there are activist groups dedicated to controlling and policing the language the press uses when covering specific issues. Run afoul of a group’s preferred language rules, and you or your editor will likely receive a polite — albeit gritted-teeth — phone call from some public relations flunky, reminding you that you’ve forgotten to use the “correct” terminology. You’ll receive the call even if the language you used is unquestionably accurate. It doesn’t matter.
Don’t call it a heartbeat bill, please. Call it a “near-total abortion ban.”
The problem with a setup in which outside groups attempt, with a significant degree of success, to influence the language reporters use — besides the obvious loss of editorial independence — is that it primes newsrooms to forfeit the one thing they’re supposed to be good at: delivering the facts clearly, concisely, and accurately.
Pressuring reporters and editors to pay homage to various political and social pieties is how terms such as “gender-affirming care” can appear as a sanitized and completely misleading stand-in for the more accurate, but harsh, phrase “chemical and surgical castration.” It’s how, per Planned Parenthood’s own guidelines, the term “pregnant person” can appear in place of “woman.”
But accepting euphemisms in place of clear descriptors doesn’t just make for poor writing. It also obscures the truth, and a journalist who obscures the truth is hardly a journalist at all.
It’s even worse for publicly funded media operations such as the BBC, because, in addition to demands from outside special interest groups, they’re beholden to the government and its constantly evolving and oftentimes nonsensical rules regarding “acceptable” speech.
The end result, as we have seen an awful lot of recently, is a style of reporting that barely rises to the level of intelligible. It’s frequently straight gibberish, especially if the topic is a politically charged, hot-button one. Consider, for example, the following news blurb, which was published this past week by the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ:
A UK trans woman, who used her frozen sperm to have a baby with her wife, has been granted permission to bring a High Court challenge against a refusal by the State to grant Irish citizenship to the child on the basis that she is not the biological mother.
I dare you to make sense of that sentence.
I double-dog dare you to diagram it.
Remember, RTÉ is not a blog run by a lone individual. RTÉ is the Irish equivalent of the BBC. It is a state-funded organization that employs thousands of people. The above news blurb is not the work of a lone journalist with a criminally tenuous grasp of the English language. At RTÉ, there are journalists, editors, copy editors, homepage editors, web producers, a social media team, and a standards and guidelines desk. The “UK trans woman” news blurb, which defies all rules of logic and English grammar, was not published in a vacuum or created and put into the world by a single employee.
The blurb is the product of several disparate interests pulling RTÉ in different directions, to the point that it’s incapable of even basic communication — let alone clean and clear reporting.
RTÉ, like many newsrooms — especially those funded by governments — has sacrificed straightforward journalism to satisfy the demands of groups not involved in journalism. For the press, succumbing to the interests of outside groups represents a clear violation of journalism’s duty to the public interest. For the reader, though, the garbling of reporting language represents something far worse than a professional failure. The reader now lives in a world where his government, along with multimillion- and billion-dollar media conglomerates, insists that he accept political euphemism in place of plainly stated fact.
Given enough time, the government will win. The corruption of language leads inevitably to the corruption of thought, and what can corrupt you can control you.
Given that this is the obvious endpoint of the torture of language, one can’t help but ask: Is the corruption the point?