The Dumbo/Teabaggers have spent the years since the 2008 election trying to destroy the USA to "save it." Mr. Turtle, the Senate Minority Leader (Mitch McConnell, R-KY) said it best in 2009: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Country be damned! If there is a Hell, may every single lying, traitorous Dumbo/Teabagger burn there forever! If this is a (fair & balanced) curse, so be it.
[x Cronk Review]
The Word The Media Won’t Use
By Ben Yagoda
Tag Cloud of the following article
People and institutions are frequently criticized for the words they use. Lately, the mainstream news media has been getting heat for a word it habitually does not use. The word is lie—both the root noun and the verb that derives from it. Throw in the epithet liar while you’re at it.
The complaint is an outgrowth of a more general, longstanding, and well-founded grumbling that the press too often acts more like a stenographer than a watchdog—merely summarizing or quoting politicians, candidates and business leaders’ statements, rather than independently determining their veracity. This came to a head in what might be termed WMD-gate1: the failure of journalists, in the run-up to the second Gulf War, to scrutinize George W. Bush administration officials’ claims that the Iraqis had and were ready to use weapons of mass destruction.
That sorry performance led to self-criticism, gnashing of teeth, and, more usefully, an institutionwide pledge to try to do better. And the media has done better, insofar as that is possible, given the unforgiving nature of deadlines, the shrinking of newsrooms, and the extreme slipperiness of the truth. One particular innovation is the “fact-check” piece, especially visible during campaigns, in which a candidate or a political ad’s representations are broken down and evaluated for veracity. Most news organizations do this in some form, and a few have turned it into a brand, including the Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact.com, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, and The Washington Post’s blog, The Fact Checker.
You can search these sites top to bottom, and you will not find lie or any of its variants (other than in direct quotes from people who have invoked them). That may seem odd, especially in view of the sites’ ranking systems, the Rotten-Tomato lowest ratings of which coyly imply the word: PolitiFact’s “Pants on Fire,” FactCheck’s “Whopper,” and the Post‘s “Four Pinocchios.” The aforementioned critics say that this is because the journalists who put together these sites lack gumption, just like the rest of their ilk.
The criticism reached a dull roar last week after Paul Ryan gave a convention speech that, according to virtually every analysis, did not strictly adhere to the facts. The magazine The Week published a roundup of the reporting on it titled “The Media Coverage of Paul Ryan’s Speech: 15 Euphemisms for ‘Lying.’” It quoted such formulations as:
Initially, the seemingly militant avoidance of the l-word may indeed seem odd, especially for admittedly partisan outlets like The New Republic and Talking Points Memo. Yet when I read that list, I get all warm and fuzzy inside. It tells me that even in this odd and shape-shifting moment, journalism has still managed to retain an honorable and becoming epistemological modesty.
To assert that someone has lied is to say that he or she has uttered, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, “a false statement made with intent to deceive.” The “false statement” part is the proper province of journalism, and the media is on that case. The deal-killer is “intent to deceive.” Roughly the second week of my introductory-journalism classes, I tell students that two things will get them thrown into journalism jail: predicting the future and reporting what anyone thinks, intends, wants, or hopes. “You do not have a crystal ball and you are not a mind reader,” is my go-to line. It is not entirely impossible for a good reporter to write that a statement is a lie. But to do so, the reporter would not only have to establish the statement as false but also have the speaker on the record or on tape acknowledging an awareness of that falseness. A perjury conviction wouldn’t hurt, either.
Absent that, there’s a whole thesaurus entry full of useful and usable verbs and phrases, many of which were applied to Ryan: twist the truth, mislead, misstate, exaggerate, be selective with facts, prevaricate. (The OED definition of the last: “To deviate from straightforwardness; to speak or act in an evasive way; to quibble, equivocate.”) Journalists should have at them, and continue to leave lie to civilians.
1“Might be termed”: hah! I just Googled “WMD-gate” and got 620,000 hits. So much for trying to tell yourself, in the Internet age, that you’ve come up with a fresh and witty formulation. Ω
[Ben Yagoda (B.A. Yale, M.A. University of Pennsylvania) is the author of Memoir: A History (2009), About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (2000), and Will Rogers: A Biography (1993) and the coeditor of The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (1997). He has contributed articles, essays, and reviews to more than fifty national publications, including Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, and the New York Times Book Review. Yagoda has been a Lingua Franca blogger at the Chronicle of Higher Education since August 2011.) He is a professor of journalism and literary non-fiction in the Department of English at the University of Delaware.]
Copyright © 2012 The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
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