Warning: War, Death, Sam Harris
Here’s the part that horrifies me: when I hear “wedding party hit by air-strike” I assume that it’s notable because it’s a wedding party, and that what we’re seeing is just probability in action.
Lots of other people are getting killed, too, but we just hear about the notable bombings. I suppose part of that is setting up a circular notion of “notable” – we noticed it because we noticed it. But than that means there is a gigantic amount of misery going on that is not notable – it’s the tip of the iceberg that we see, not the much larger mass below the surface.
This is slightly old, but it’s happening all the time [nyt]
Wedding Is Hit by Airstrike in Yemen, Killing More Than 20
I can’t read that without noting the Orwellian elements: the use of passive voice (“is hit”), the vagueness (“more than 20”), and the blurring of the importance of the individual. Does the individual matter? “More than 20” were killed – does it matter that one of them was the bride? Or that the would-have-been groom was badly wounded, too, and wound up in intensive care?
When I read the article with a deconstructing eye, I can’t help but see how the New York Times is complicit in downplaying the event. Let’s look at more:
An airstrike on a wedding party, carried out by the Saudi-led coalition waging war in Yemen, killed more than 20 people and wounded dozens of others, including the groom, Yemeni officials said Monday.
The airstrike was carried out by “the Saudi-led coalition” – the Times gently points us toward Saudi Arabia as the perpetrators. After all, they are leading the coalition. How many of the Times’ readers are aware that France, Britain, and the United States are part of that coalition? In a non-bizzaro-world version of The Times wouldn’t that read:
The US/French/British alliance, directed by Saudi Arabia, bombed a wedding party.
When we read The Times’ take on the event, is it unintentionally directing the reader away from the US/French/British involvement in what is clearly a war crime – or is it intentional? To what degree is The Times complicit, as propagandists? Are we willing to believe that professional journalists, who are supposed to analyze and report on events, managed to accidentally hit on a formulation that directs the reader’s attention away from the US/French/British involvement?
The strike hit an isolated village in northwestern Yemen, where families had gathered to celebrate, late Sunday.
Because strikes, you know, just do things like that. It’s what they do. The Times directs us away from the facts – the precious facts – while still reporting on the event. There are some facts: “the strike hit an isolated…” but more facts are left out. Whose aircraft dropped those bombs? Why? Under what rules of engagement does ${whoever} have such poor fire-control that their strikes hit a wedding?
It fascinates me and horrifies me at the same time – here we have one of “the world’s great newspapers” – and they’re not serving the news, they’re manipulating the news. It’s like reading a piece by Sam Harris [stderr] and slicing it finely, only to discover that it’s extraordinarily manipulative. Which leaves you with the question: “is this manipulation accidental or deliberate?”
To ask the question is to answer it: nobody is instinctively or accidentally manipulative like this. It doesn’t happen. Pathological liars sound like Donald Trump – disconnected from reality – whereas this is finely manipulating our reality through careful and deliberate use of language.
After the attack, people posted online what they said were survivors collecting mangled and charred bodies. One widely shared video showed a young boy clinging to the shirt of his dead father, crying, “No, no, no.”
“… what they said were”
Such a fascinating construction! “… what they said were” throws a very slight shading of doubt. Were they, or weren’t they the survivors? By implying a slight uncertainty the New York Times is dangling red meat for conspiracy theorists to make sandwiches of evil from – maybe those people were “crisis actors” or something. Am I demanding too much honesty, here? Am I being unreasonable? Why doesn’t The New York Times report this as:
After the attack, people posted pictures of survivors collecting mangled and charred bodies.
It’s similar to the process of deconstructing Sam Harris: if he adds an extra word where he otherwise might not have had a word, you check and see if that word is manipulative or otherwise carefully chosen for effect. The writers at The New York Times are better than Harris; it’s doubly distressing to see them making the same maneuvers.
The Times offers some analysis, a ways into the article:
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab countries, with support from Britain and the United States, have been bombing Yemen for more than three years to try to remove an Iranian-aligned rebel group known as the Houthis from the capital, Sana, and to restore the internationally recognized government.
Now, we see a statement of fact. That’s nice and direct, isn’t it? Except it’s subtly keeping its thumb on the truth-o-meter, by accepting as fact one part of the sentence, in order to ease through the idea that another part of the sentence is also factual. What do I mean? Imagine if we re-wrote that sentence to present the same standard of truth as the sentence we looked at earlier:
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab countries, with support from Britain and the United States, have been bombing Yemen for more than three years supposedly to remove an Iranian-aligned rebel group known as the Houthis from the capital, Sana, and to restore the internationally recognized government.
Is that a big difference? It’s much more subtle well-poisoning than Sam Harris uses, but this is The New York Times, we expect higher quality work from them. If that were “supposedly” were positioned in that sentence the way I positioned it, it subtly calls into question the claim that the Saudis are trying to “restore the internationally recognized government.” Let’s bend it further, for the purposes of stress-testing the sentence’s structure:
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab countries, with support from Britain and the United States, have been bombing Yemen for more than three years supposedly to remove an Iranian-aligned rebel group known as the Houthis from the capital, Sana, and to try to restore the internationally recognized government.
Let’s continue:
The conflict has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced millions and caused what United Nations officials have called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
How naughty of “the conflict” to just go and do that. Let’s re-write that one, too:
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab countries, with support from Britain and the United States have killed more than 10,000 people, displaced millions and caused what United Nations officials have called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
I’m just shuffling words around, but words have meaning. My choice of position and my choice of the words has radically changed the tone of the explanation, but my re-written version is true, based on what The New York Times itself said, just a few sentences earlier.
As Howard Zinn says, history is as much what we don’t report as what we do: what we leave out matters as much as what we put in. And when I deconstruct this reporting from a great, reputable, newspaper, my picture of historical truth turns to dust. Elsewhere, the same incident is reported as: [in]
Yemen: ‘At least 20 killed including bride’ after airstrike by Saudi-led coalition hits wedding party
Wait, what? They got the bride, too? Call me a romantic but the tenor of the story changes substantially when it’s reported with the death of the bride at her own wedding. I know that it does not matter – everyone who died or was wounded has suffered unnecessarily – but there is an emotional story-arc that gets invoked in me as I imagine the bride and groom, perhaps blown apart just as they were about to kiss. That emotional story-arc is manipulation (me manipulating myself, or more precisely “my emotional reaction to the situation as reported”) you can imagine how that flashing instant of fire and noise could be turned into a movie about those people’s lives and love.
Saudi officials blame the Houthis, saying their fighters hide in civilians areas and divert aid meant for civilians to take care of their fighters.
The New York Times blandly carries forward one of the oldest attempts to excuse a war crime: “they’re not fighting fair.” Can we fault them for not mentioning that that’s no excuse at all? The fact that Houthis may be hiding in civilian areas does not excuse bombing a wedding.
Do you think it is unfair of me to declare that The New York Times has taken a side in its reporting of this incident? Is this fair and balanced journalism?
Propaganda embedded in everything forces me to run my brain extra hard, as I try to deconstruct the subtext in everything. I realize that that’s what conspiracy theorists do; they cherry-pick out the confirming details in the text and the subtext. The way news stories are told today has made me so allergic to propaganda, I see it everywhere and that makes me want to shut down and stop reading, stop thinking, stop seeing. Because all I see is lies, lies, lies. The line between where I am, and a conspiracy theorist is they see lies, lies, lies, and fragments of truth.
I used to believe that journalists were concerned with the truth. I was so fucking naive. Like a lover betrayed, my hatred for them is profound, and I look at everything closer than before. I spiral into paranoia.
Are you saying that holding a wedding at a hospital in Yemen might not be a good idea?
Reginald Selkirk@#1:
Are you saying that holding a wedding at a hospital in Yemen might not be a good idea?
I bet you were the kind of kid they told “don’t cross the streams” and you immediately asked “why not?”
That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. You actually need to know the answer, so that you know how hard you need to work to avoid crossing the streams. If it’s insanely catastrophic, you need fail-safe, multiply-redundant interlocks on the Particle Throwers so that not more than one can shoot at any time, regardless of where they’re pointed at. Actually, you need to reconsider using proton beams at all. If crossing the streams just causes slightly annoying sparks, then yes, it’s good to know you should avoid it, but you don’t really need to take additional precautions (and when there are sparks, you’ll know why).
Marcus, I think you have a perfectly healthy attitude to news. Too bad it’s so utterly exhausting.
What I’m going to say next is only about myself, about how I use words. I don’t know about other people, so you may take it with a grain of salt. That being said, if I was the writer, I would be doing this instinctively rather than deliberately.
Personally, I use language instinctively. Most of the time, I don’t deliberately contemplate my choice of words. For example, if I’m in a formal situation, I never think: “Hmm, this is a formal situation, I shouldn’t say ‘this sucks,’ instead I should opt for the more appropriate alternative ‘this is bad.’” I just instinctively say or write whatever words or phrases I’m used to using in this kind of situation. When I write a scientific paper, I use different words, phrases and sentence constructions compared to when I’m writing a casual e-mail to a friend. And I never deliberately pick and choose words; it’s always instinctive for me.
Even when my choice of words shifts over time, the change itself remains instinctive. For example, I first learned German in the university where I always used the language in more formal contexts. When moving to Germany, at first, while talking to my newly made German friends, I kept using the more formal words despite the casual situation. I did know many casual German expressions and phrases, I just never used them, because I simply wasn’t used to using casual German language. Later, after living in Germany for a few weeks, the way how I spoke German changed and I started using more and more casual language. I started speaking the same way how my German friends spoke. This change was in no way deliberate, it just happened on its own.
Anyway, my point is that if I was a journalist, I would get used to the kind of language my colleagues use and thus I would be using the same words and sentence constructions instinctively. I wouldn’t be the evil and immoral journalist who seeks to mislead the readers and manipulate their perception of events, and who intentionally picks words accordingly.
On the other hand, of course it’s also perfectly possible that every one of the quotes you gave was intentional and deliberate use of manipulative language. The way I see it—there’s no way for me to know whether it was deliberate or not, because I cannot tell what was happening in the writer’s head when they wrote this news article. There’s simply not enough proof for me to conclude that it was either intentional or unintentional.
I have a master’s degree in philology, and one of the courses I took in university was about sociolinguistics. I remember a lecture about registers (register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting). In that lecture we also discussed text types. My professor gave us a task to describe some identical event in accordance with various text types. Let’s pick any event (for example, a person gets injured in a car accident) and write several texts—how would you describe this event if you were writing a news article, a novel, a report, a scientific paper, etc. text types. For the news article professor specifically instructed us to use phrases like “it was said that,” “it seemed like,” and so on. We were also instructed to focus on facts and not talk about emotions. When describing a car accident in a novel, the writer should focus on the victim, their suffering, their feelings, how it impacts their further life, basically, their story. When writing a news article, you have to skip all that and say: “On Wednesday, June 27th, a car crash happened in Berlin, Germany. Two people dead, five injured.” We were also instructed to use passive tense. Journalists tend to use a specific language, and they are taught to do so. They don’t just write in whatever way they feel like. By the way, in newspapers there are various types of articles. What language you are supposed to use and what things to focus on depends on the type of article.
Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not justifying manipulating readers’ perception of the news. I’m just saying that “… what they said were” and the resulting manipulation might not necessary be intentional. That’s just how journalists are taught to write.
It depends. You should compare the kind of language they use in this article with the kind of language they use when describing the actions of the other side (the supposed enemy). If they write “it was told that the coalition might have. . .” in one article, and afterwards they write “Vladimir Putin killed people” in another article, then, yes, that would indicate The New York Times taking a side. On the other hand, if the journalists consistently use the same kind of language when reporting war crimes regardless of which side commits them, then they are not taking sides, then the journalists are simply following the standard newspaper writing style.
Oh, and I fully agree with you that the words you quoted do manipulate the readers’ perception of events. And, of course, I don’t like it when somebody uses deceptive language in order to diminish the perceived severity of war crimes. It’s only the journalists’ intentions that I don’t feel so sure about.
I occasionally tend to watch Putin’s news channels (in Russian, of course; the news that are targeted to Russians living in Russia). Mostly because of curiosity. Besides, it’s a really weird surreal experience. When reading/watching that stuff, it’s obvious that it’s all lies, and it’s fully deliberate. It’s just so blatant. With Western media (well, it depends, it’s not like all of them are the same) I’m no longer so sure. It’s not always such obvious lies anymore. Nor is it obvious that any particular manipulation is intentional. Thus I’m not sure about how justified paranoia is.
By the way, some journalists are concerned with truth. Others aren’t—they just want to push their personal agendas. Then there are also journalists who fail to realize that what they are spreading is factually incorrect. There is no reason to hate all journalists. They are just people, and some of them are better than others.
Marcus I think you are correct to apply that standard to the NYT as to other venerable papers, I’m not sure it’s entirely healthy, because it is so exhausting.While it will become less exhausting and more reflexive the more you do it, I also think it’s important to choose where and to what subjects you apply the analysis, because applying it to everything you read is just too tiring. And too depressing.
cvoinescu@#3:
Marcus, I think you have a perfectly healthy attitude to news. Too bad it’s so utterly exhausting.
Shit, I was hoping you all would convince me that I’m still getting a pony for christmas.
Ieva Skrebele@#4:
What I’m going to say next is only about myself, about how I use words. I don’t know about other people, so you may take it with a grain of salt. That being said, if I was the writer, I would be doing this instinctively rather than deliberately.
Fair enough. I think I sort of agree. I don’t think Sam Harris is sitting there in a dark room in a high-backed chair gloating about how he’s going to fool his readers, and I don’t think the writers at the NYT do that, either. However, they both appear to approach certain things from a certain perspective that implicitly slants the way they explain things. In the case of Harris, I think I did an OK job of arguing that he has to be deliberately cherry-picking his facts – but that’s what we call “making an argument” right?
Like, when I say “I am trying to dismiss the field of psychology as being based on foundational principles that we now know are wrong or unsupported bad science.” – I am selecting the data-points on which I base that view. I am weighing some facts as more significant than others.
I believe that that is what “having an opinion” is. It’s forming an opinion about something, based on our interpretation of facts (and other opinions) and is inherently subjective.
I just instinctively say or write whatever words or phrases I’m used to using in this kind of situation. When I write a scientific paper, I use different words, phrases and sentence constructions compared to when I’m writing a casual e-mail to a friend. And I never deliberately pick and choose words; it’s always instinctive for me.
But, in the comments I’ve read by you, you tend to be pretty scrupulous about clearly saying “I think” or “I do ${this}” when you are delineating your personal experience rather than making a general claim. That’s the essence of honest writing, I think. There are certain assumptions we make – which is that when someone says something that is obviously their opinion, that they are basing that opinion on their interpretation of reality, which must be partial to at least some degree. You appear to be saying something like that if you were writing for The New York Times you might well be writing your reporting using constructs similar to the ones I am pointing out, and that you wouldn’t be doing it deliberately, it’d be “how Ieva reports on a story.”
It seems that leads me to the question of whether something is a lie, if the person telling it is arguing for a fully-formed opinion based on what they see as facts. They just might be wrong; it’s not a lie.
Anyway, my point is that if I was a journalist, I would get used to the kind of language my colleagues use and thus I would be using the same words and sentence constructions instinctively. I wouldn’t be the evil and immoral journalist who seeks to mislead the readers and manipulate their perception of events, and who intentionally picks words accordingly.
Yeah. I could see Sam Harris honestly offering the same defense, namely that that’s just how Sam argues about things – his well-poisoning flourishes are simply one of the many ways (including what he sees as facts and what he believes is reasoning) to get someone to adopt his viewpoint. That’s what “arguing” is, I think. It’s not outright lying, it’s not even blatantly manipulating the discussion, it’s just putting your thumb on the scales a little bit when the audience doesn’t notice it.
The way I see it—there’s no way for me to know whether it was deliberate or not, because I cannot tell what was happening in the writer’s head when they wrote this news article. There’s simply not enough proof for me to conclude that it was either intentional or unintentional.
I accept that. The problem I have, I suppose, is when I notice that the language is tipping things entirely in one direction. It’s not as though, in the Times piece, it was being skeptical about everything. It was minimizing the claims of the victims and de-emphasizing the involvement of the US/UK/France and to a lesser degree the Saudis. The use of passive voice was in the service of a particular viewpoint, in other words. That looks a bit convenient.
Let’s pick any event (for example, a person gets injured in a car accident) and write several texts—how would you describe this event if you were writing a news article, a novel, a report, a scientific paper, etc. text types. For the news article professor specifically instructed us to use phrases like “it was said that,” “it seemed like,” and so on.[…]
OK, that is flippin’ fascinating!
Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not justifying manipulating readers’ perception of the news. I’m just saying that “… what they said were” and the resulting manipulation might not necessary be intentional. That’s just how journalists are taught to write.
Yep. Yet they don’t write things like:
“Yesterday two airplanes hit the world trade center buildings in New York and there was substantial loss of life…” I think that they fairly represent that there was intent behind the event. I suspect that passive voice was not used widely in reporting that particular event.
Computer technical manuals and computer security books tend to use passive voice a lot: systems fail (they are not “caused to fail”) mistakes were made. That sort of thing. I once had someone who I considered “a real writer” review some stuff I had written and they were screaming about how much they wished it was bound into book form so that they could throw it against a wall. That experience probably sensitized me to the political implications of the use of passive voice. Once you’ve latched onto that, it becomes difficult to read something like – any history of war – and not see it everywhere. “Mistakes were made” and shit just happens.
You should compare the kind of language they use in this article with the kind of language they use when describing the actions of the other side (the supposed enemy). If they write “it was told that the coalition might have. . .” in one article, and afterwards they write “Vladimir Putin killed people” in another article, then, yes, that would indicate The New York Times taking a side.
Good point. That would be the way to resolve that. It would be similar if we analyzed Sam Harris’ writing and discovered that he makes the same kind of cherry-picked arguments about christians; he doesn’t. Oh, I guess he’s a bigot.
Oh, and I fully agree with you that the words you quoted do manipulate the readers’ perception of events. And, of course, I don’t like it when somebody uses deceptive language in order to diminish the perceived severity of war crimes. It’s only the journalists’ intentions that I don’t feel so sure about.
I understood that you were not defending the particular wording of that particular piece. And I agree with you, if there’s any agenda being worked, it’s being applied very subtly (perhaps a centiHarris’ worth of windage) (By the way, I suspect that Harris is just instinctively an asshole on some topics, he’s probably so fluent at cherry-picking his arguments that he cherry-picks his own assessment of his arguments, and doesn’t realize he’s doing that.)
By the way, some journalists are concerned with truth. Others aren’t—they just want to push their personal agendas. Then there are also journalists who fail to realize that what they are spreading is factually incorrect. There is no reason to hate all journalists.
Fair enough. But I’ve learned to distrust all of them. Now I have to carefully scrutinize everything. [I have another posting on this topic that I need to write, which adds additional information about why I feel the way I do]
I grew up as a New Yorker, and The New York Times occupied the sort of place in my world that Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather occupied to a television consumer. I was always suspicious of the television talking heads, but I always took The New York Times very seriously. My mistake.
jazzlet@#5:
I’m not sure it’s entirely healthy, because it is so exhausting
It really is. And, as Ieva explained, it doesn’t help anyway because we don’t really have any way of knowing if it’s accidental or deliberate. Which appears to matter to me as a moral issue.
Ieva Skrebele, I am pretty sure most journalists are acutely aware of the “virtues” of the passive voice. They use it (and other techniques) to avoid making potentially libelous statements, but those are easy to spot and don’t flow as well. This article plays at a different level. There is some artful dodging there, not just journalistic register and habit.
Wikipedia’s own article about weasel words and the like is pretty good. It touches only on some of the problems Marcus pointed out in the NYT text, but it’s a good start.
After Marcus’s detailed response, mine, especially with the reference to Wikipedia, sounds a bit patronizing. That was not my intention. Sorry.
I think sometimes the best one can do is see the thumb, note it’s presence and the implications for the truth of an article, then read with those filters. A bit like in the UK whether a paper refers to Derry, Londonderry or Londonderry/Derry tells you all you need to know about their attitude to the various parties in Northern Ireland so you know what filter you need to read the article, but more complicated.
You know, every day I go to work I have the safe assumption that the hospital ISN’T going to be hit by an airstrike. The same went for my wedding. Weird.
You’ve read Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, right? The trick is to employ people who have so thoroughly absorbed the viewpoint you want to promote that they can’t help but write in this way without even noticing that they’re doing it. Noticing that they’re doing it would require a degree of self-awareness and the ability to question the propaganda frame from a different viewpoint. These people are true believers.
As for “why weddings?”, that’s easy – they’re targets of convenience. They’re the biggest social gatherings in those settlements, so they provide an excellent opportunity to kill a bunch of people at once. Like how suicide bombers hit marketplaces or mosques at Friday prayers.
An inadvertent admission that the wedding was specifically targeted. They can’t credibly claim they were aiming for something else, because it’s isolated; there is nothing else to hit. If they hit that village, it’s because they were aiming for that village; a civilian target.
In blog comments you are free to choose whatever language you like. There are no rules, no guidelines. It’s a totally different matter for other text types. For example, I didn’t use words “I think” even once in my master’s thesis. In fact, I didn’t even use the word “I” there. When there are guidelines about how to write something, I follow them. I have also written a few articles for an online magazine, and there I used a somewhat different language than what I’m using now.
I agree. I suspect that a significant portion of those journalists who are spreading lies actually believe in them. I’m willing to believe that majority of humanity are nice people who wouldn’t intentionally spread lies and manipulate others.
Personally, I perceive it as extremely hard to write impartially about some topic when I have already sided with somebody. I instinctively use words that benefit my side. For example, if I had to write a neutral and unbiased report about some religious event (and my personal opinion about religions is extremely negative), I would instinctively use words that portray the religion in negative light. In order to correct for this bias, I would have to constantly and intentionally check my text for bias and edit out as much of it as possible.
It is only reasonable for citizens to side with their government’s position. After all, it doesn’t feel nice to perceive your own country as guilty of atrocities. Thus it’s likely that many journalists actually believe in what their politicians say, they have already sided with their own country and thus this bias they already have seeps into their writing unintentionally.
I learned arguing in a debate club where I got called out every time I said anything that was either illogical or constituted a logical fallacy. Thus I learned not to use fallacies in my arguments. I don’t use them even when I believe that I could get away with it, because my audience probably wouldn’t notice them. On the other hand, somebody else who learned arguing in a place where logical fallacies are welcome could just get used to using these kinds of techniques. Once you get used to using manipulative techniques, you use them instinctively afterwards. If other people around you use them too, you can even start believing that this is how one is supposed to argue.
I don’t fully agree with this real writer.
Would history books really benefit from saying, for example, “George W. Bush killed thousands of people”? When tragedies or atrocities or war crimes happen, there are multiple causes. When people make decisions and do things, it always happens in some context. It would be another type of bias if historians used language that assigns all the blame on one person. (Incidentally, that’s exactly how Soviet history books were written. Whenever something bad happened, it was always exclusively the fault of the USA.)
As for programming textbooks, those are written with the intent of helping the student learn how to write software. Does the student really need to know that “programmer John Doe made such and such mistake in his code”? Is this additional information necessary or even useful for the student? The chances are that the student simply wants to learn how to code rather than learn about John Doe’s life story and career.
I have seen some writers attempting to write textbooks, which are less boring and more fun. Textbooks that include stories, anecdotes, jokes. Textbooks that feel less like a textbook and more like a novel. Occasionally some writers have nailed it, and the resulting textbooks were great. Unfortunately, on many other occasions the result was the exact opposite—the book might end up being fun to read but bad to learn from. I know that some other people have different preferences, but, personally, I want my textbooks to be logical—information has to be systematized and arranged in some logical sequence. Real life stories and anecdotes don’t fulfill this criteria, they are just too chaotic.
Of course, it depends on the subject and the individual author, but, generally speaking, I’m perfectly happy with how writers use language in textbooks. If a novelist starts complaining that textbook authors don’t write their books in the same way how novels are written, I perceive the complaint as unreasonable. After all, there are good reasons why authors should use different language for various text types.
Of course, I do perceive your point as valid. It’s just that, in my opinion, “never use passive, always assign blame” is not a good strategy either. Probably it’s a matter of finding a reasonable balance between always blaming somebody for shit happening and never blaming anybody for shit happening.
cvoinescu @#9
Theoretically, it’s perfectly possible to use logical fallacies or words that introduce bias without having ever heard about these terms and without knowing what they are. By the way, before learning about these problems, I periodically unknowingly used these words. Only after getting some textbooks about this topic I started to intentionally try to avoid such language. In my opinion, using words that introduce bias is easy and it happens without any conscious effort. Abstaining from these words is what requires conscious effort and has to be done intentionally.
In my university, before we were allowed to start working on our bachelor papers, we had to take a course about scientific writing. A significant portion of that course was all the stuff in this Wikipedia article and it went way beyond this introduction. I don’t know whether other universities also teach this stuff, but they probably do. Anyway, I have no doubts that every journalist must be aware that some words are value laden and that language can introduce bias.
However, it is still possible to unintentionally use biased language even if you have taken university courses about the problem. Personally, as long as I have any opinion about some topic, I don’t think about it in neutral terms. I think about the topic in terms that support my position. In my case, abstaining from biased language is what takes intentional effort.
I try not to assume intentional malice when other explanations are possible. I cannot know what is happening in other people’s heads either, thus, unless I have decisive proof, I won’t accuse them of intentionally doing bad things.
The choice of words might be deliberate and fully intentional. It might not be. I cannot know for sure.
Ieva Skrebele@#15:
I try not to assume intentional malice when other explanations are possible.
I think that’s the crux of the matter. I have started looking for actual malice as a leading explanation for damn near everything.
If my pizza is not good, I suspect the CIA. After I’ve eliminated the CIA, then it’s probably the KGB. Or NSA hackers. And I don’t trust that if I complain, the New York Times wouldn’t minimize my complaint by using subtly tilted language: “alleged pizza consumer is claimed to have said the pizza was bad, says a reliable Saudi source.”
@#16
And here I was thinking that I’m more cynical than you are. Now it seems like this is not the case after all.
Marcus Ranum @ # 16: If my pizza is not good, I suspect the CIA.
Remember that anchovies bioaccumulate toxins from chemtrails at higher rates than even pepperoni pigs!
Pierce R. Butler@#18:
Remember that anchovies bioaccumulate toxins from chemtrails at higher rates than even pepperoni pigs!
Fortunately, I do not like anchovies on my pizza!
(My favorite pizza topping is my own invention: olive oil, roasted garlic cloves, black pepper, and scallops)
Of course hospitals. What else could that big red cross say, other then “Hit me for maximum point score!”
Disgusting, vile, evil. I wonder when they will drop the pretense and say: “Oh well, we just like blowing folks up that can’t defend themself in any way.”
The testimonies of WW2 StuKa-pilots come to mind: Why did you strafe these people on the street? Because we could and had nothing better to do! Making red mist was worth it!
Depressing.
avalus@#20:
“Oh well, we just like blowing folks up that can’t defend themself in any way.”
I cannot recommend The Battle of Algiers strongly enough. The moment when the partisan says “If you give us some of your fighter jets, we’ll stop using baby carriages.” It was a life-changing instant for me; I understood things about warfare completely differently. Those thoughts being: of course no military want to have a fair fight. Fair fights suck! What a military wants is to have a great big smack-down against a nearly incapable foe! The best thing a military can have is to be at 20,000 feet dropping high explosive on people whose weapons can only reach 10,000 feet: you want to be able to kill with complete impunity. Because everything else, sucks for both sides. War is great as long as it only sucks for one side.
OMG Marcus you’re amazing! No one has ever put seafood on pizza before!
http://www.blueseafoodbar.com/LUNCH%20%20Lunch.pdf
http://www.lazzaraspizza.com/our-menu.html
https://www.motorinony.com/location/east-village/#food-1
I mean there are hardly any that I could find in NYC with 30 seconds of the googling and such!
Raucous Indignation@#22:
OMG Marcus you’re amazing! No one has ever put seafood on pizza before!
Right, I know! But I had never encountered it before I did it, so in my world, yep, that’s how it was. I had to do it first. It’s a crazy thing. I was all excited and everything and it was super yummy and I was thrilled.
You’re behind the times, man. These days everyone has their own private reality, or something.
(When I started making my pizzas that way, the web did not exist, nor did google. I did not check at the university library in the card catalog and admittedly I didn’t look and see if there were any books on pizza-making at the bookstore, because I already knew how to do the pizza-making part.
I am not, seriously, trying to claim that great innovation. I’m quite sure some Italian did it about 20 minutes after the scallop was invented. Or maybe it was the scallop came first, then the pizza.)
(Joking aside, if someone has an idea that is new to them, it’s still a new idea, right? Now I am sitting here wondering if the whole idea of originality is kind of dubious. If some Roman made scallop pizza in Pompei before the disaster, how would they know, because some Greek might have beaten them to it.)
Marcus, clam pie has been served in NYC for longer than I have been alive. The mixed seafoods usually have squid and clams and other shellfish ad lib. I can’t imagine how long that has been going on. But yes, I agree that if you grew up with no contact with pizza or seafood of any sort then yours is, indeed, an original idea.
You go you! Put it on your business cards! And blog!
Also fairly certain scallops pre-date pizza, but it’s a tough call. Early pizza is under-represented in the fossil record due to being a cartilaginous species.
Raucous Indignation@#24:
Marcus, clam pie has been served in NYC for longer than I have been alive
Yeah, but it didn’t exist for me. I didn’t even hear rumors.
Damn it, whoever said “ignorance is bliss” fucking lied.
I just agreed with you!! I’m used to being ignored by my family and employees, but now you too!?!?
This kind of deflective phrasing seems to be a core principle of the BBC. No matter the topic, they take pains to make clear someone else said [something]. In most (innocuous) cases this leaves the impression they’re simply deathly afraid of saying something that might turn out to be wrong later on. “Ye gods! But actually we didn’t say it, we just said that Mr Wobble of Upsington said it. Don’t blame us! Please!”
It’s pretty annoying and makes the BBC look like a grapevine for hearsay and rumour sometimes. “Professor Scientist says the sky is blue and claims that breathable air contains oxygen.” Gosh, what if s/he’s right? So glad the BBC kept us informed of this exciting possibility. But it’s not always quite so innocent, I suppose. Closer attention will have to be paid, says Komarov, a random blog commenter accosted on the street by a group of nervous interviewers.
In Fiji in 1980something I saw people putting ketchup on their pizza.
In Japan in 1980somethingelse, I had tuna and corn on a pizza.
.
A pizza with a radius of “z” and an depth of “a” has a volume of “pizza”.
– read that on the internets somewhere
UK defamation law?
Owlmirror, that’s a depressingly plausible theory.
Owlmirror@#29:
UK defamation law?
I’d buy that; a visible cooling effect on speech.
chigau@#28:
In Fiji in 1980something I saw people putting ketchup on their pizza.
Is that really a pizza, then? I’d say it’s more like a flat cheese-dog. I refuse to acknowlege such a thing as a “pizza” unless there’s a table in the bioweapons convention specifically forbidding ketchup pizza.
In Japan in 1980somethingelse, I had tuna and corn on a pizza.
Hmmm… I saw someone put banana on a pizza, once.
It is because of these horrible travesties of pizza that I had to invent scallop pizza.
Marcus
As I recall, the Fijians put ketchup on almost all non-Fijian food.
It may have been a political statement of some kind.
chigau@#33:
As I recall, the Fijians put ketchup on almost all non-Fijian food.
It may have been a political statement of some kind.
I knew a cat, once, that carried some of its food, carefully in its mouth, and deposited it in a pile in its litter-box. Perhaps it was one of those kind of communications.
(we stopped feeding the cat that particular flavor of food and the cat never repeated that behaviour)