Michael Medved has a great column today at townhall.com on the importance of language in framing issues.
Maybe it's my love of journalism and fascination with the law that makes me so interested in the language of issues. As a journalist, I learned the way words frame events in a story. For example, when doing police beat stories, one always refers to the "alleged" crime because to simply state a crime was commited passes judgement on the accused, intentionally or not. In law, the jury verdict is "not guilty," not "innocent" because there is a clear difference between the two.
There are plenty of other examples where the language journalists use frames the debate. In some cases, it isn't done to create objectivity but to persuade. Journalists know that the language they use persuades readers, even in supposedly "objective" news stories. This is why there are style guides such as the Associated Press Stylebook, which is designed to prevent bias (intentional and unintentional) in reporting.
Unfortunately, there are many examples where journalists use terminology that unfairly frames a debate or creates a false impression. Medved gave a few examples.
Whenever conservatives work for state or federal constitutional amendments to reinforce the existing definition of male-female marriage, for instance, leading newspapers and TV networks describe such efforts as “gay marriage bans.” A simple declaration affirming marriage as “a union between one man and one woman” bans no private behavior whatever, but rather underlines the policy under which government grants its strongest endorsement to one specific type of relationship. A restatement of the traditional basis for marriage amounts to a “gay marriage ban” no more than existing marriage laws constitute an “incest ban” or a “ban on interspecies relationships.” Defining one sort of union as uniquely approved doesn’t mean that another sort of connection is specifically forbidden, or banned.
In a similar vein, nearly all major press outlets have stopped using the phrases “pro life” or “pro choice” to describe the opposing positions on the abortion issue. The most common phraseology now centers on “abortion rights” --- as in, “Rudy Giuliani offends GOP orthodoxy with his support for abortion rights” or “Mitt Romney once supported, but now opposes, abortion rights.” Such outrageously unfair language ignores the fact that no pro life candidate or advocate would ever say “I oppose abortion rights” – since they don’t believe that abortion constitutes a genuine “right” in any sense.
If a newspaper suggested that Senator Chuck Schumer opposed “Second Amendment rights” or “gun owners’ rights” the New York Democrat would have legitimate grounds for complaint: he describes himself as “pro gun control” not “anti gun rights.” If those who favor more restrictions on firearms generally avoid designation as opponents of any sort of rights, why is it appropriate to characterize pro-lifers as foes of “abortion rights”? After all, gun rights actually appear, explicitly, in the text of the Constitution whereas “abortion rights” rely on the famous (and gaseous) “emanations of penumbras” that Justice William O. Douglas first conjured out of his fertile imagination in 1965.
Liberals argue that the mainstream media is conservative because media outlets are owned by a few large corporations. This argument sounds appealing, but the problem is that the heart of the media is its use of language, and that language overwhelmingly favors liberals and liberal causes. Whether we discuss gun control, abortion, the war in Iraq, gay marriage, firing political appointments, declassifying information, listening to terrorists' phonecalls, or a host of other issues, the framing of the MSM is clear and it is liberal.
Cross-posted at Common Sense Political Thought.
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