Glenn Greenwald has a good article at Salon about the ways in which the threat of terrorism is being used by some to argue for various violations of the Contstitution and our civil rights. He also highlights the media’s complicity in stoking these fears.
I thought of the article last night when I happened to see a “teaser” on the local news for a story about the recent attempted airplane bombing. The newscaster said something along the lines of “In the wake of the recent attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines 253, Americans are increasingly worried about airport security.” It was a good reminder to always be on the lookout for weaselly abstractions in writing or speaking. “Americans,” “everybody,” “more and more people,” “sources,” and my personal favorite, usually used by politicans, “folks,” are all signals that a tendentious argument (or simple hogwash) disguised as an assertion of fact is being proffered.
Television news teasers are meant to be vague and unspecific, of course, because they’re supposed to entice you into sitting through the commercials to find out what they’re actually talking about. But it’s good to keep in mind some of the best advice I’ve ever come across, political, aesthetic, or otherwise, concerning language. From Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style:
16. Use definite, specific, concrete language. Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.
It’s hard advice to live up to consistently, but our media could certainly be doing a better job of it.
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