Author Topic: Bureaucratic language infects the media  (Read 903 times)

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Online Pandora

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Bureaucratic language infects the media
« on: April 21, 2017, 01:41:20 PM »
Quote
... If there is a singular, shining example of this emergent style of language, it’s to be found not in the language of the corporate world (even though corporations like United freely make use of it to their benefit), but in the tortured and reprehensible term “officer-involved shooting.” The term has crept into the lexicon only recently (around 1989, according to Google’s ngram viewer), and quickly became a hallmark of American policing. It exists for one reason only: to obfuscate the circumstances surrounding police killings of civilians, whether justified or not, and to efface any agency among law enforcement for the use of deadly force.

The term “officer-involved shooting” is a perfect example of bureaucratic speech: It invariably is paired with an active verb (“an officer-involved shooting occurred”) and yet the entire purpose of the construction is to imbue the scene with passivity. Police did not kill anyone; a shooting just occurred and it happened to involve officers. There is no actor in an officer-involved shooting, and not even any real actions. We don’t even technically know who was shot, only that an officer was somehow involved. An entire syntactical arrangement consisting of a subject (“police”), a verb (“shot”), and an object (“a civilian”) are transmuted into a noun (“shooting”) with a compound adjective (“officer-involved”) attached. It’s almost as if nothing took place at all.

... Readers need to know, for example, that journalists who use phrases like “officer-involved shooting” in any context other than a direct quote from law enforcement are derelict. It is law enforcement’s prerogative to use spin and dissimulation to obtain favorable coverage; it is the media’s role to resist this. And yet, this is a role the media has almost wholeheartedly abdicated.

https://longreads.com/2017/04/12/the-elements-of-bureaucratic-style/

H/T American Digest

Very interesting piece, though long, on how the language has been distorted to obscure instead of clarify.
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Offline Libertas

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Re: Bureaucratic language infects the media
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2017, 06:52:23 AM »
Well...

What's good for the goose is also good for the gander...

Everybody say it with me now!  Citizen-based justice!

 ::whoohoo::
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.