Serious Introduction

Every single day several hundred collective hours of television news are transmitted in the United States and other English Speaking Countries.

As those of you from the other English Speaking Countries can attest if you have ever visited us and chanced to watch the “news” you will undoubtedly have noticed that it is in general flippantly delivered, facetious, vacuous or surmounted by blonds with cleavage on the scale of the Tekeze Gorge.

As our production of the news becomes ever shoddier, and ever more reliant upon keywords to hold our attention as the news becomes even more capsular and modularized certain trends and patterns arise out of the presentation of news and some enter into our public lives. This is a bad thing.

As language degenerates it becomes increasingly hard to be understood when talking of things more complex than the pelleted, pedestrian Brittany Spears updates that typify The News. George Orwell forecasted this with his fictional language of “Newspeak” with such simplistic constructs as “doubleplusungood” (very bad) and “crimethink” being used to reduce the populace’s capacity for serious thought to the point of, and with the goal of obtaining, universal and homogeneous communist[1] orthodoxy. This is very similar to a Thought-Terminating Cliche[2]
Cable news is now completely hopeless. It either is actively deceitful as in the case of Fox News (even their weather reports are suspect[3]) or simplifies and dichotomizes current affairs to the point that none of its denizens are capable of thinking or voting seriously on these profound matters. The Fox News technique of literally screaming until people pay attention undermines the credibility of The News, thus causing people to regard the news as a product, as light entertainment, or as something of no importance.

It is a testament to the pervasiveness of these three ideas that I have two friends who seem to get their news solely or predominantly from the celebrity gossip website “Drudge Report”. There are also people who regard USA Today as a newspaper[4].

But I am going to focus on what I call deadwords. These are words or phrases which are used incorrectly, or are repeated formulaically. It might initially seem that these two things have different geneses, I think that they actually originate from the same fundamental problem It started with cable news and began to slowly contaminate local news, itself undergoing some changes on the way.

The gatherers and preparers of cable news become increasingly politicized and commercialized over the past, perhaps twenty, years. As a result they have become less and less intelligent and less and less educated as intelligence and erudition are off-putting to a generation of whom many were raised[5] almost entirely by conformist, orthodox, hidebound and outright anti-intellectual public schools. This is a bad thing for an organization hypnotized by ratings and their attendant ad-dollars.
It was discovered that higher ratings could be obtained by simplifying issues. Worse, it was discovered that higher ratings could be obtained by reducing every issue to a stark dichotomy. Worse, it was discovered that having two loudmouthed obnoxious simpletons for each half of that supposed dichotomy was a ratings winner. The result was modern cable news with its characteristic labellings[6], cant phrases, and general idiocy.

Now this has all come to a head and we have a new church of local television newsmen and women who cannot speak properly.

The Words

One of the favorite words of this bunch is “went missing”. For some reason this odious phrase is preferable to “disappeared”, “absconded” or “became lost.” Whenever a white, voluptuous woman is kidnapped and killed apparently by her boyfriend the media has a feeding frenzy and this phrase gets batted around a lot until the remains are located.

“Cachet” is another word that is very popular, but only for the wrong reasons. We often hear the newsreaders speak of “A cachet of weapons.” It seems they are totally oblivious to the fact that they are referring to a property of weapons and not a conglomeration therof. When used as a complete sentence this results in garbled nonsense. “The police raided a home and found a cachet of weapons.”

Whenever there is a trivial problem such as erotica being viewed on computers in public libraries the reporter says he “Investigated” the matter. I suppose this means he went and looked at porn on the computers in the public library instead of in his office[7] .What exactly constitutes an investigation? I have heard this phrase used to refer to calling a company about its warranty policy, leaving items behind in hotel rooms to see if staff steal them, and reading a report from the CPSC about defective lunch-boxes.

This term has thus become useless.

Whenever something pathotic or bathetic happens the news refers to it as “emotional”, like clockwork every single day we have “emotional testimony”, “emotional homecoming”, “emotional reunion”, “emotional court rulings”, and “emotional confrontations”. Soon we’ll have “emotional weather.” What emotion exactly? why cant we say “joyful”, “hateful”, “loving”, “tense”, or any other actually descriptive word.

It’s not enough that we give vapid celebrities portmanetau words The News also ascribes physical impossibilities to them “… announced they’re pregnant.” No, that is not possible, unless he’s intergendered. The correct grammer is “…announced she’s pregnant”. Even if referring to both of them, this is still good grammar because both are announcing her pregnancy. Good grief.

A very serious Freudian slip is continually comitted whenever the daily murder was committed with a gun. With excessive emphasis The News proclaims that police arrested/chased/are looking for/are asking the public for help finding “the shooter”. This might just seem a semantic nothing, however if the daily murder is committed with a knife or the fists The News does not refer to “the stabber”, or “the pugilist.” This stems from the anti-private-gun-ownership bias in the media.

Another problem that often arises in this situation is the use of police-speak, although not common I have started to hear The News refer to suspects as “Perps”. In addition to being wrong for obvious reasons, there is no such word. It also leads one to wonder how much of the news is actually rehashed press releases.

This one is very, very serious. “Post Nine Eleven” The News uses this when it is in state-propaganda-organ mode. These three words are used as a literal version of the aformentioned Thought-Terminating Cliche. The Government feeds it to the media and it is used to justify the most horrible iniquities, ranging from universal surveillance to torture. As if the nature of right and wrong could be affected by being attacked?

“Devestation” is the only word used by the news to refer to the scene of a natural disaster. This shows a serious lack of imagination.

Whenever someone rich builds a new school of nursing at one of the local colleges[8], or preforms some other charitable endeavor they are said to be “giving back to the community.” Did they steal from it? This is another Freudian slip. The News is in a delusional world were it is impossible for people to enrich themselves except at the expense of others, and in which wealth is morally wrong.

Might I point out that “Improvised Exposive Devices” are bombs. Just… bombs. This phrase arose from a problem with military culture and should never have been allowed to bother us civilians.

In a similar instance of prolixity, we often hear the word “enemy combatant”. This is a propaganda term used by the federal government to excuse the seemingly everlasting detention of persons who have not been proven to have done anything wrong in of-shore camps were they may reasonable be assumed to be tortured. Like all other government propaganda The News whooped it right up. In addition, It’s a pleonasm, what other kind of combatant would there be?

The News has gotten so stupid that we are all in great danger.

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[1] Whatever that means. The “Newspeak” term Orwell used was “Ingsoc” which means “English Socialism”, it was neither.

[2] Which more formally is a propaganda phrase which is used as an excuse for thinking. “Support our Troops”, “We must fight them there so we don’t fight them here”, “we must [fill-in-the-blank] for national security”, “Global War on Terror” are just a few examples recently popularized by the federal government under the administration of George Bush.

[3] With apologies to Fran Lebowitz!

[4] Including the infamous Lewis.

[5] Not educated, merely—that would be bad enough—but actually raised.

[6] What precisely is a conservative and what is a liberal? If the rigorous definition of those words is used cable news stop making syntactical sense.

[7] Since most Americans under forty are close to or actually functionally illiterate, the ability of libraries to continue existing cannot be explained except that they provide a convenient venue for the satisfying of perverse tastes. As such I don’t see why anyone, even a reporter, would act surprised by this.

[8] Including branch campuses of schools in Buffalo I think there are sixteen in my town… at any event it is a ridiculous number.