There’s also a deep diffidence about pointing out uncomfortable truths. Back in 2000, when I was first writing this column, I was discouraged from using the word “lie” about George W. Bush’s dishonest policy claims. As I recall, I was told that it was inappropriate to be that blunt about the candidate of one of our two major political parties. And something similar may be going on even now, with few people in the media willing to accept the reality that the G.O.P. has nominated someone whose lies are so blatant and frequent that they amount to sociopathy.
Trump Time Capsule #92: ‘How the Media Undermine American Democracy’
The argument of the previous 90-odd entries in this series is that Donald Trump is something genuinely new in the long history of major party nominees. He has absolutely no experience in public office. Almost every day he says or does something that by itself would have disqualified previous nominees. He does not have policies so much as emotional stances. What he has done renders irrelevant the normal “Trump says, but critics answer” approach to journalism.
.. The print version says that Trump is “shelving” his deportation plans and making a dramatic shift toward a more favorable tone on Mexicans and immigrants. The online version says the reverse.
.. Rather it was the seeming demonstration of the journalistic instinct to be on the lookout for a “spirited bid” like this, since it is what reporters think “should” be taking place. After all, this is what a “normal” candidate would do; implicitly the story presents the Trump campaign as normal.
How Does the Language of Headlines Work? The Answer May Surprise You.
there’s a long history to how humble copy editors have developed the weird linguistic tricks that intrigue, shock, and amuse an otherwise cynical audience. What you’ll learn may surprise you (or not).
.. By the end of the 19th century, editors had started playing around with the language of headlines, switching over to using the present tense in headlines, even for events past, and promoting verbs, making action seem more immediate and palpable.
.. tabloids often make liberal use of “headlinese” to sensationalize stories. This means using an expressive, “connotation-rich” vocabulary that is attention-grabbing and promotes curiosity and a strong emotional connection for the reader, unsurprisingly, similar to advertising language, since “the average newspaper is simply a business enterprise that sells news and uses that lure to sell advertising space”
.. No one likes clickbait, and for good reason, but it’s surprisingly effective at generating viral interest, fast, which is exactly what news publications like.
.. in a clickbait headline the experiencer of emotions becomes us, which is as close to the news as you can get: “you won’t believe what happened next,” “…you may never have heard of,” “… will surprise you…” The news builds a relationship directly with the reader, by anticipating how we might feel or what we might know about a situation and giving us a personal stake in the story.
.. one of the ways this is done is very simply through forward referencing to lure in readers. For example when we use a pronoun likehe or she, it usually refers to a noun that’s been mentioned before, such as John or Mary (Mary read a book. She liked it). But for successful clickbait headlines, it’s reversed to great rhetorical effect (She did it, she read a book).
Forward referencing is a cataphoric concept that promotes the mysterious, in which pronouns and pointers are mentioned in advance, and we only find out later what they refer to, adding to the suspense through a simple act of language. One of the main ways clickbait does this is to refer to words like “this“: “This is what racism looks like. (It will shock you).”
This is What’s Missing From Journalism Right Now
And a slightly scary experiment to try and fix it.
That’s why journalists rely so much on quotes: We’re not usually experts at what we’re covering, so our job is to ask the right questions of the people who are.
But this kind of reporting doesn’t get you far when experts are biased, have vested interests (e.g., virtually anyone in politics), or simply don’t exist. On those kinds of stories, reporters do have to build up their own expertise.
.. But it was something news organizations knew they had to do to earn the public trust that would let them stay in business.
That started to change in the 1990s, when merger mania sucked many independently owned newspapers and TV stations into publicly traded corporations, with the resulting pressures to deliver big returns for shareholders. It kept going in the 2000s, when digital advertising sucked the profits out of news, and it got worse as hedge funds and private equity investors wrung extra “efficiencies” out of already diminished newsrooms. And it continues today, with venture capitalists and billionaire power players the latest to seek a payday—or political influence—by reshaping media in their image.