If George Orwell Could Critique Broadcast News

First published in Medium in 2018, this piece was a favorite among readers. It could use some updating, though. Leave your own suggestions for new candidates for Orwellian critique!

I used to teach writing to graduate students. For about half the semester, I have to train them to unlearn every habit they’ve acquired in other classes. Jargon. Pretentious phrasing meant to show they “do theory.” Insider codes. Abstract flights of unmoored words traipsing around in the academic heavens, winking and kissing each other, making everyone on the ground feel stupid.

When I taught writing, Ralph Keyes’ The Courage to Write was one of my indispensable guides. Keyes helps readers understand that much of what they thought was sophisticated scholarly prose actually generates “verbal fog” — the use of jargon and other forms of “higher obfuscation” — to obscure rather than clarify thought.

I’d have my students bring in a previously written piece, cross out all the foggy items, and try to replace them with ordinary English. Most were shocked to discover that once they declutter their writing, they often have no idea what they meant to say. It’s a depressing but necessary exercise for which they are ultimately grateful. Once they’ve cleared away the fog, they can ask themselves what they are truly interested in writing about — and, in many cases, they rediscover why they wanted to write in the first place. That motivation often gets lost in the process of so-called professional training.

Another great guide is George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,”written in 1948 but more applicable today than ever. In fact, I find it so piercingly true that even though I taught the piece for decades, I still fell in love with it every time.

The first rule of good writing, Orwell notes, is to remember that language as an instrument is “for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” Well, of course, you might be thinking. What else could language be for? In practice, however (and particularly in academia), we often use language as a kind of protective armor that makes us look smart and avoids any straight talk that would expose our confusion or not-yet-formed ideas. Expressing ideas precisely is hard. It’s so much easier to grab a familiar phrase and insert rather than struggle to find just the right words. The trouble with these familiar phrases, though, is that all the life has been beaten out of them. What’s left is empty verbal skin and none of the meat of meaning.

What we should be doing instead, according to Orwell, is “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.” He goes on, with a phrase that gives me chills every time, “In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is surrender to them.”

I’m pretty sure that unless you’ve read “Politics and the English Language,” this is the first time you’ve encountered the idea of surrendering to words. That’s part of why it’s so great. It catches us by surprise, unexpectedly putting together the emotionally charged idea of surrender with that quotidian little noun word. But Orwell gives us more. Surrendering to words means “throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

The verbal fog of academese is a species of surrender to words, but not the only one. Political writing, Orwell argues (in fact, it’s his main target), suffers from a similarly stale, imprecise, essentially clubby embrace of prefabricated phrases, repetitious metaphors that have been bludgeoned to death, pretentious verbal tics, and other enemies of clarity and communication. “As soon as certain topics are raised,” Orwell writes, “no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”

Orwell wasn’t thinking of broadcast punditry when he wrote these words, of course, but political pamphlets, articles, manifestos, and speeches. Television was in an experimental stage in 1948, and for many years after played a tiny 30-minute role as a conveyer of news. Today the talking heads never shut up—even when there is little actual news to report or when they have already reported it 10 times—and prefabricated construction is the norm. After I heard MSNBC’s Kristen Welker use the word robust four times in a two-minute report, I decided to turn my annoyance into a game. I asked my Facebook and Twitter friends which words and phrases they would most like to see purged from the media’s vocabulary. I wasn’t surprised that each was an example of one of Orwell’s top enemies of thought.

Dying Metaphors

“Worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

·       “Baggage”

·       “Getting out over one’s skis” (very popular at the moment)

·       “Speaking truth to power” (especially when said about someone who is in a position of power)

·       “Rockstar” (when applied to a politician)

·       “Teachable moment”

·       “Horse race” (when applied to contest for political office)

·       “At the end of the day”

·       “Unpack”

·       “Our better angels”

·       “Thrown under the bus”

Some of these all-too-familiar turns were once vibrant. “Unpack,” for example, used to be exclusive to the vocabulary of analytic philosophers. among whom  it meant excavating and laying out clearly the individual components of something (as in “Let’s unpack that argument.”) When journalists picked it up, it evoked a visual image that had some life, suggesting that ideas were like suitcases, stuffed full of various items to be sorted rather than singular in nature.

“Our better angels” was evocative and lovely when President Barack Obama quoted Abraham Lincoln, and (unlike the Gettysburg Address) Lincoln’s inaugural address was new to many people. (“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”) And “speaking truth to power” was both passionate and precise as the title of Anita Hill’s memoir. Today, however, all these phrases are as common as punctuation marks.

More disturbing than the simply overused phrases are those that influence how listeners organize their perceptions. When a politician is anointed a “rock star,” for example, it immediately casts a certain sheen over him (I’ve yet to hear “rock star” applied to a woman) and immediately makes viewers want to come to the party. Political rock stars are as much, if not more, the creation of the media as any groundswell, yet pundits continually describe such stardom as though they are reporting a natural phenomenon.

Another example: Describing a political contest as a “horse race” confers a kind of equality to the contestants, even if one is a thoroughbred and the other a show pony. It also creates a sense of breathless anticipation. Who is gaining? Who is falling behind? Are they neck and neck? All of this makes position in the polls seem far more important than, say, policy differences.

Verbal False Limbs

Basically, padding that adds nothing to a sentence except excess syllables.

·       “Quite frankly” (rarely used to indicate that a particularly frank or candid statement is coming; reporters have become addicted to peppering their sentences with this)

·       “The fact of the matter”

·       “With all due respect”

·       “It remains to be seen”

·       “Look” or “So” (as the first word of the answer to a question, serving no purpose other than to create the illusion of dialogue)

Pretentious Diction

The examples Orwell gives are drawn from science, history, Greek, Latin, and foreign phrases. His essay preceded the importing of academic jargon into mainstream journalism. When I was in college, newscasters talked like regular people, and it was a relief to come home from my class on post-structuralism, turn on the television, and not have to ponder what “hegemony” really meant. No more. In fact, some of MSNBC’s regulars—Chris Hayes comes immediately to mind—occasionally forget that they are not in a college lecture hall, discoursing about theory.

As an academic trained in philosophy and critical theory, I recognize them and their origins:  “Deconstruct” comes from a strand of French philosophy. Journalists often use it as synonymous with “unpack,” which it is not—to “deconstruct” is not simply to break down into parts but to show that what is thought to be universal or timeless is in fact historically “constructed.” “Narrative” comes from literary criticism, and has actually been pretty useful to broadcasters, now that most news is presented encased in an evolving story. “Epistemological” comes from classical philosophy, and is almost always misused by broadcasters, who throw it around indiscriminately anytime they want to sex up any discussion involving issues concerning facts, lies, truth, etc. In philosophy, it refers to the domain of knowledge: what can and can’t be known, what knowledge is, etc. Broadcast news doesn’t fly that meta, not even on Chris Hayes’ show (although the word “meta” itself gets tossed around.)

Previously academic language has become a goldmine for broadcast news. “Existential” is frequently used, incorrectly, to mean “threatening continued life” rather than, as for French philosophers,  the inescapable conditions of existence. I thought I had escaped “performative” when I retired from teaching, where it appears at least once a page in every student paper (not their fault, it’s in all their instructors’ articles, too.) But no—I even heard Chuck Todd use it. And most irritating, there is the ever-mutilated “Other” (see also “Othering,” “Othered”, “The Other”). I’m fairly sure most of my undergraduates for whom the term has become a political grenade to throw at the “unwoke,” have no idea that the concept was the brain-child of Simone deBeauvoir, and that “woman” was the paradigmatic, historically ubiquitous “Other.” Her discussion is elegant and subtle and it’s not surprising it has been taken up by many disciplines and used to apply to any group that is described or treated as belonging to a secondary—or possibly even non-human—form of life. But she would have cringed at the word “othering” as well as its use as an accusation to establish the “progressive” credentials of the accuser. (“Othering” has gotten so out of hand that I  had a student accuse me of “othering” her because I misspelled her name, which she took as deliberately “erasing” her ethnicity.) Any time Eric Michael Tyson is on as a guest, you can be sure some variant of “Other” will come up.

Not all broadcaster jargon is theoretical or political in origin, but seems to carry the simpler thrill of being more “literary” than straight talk. “Resonates,” “problematic” “contested,” “granular.” Broadcasters also love describing ideas, movements, arguments etc. with words that in everyday discourse usually belong to the world of physical bodies : “nimble,” “appetite” and “robust” are three of those.

Meaningless Words

Orwell is referring to words that are so plastic and have such variable meanings that they wind up with no accepted meaning at all, and are thus used — sometimes deceptively — any way the speaker wants.

The most glaring contemporary example I can think of is “establishment,” which “the left” (another phrase that fits the bill) still throws around with passion. But it’s not just the left that is guilty. Bernie Sanders may have originally tossed the grenade, but commentators and anchors from left, right, and center have passed it from hand to hand casually and recklessly, seemingly unaware that although the word is a dud meaning-wise, it can cause extensive damage as a weapon of political destruction.

Its so-called opposite, “progressive,” is among Orwell’s own examples, and pundits now use it (in a contrast with “centrist” or “moderate”) to designate different wings of Democrats. They then distribute politicians with basically similar agendas and ideals under one column or another, creating the illusion of major differences. In 2015 and 2016, they smushed together Trump and Clinton with false equivalences; now they’ve turned Democrats into competing camps by labeling some “progressive” and some “centrist.”

A couple of other provocative labels that have no commonly accepted meaning but are powerful shapers of how prospective voters imagine their choices: “insurgent” and “populist.” Orwell calls this kind of self-serving shell game, in which honorific or demonizing labels appear wherever they are placed, a swindle.

During the Great Swindle of the 2016 election, broadcast news went all post-modern on us, and “narrative” and “optics” became standard pundit vocabulary. Why were journalists suddenly talking like English professors? I guess it felt fresh and somehow sexy to stop reporting what happened — the old-fashioned point of the news — and begin talking about what academics used to call the construction of reality. This is the study of how things are put together and shaped for various ends; the impact of how they appear and the impressions they create, rather than boring old facts.

But optics are not facts, and reporting on optics with the same urgency and repetitive emphasis as facts is to create, for listeners or readers, a secondary world of faux realities as vivid and “evidentiary” as what actually took place.

No, I don’t think the mainstream media is a generator of fake news. But by allowing the journalistic fashions-of-the-moment to displace the rigor of distinctions, precision, and the difference between appearance and fact, mainstream media has softened the ground in which the Trumpian garden of lies could plant itself and flourish.

Trump convinced an awful lot of people that Mueller’s investigation was a “witch hunt” simply by saying the words over and over, as journalists have called out. What they haven’t acknowledged is that repetitively describing Russian interference as “meddling” has arguably shaped people’s understanding by underplaying the seriousness of what happened. Meddling is what an interfering old relative does. The Russians very likely altered the course and outcome of a presidential election.

Euphemisms and Clichés

Orwell doesn’t have a specific category for either of these, but they are clearly part of the surrender to words that is the main topic of his piece, and my Facebook and Twitter friends mentioned them frequently.

·       “Troubling” (surely what’s happening today is worth a little more concern than that)

·       “Give a listen” (sit back in your rocking chair, suck on your corncob pipe, and hear POTUS mangle law, language, and morality)

·       “Hotly contested” (please don’t change the channel; this is exciting stuff)

·       “Highly anticipated” (ibid)

·       “Hopes and prayers” (it was painful, yet I was glad to see the parent of a recent school shooting victim tell the politicians, although not in exactly these words, to shove their hopes and prayers up a bodily orifice and get rid of guns)

·       “Misspoke” (instead of “lied”)

·       “Racially charged” (instead of “racist”)

·       “Unprecedented” (we know that all bets are off, all rules have been broken, under Trump.)

This piece was written a few years ago. Since then, lots of new candidates for Orwell’s various categories have emerged in the vocabulary of broadcasters. Let’s update my piece together! Leave a comment here or go to my Substack chat room and contribute to an updated list for George.

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