Metaphors Make the News
(Hey, that’s a trope!)
Do you remember that lesson in English class where you learned about metaphors, and practiced creating ones like, “The clouds were cotton balls in the sky”? While poetic metaphors like those are perhaps easier to spot in the wild, it’s the hidden metaphors — the ones we’re so used to that we forget about them entirely — that really creep into our subconscious and affect how we see the world.
Let’s take a quick trip back to English class.
A metaphor is one subject expressed in terms of another, or one thing standing in for something else. Example: America is a melting pot. (A simile is similar: one subject is compared to another using “like” or “as.”)
Metonymy is a whole subject expressed by something connected to it, or a related thing standing in for the original. Example: using “The White House” when referring to a presidential administration.
Synecdoche is the substitution of a part of something for the whole, or vice versa. Example: using “ink” for “tattoo.”
Irony is the substitution of one thing for its opposite. Example: saying “that’s great” when you don’t think it’s great.
These are all called tropes.
What does this have to do with the news? Well, humans use tropes constantly. We’re always using them to communicate, even when we think we’re being straight shooters (see what I did there?). So, naturally, journalists and editors also use them all the time.
We often use tropes because they help us make sense of things we know nothing about. If I want to describe some clouds to you, the phrase “giant cotton balls in the sky” is much more descriptive (and more fun) than just saying, “they were super fluffy.” In this way, tropes help us establish mutual understanding.
But, since tropes often rely on trading in one subject for another, they have a way of creating distance between what we mean and what we say. For instance, if I say, “Wow, the local museum really needs to step up its game in representing women artists,” I’m putting some distance between the problem — a lack of women artists — and the actor creating that problem — ostensibly the curators or leaders of that museum. It’s much easier to talk about a larger institution like a museum than to discover who actually in that institution is responsible for the problem at hand.
Or, for instance, as shown in the metonymy example, you’ll often see journalists use “The White House” when talking about a president, his administration, an office of the White House, his aides, etc. This puts an uncomfortable amount of distance between action and actor, weakening accountability in the process.
This distance can even create a strange sense of inevitability, especially when we’re talking about things we use everyday. When we talk about how Facebook helps spread fake news, its easy to think of the giant corporation as a machine with a life of its own, barreling into our phones each day of its own volition. But people made Facebook, and people choose how Facebook works. It does not have a life of its own, and it can be controlled. When we talk of“Facebook” instead of “the people who run Facebook” or “Mark Zuckerberg,” we’re letting it off the hook like it’s an animal who acts on instinct and not a group of the smartest brains in Silicon Valley.
Of course, sometimes we create this distance because we don’t know how problems arise. For instance, if you say, “The bank really screwed me today; the line was so long, I was late for work,” you may not actually know why the line was long, or a number of things may have factored into the long line.
But when we do or can know who is responsible for something like an institutional failure or a sweeping law or rule put into place, it’s important not to use any tropes when discussing it. In order to hold organizations and people accountable, as is often the mission of a journalist or publication, they must do away with metonymy and synecdoche and name names.
An easy way to spot tropes taking over reality is to ask yourself whether the subject of a sentence or headline — the bank, Facebook, the White House, a museum — is actually the one acting. Can an inanimate object or a building make a decision? Is this one person responsible, or was it their organization? Interrogate tropes and you’ll be one step closer to truth.
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