Writer Slams Journalistic Malpractice
Sensationalism, understatement, and the myth of neutrality
Anyone who follows the news would generally agree that journalism is in bad shape. With the business now mostly online, articles are geared towards driving engagement and collecting advertising revenue. This has led to the rise of “slam journalism” and sensationalism, where editors employ vague but evocative verbs in their headlines to entice readers into clicking. In addition, writers continue to employ understated language and attenuations to mask the true nature of events. They will also favour the passive voice whenever possible for the same reasons. These three problems — sensationalism, understatements, and the passive voice — plague every major paper which covers politics and world conflicts.
This type of language is lazy and imprecise, though it is often used in the name of journalistic neutrality. Unfortunately, what writers consider to be neutral often plays into the hands of cruel and violent actors, meaning their neutrality becomes a political choice. Going beyond the obvious — that these phraseologies are aesthetically undesirable — their use towards political ends make a joke of journalism and the English language. Everyone’s daily scroll through their carousel of news apps, and society as a whole, would be greatly improved if writers focused on avoiding these language traps.
I.
Sensationalist headlines usually go like this: “Person A slams/blasts/pans/tears into person B over issue”. Here are some recent examples:
“Trudeau slams NDP for distancing itself from carbon pricing” (The Globe and Mail, 12 April 2024).
“Jon Stewart Slams How the News Media Is Covering Trump’s Trial” (The New York Times, 23 April 2024).
“Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson blasts cancel culture” (The National Post, 7 April 2024).
You get the idea. In each of these cases, an editor has opted for a vaguely violent verb instead of a more accurate, less intense one. Slam or blast, as metaphors, have lost all their meaning because of this abuse. In the first example, Trudeau’s slam consists of a calmly delivered and barely even critical quote from a press conference. This couldn’t possibly be further from slams. In the second, John Stewart is delivering a comedy segment on the Daily Show. Comedy can be harsh, critical, cutting, but it cannot slam. There is no malice or forcefulness in Stewart’s words — no slam. The next two articles are not much different.
Though I have not seen the data, I am sure that editors have; using slam and blast likely garners more clicks than most other verbs. Their ease-of-use and punchiness makes them irresistible for writer and reader alike. When you get that push notification — “Biden blasts Fox News over hurricane coverage” — you just can’t help but click. You are brought back to your high school days, incapable of looking away from the two seniors duking it out in the cafeteria over the science teacher’s daughter.
In other words, these headlines cater to people’s least desirable tendencies and guarantee clicks. Not only is this demeaning to readers, who are reduced to bloodthirsty brutes, but it lessens the standard of journalism itself by favouring analytics over creative and accurate writing.
The political function of slam journalism is to play both sides. In their quest to maintain journalistic neutrality, writers use slams to avoid using words such as corrects or lies about. These convey right or wrong, while slam technically remains “neutral”. The consequence is that writers make it seem like politicians have set up a boxing ring in Parliament, and then don’t even bother to tell you when one guy wears loaded gloves. Holding both sides of an argument in equal regard in this way, when one should clearly be disqualified, is a political choice. In service of neutrality and clicks, writers avoid commenting on the quality of deeply unworthy arguments and end up covering them favourably.
II.
Journalism is also riddled with attenuations, often used to make terrible atrocities acceptable to readers. This happens so much in politics and journalism that you barely notice it anymore, like how your brain stops you from seeing your nose even though it’s always there. For example, it has become commonplace to use the verb clear when referring to police actions which violently beat, mace, and arrest student protesters on campus universities. Headlines read “Police clear encampment at University of Calgary” or “NYPD clear Columbia building from protesters”.
I don’t know about you, but in my experience, a more appropriate usage of clear might be “I’ll clear the dishes” …
The phraseology is purposeful because it allows newspapers to appear clear of bias. They do not call police violent, and they do not call protesters trespassers. Using clear, a verb associated with cleaning up or moving items out of the way, allows them to describe police violence without the violence. But using this attenuation explicitly positions them on the side of police. As I’ve said, when police clear protests, they do not do so with calm and patience. Reading headlines, one might think students are being nonchalantly cuffed and put on a bus — no biggie, nothing to see here! By understating the brutal tactics employed by police and by employing lazy words and oversimplifications, they trick you into not seeing your nose.
Another egregious example comes from The New York Times on May 10, 2024: “Actions by Israel and Egypt Squeeze Gaza Aid Routes”. The choice of words here is beyond parody. It’s like writing “Actions by Russia Hurt Ukrainian Independence”. The verb squeeze, which evokes the tightening of a belt or playing with a stress ball, here refers to starving and suffering Palestinians. It’s an odd choice, if not a completely inappropriate one, which a Times staff writer used solely because they thought it was short, visually useful, and neutral enough.
Unfortunately, just like clear, the word squeeze understates the severity of the situation. In their quest to be neutral but punchy, newspapers fall into a trap where they downplay events and provide malignant actors with almost favourable coverage. Squeeze is much too light of a metaphor for what is actually happening in Gaza. Failing to acknowledge the inaccuracy of this wording helps perpetuate the dreadful situation by keeping readers in the dark about its true nature. These formulations are extremely common, but that doesn’t make them any less lazy, imprecise, and fundamentally political.
III.
Even at my French public school, all my English teachers said the same thing: “whenever possible, avoid the passive.” Yet, professionally trained writers employed by the best news organizations on the planet continue to use the passive voice like they’re addicted to it. Put simply, in the passive voice, a subject has something done to them. In the active voice, the subject is the one who acts. For example, “A Mistake was made” vs. “I made a mistake”. The former is incomplete and, frankly, ugly. A passive sentence is just that: unassertive and subdued. On the other hand, the active formation is more appealing and clearer; the “I” attaches an actor to the act and engages the reader.
Despite the active voice’s superiority, writers and editors continue to publish headlines like these:
“Over 60 Journalists Have Been Killed in the Israel-Gaza War” (The New York Times, 3 December 2023).
“How 6-year-old Hind Rajab and two paramedics were killed in Gaza” (The Washington Post, 16 April 2024).
“At least 13 killed in Belgorod building collapse, Russia says” (Al Jazeera, 12 May 2024).
The answer is, once more, both laziness and politics. The passive format is easy to formulate because it involves fewer moving parts. There is a subject, a past tense verb, and whatever modifier provides context. Despite the ease-of-use, it isn’t hard to see the problem with it. The passive, and therefore the writers and their newspapers, avoid naming who exactly is performing these killings. The result is imprecise language which is, of course, purposeful.
Exactly like understatements, writers use the passive voice because they believe it conveys information while maintaining neutrality. Again, by hiding the main actor, the passive actually helps the perpetrators of murders and atrocities. In the second example, two paramedics attempted to save an injured Palestinian child, only for all three to be murdered by the Israeli Defense Force. This is the explicit conclusion of the article, not my interpretation, so why does the Washington Post not say this in their headline? Why bury the lead? A better headline — one more in line with the article — would read: “Israeli soldiers murder 6-year-old and two paramedics in Gaza”.
In the third headline, Al Jazeera would have you believe 6 Russians were killed in a building collapse. However, upon reading the article, you find out it was Ukrainian shelling that destroyed the building. How can this information not make it into the headline? These civilians were not simply killed; they were murdered by Ukrainian soldiers shelling apartment buildings.
IV.
To be clear, this essay is not making a specific point about Israel, Gaza, Russia, Ukraine, or even what The Rock thinks about cancel culture. What I am saying is that solutions to these issues, or at least what to think about them generally, arise naturally from clear reporting and writing. What I point out here is a systematic blurring of the lines in the media caused by laziness and politics. Journalists slam and blast, they attenuate, and they write passively because it gets clicks, it is easy, and because it conforms to standards of neutrality. But the consequences are unacceptable.
Readers need to be trusted with all the information. They are perfectly capable of reading stories without slam or blast, with vivid and accurate descriptions of violence, and with full awareness of who is committing these horrific acts. When writers sneak around the truth — even in the name of neutrality — they commit to a specific political point of view. Every slam headline makes you think politicians do nothing but argue and are equally bad; every understatement makes you forget just how violent state actions can be; every passive headline creates the dehumanizing sense that while some people are murdered, others are simply killed. To use lazy and imprecise writing is one failure, but to employ it towards political ends is another thing altogether.
Neutrality can be a virtuous aspiration, but in this case, it has driven complacent writers into a language trap. They sensationalize the trivial and understate the critical. They proclaim arrests without violence and deaths without killers. How long can journalism go on like this? How long before readers realize what they always do: protests are never peacefully cleared, people do not walk into bullets, and neutral actors are never truly neutral. By way of their impartiality, writers become complicit in perpetuating the status quo and stand for nothing but themselves.
