Joshua Adams, speaking at Salem State University. Source: screenshot
Jun 16, 2020 — A big, important idea we learn as journalists: write in active voice. Somebody did something. Verbs are important. Subjects are important. Avoid vague forces and things somehow happening.
"A black man died in police custody." "A white police officer killed a black man." These are the kind of sentences we're reading, and as journalists, writing, a lot these days as we cover protests against police violence, and systemic racism, and incidents of police violence.
Writer and professor of journalism Joshua Adams wants his students, and listeners like you, to notice the difference:
"When you're a child, you knock over mommy's lamp, you don't say, 'Mommy I knocked over the lamp,' you say 'Mommy, the lamp fell.' It's intuitive. You can kind of distance yourself from culpability."
As reporters, we’re making these kinds of choices whenever we report a news story.
Take a headline from the New York Post a week ago: “Ohio protester dies two days after exposure to tear gas, pepper spray”
Adams says the choice not to mention, in this case, that it was police officers sending off that tear gas—shines light on a subtle judgment that reporter could be making.
"I read that headline and I have no attribution of where the tear gas is coming from," Adams says.
Instead of, in this case:
"'There was an action by police which caused somebody to die.' It's just kind of like it was chaotic, there was all these things happening and someone just kind of happened to die and isn't that bad and shouldn't we stop doing this."
That’s not to say that we as journalists should say someone did something when we don’t know it’s fact—we shouldn’t. But when we intentionally leave out attribution—Adams says it leaves readers who may have preconceived ideas about, say protests just being chaos, to fill in the blanks.
"You can just think about the people who are just uneasy about it. You know it's like 'eh, I kinda understand the people doing that, but it just makes me feel weird seeing people protest, they seem angry, that makes me uncomfortable,' so on and so forth."
At its most benign, passive voice can be a way for journalists to avoid making accusations, but it can also be a way for us journalists to avoid being accused of bias, Adams says.
A big example of a deep-rooted cultural assumption is that we should respect police, Adams says. Which might make us more inclined to write in passive voice when we’re writing about the actions police take, for example, than when we write about other members of society.
"It's really tough as journalists when we're having a conversation about did a police officer kill someone or not, when there's a video."
It’s not just lazy writing, it goes further than that, Adams says: It diffuses agency, it spreads it around—it gives some people the benefit of the doubt, but not others.
Add race to these decisions, and language journalists use can really lay bare internalized attitudes—even deepen them for audiences. Adams remembers putting this together as a teenager, watching how journalists on TV covered Hurricane Katrina, and the devastation it wreaked on families.
"You'd see a white family going in a store and they would say the family was scavenging for food. And then you would show a black family and it'd say they were looting stores. And the disconnect between those two didn't make a lot of sense to me? I had no concept of the idea that some news leans towards a certain ideological perspective?"
Everything is filtered. And staying aware of the words we use, the way we construct our sentences? it's a muscle you build. Adams cautions you, the listener: don't just take information in, stay alert.
"avoid it" - Google News
June 16, 2020 at 04:28PM
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Why do journalists use passive voice covering protests and police? And why we should avoid it - North Country Public Radio
"avoid it" - Google News
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