LANGUAGE CONTROL PATROL


March 3, 2006

BOB GARFIELD: Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. He says language is used by governments and their opponents to highlight certain features of reality and suppress others.

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Take the word "regime." People spoke of the Saddam regime, for instance, or the Baghdad regime rather than the government. And "regime" is a word that implies always a certain illegitimacy or instability. We talk, for instance, about the Latin American countries that have adopted democratic government we describe as "democratic regimes," but we don't talk about nations like France and Sweden and the U.K. as "democratic regimes." They're just democracies. Language like that always carries a point of view, and the media use the words in ways that pretty much accord with the assumptions that the government brings to them.

BOB GARFIELD: So do you believe that the media can and should be arbiters of what the right word choice is, or should we be leaving this to politicians? How do we alight on just the right word?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: In recent years, certainly the media has been willing, perhaps too willing, to adopt the administration's usage. After the administration announced that they'd no longer be talking about "private" Social Security accounts but "personal" accounts, if you looked in the media in the two or three months after the administration made those announcements, the number of stories describing them as "personal" rather than "private" accounts doubled, which is a pretty clear indication of the government's influence. A lot of people in the media have taken to using death tax without quotation marks, without a little hedge like "so-called" rather than estate tax. The American media were extremely reluctant to use what Rumsfeld called "the torture word" after the first Abu Ghraib stories came out. And this is while the European papers, even the right-wing, even Murdoch's papers in the U.K. were using "torture" while the New York Times and the Washington Post for quite a while were dancing around that word out of a fear of either criticism from the administration or from, in particular, right-wing press watchdog groups.

BOB GARFIELD: Is it fair to say that he who controls the vocabulary really controls the debate?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: I think that's fair to say, though I think people sometimes tend to look in the wrong place for that. I think the vocabulary that really matters here is a vocabulary about which the press is actually less aware and less sensitive than these phrases like "private accounts" or "death tax" and so on, where everybody's kind of keyed into the partisan significance of those phrases. So look, when I look in the so-called liberal media -- The Washington Post, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, L.A. Times -- in domestic political context at the word "values," I see that conservative values are anywhere to three to five times as common as liberal values. And that's not a matter of some dictat coming down from the editor of those papers, nor is it really a matter of a conscious decision. It's just that "values" nowadays in American speech evokes conservatism rather than liberalism. And you can go on with that sort of thing. But those are the usages that I think really move public opinion or crystallize public opinion, and they're ones that the media adopts, I really think, without much thought.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Geoff. Well, thank you very much.

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Okay. Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist and author of the forthcoming Talking Right: How Conservatives Turn Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving Left-Wing Freak Show. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

the frames, the frames...


- bill 8-05-2006 8:19 pm

parsing the parsing


- bill 8-05-2006 8:35 pm

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Sorry, I know enough can be more than enough, but this quote of Sully's is irresistible: "I ignored Geoffrey Nunberg's piece in The American Prospect in April, debunking the notion of liberal media bias by numbers, because it so flew in the face of what I knew that I figured something had to be wrong." When a conservative pundit "knows" something to be true, don't go hassling him with contrary evidence. It so happens that linguist Geoffrey Nunberg did the necessary heavy lifting to disprove perhaps the one contention in Bernard Goldberg's book Bias the so-called liberal media felt compelled--perhaps out of misplaced generosity--to accept: that the media tend to label conservatives as such more frequently than alleged liberals. Tom Goldstein bought into it in Columbia Journalism Review. So did Jonathan Chait in TNR. Howard Kurtz and Jeff Greenfield let it go unchallenged on Communist News Network. Meanwhile, Goldberg admits to "knowing," Sullivan style, happily ignorant of any relevant data beyond his own biases. He did no research, he says, because he did not want his book "to be written from a social scientist point of view."


Unfortunately for Bernie, Nunberg discovered that alleged liberals are actually labeled as such by mainstream journalists more frequently than are conservatives. This is true for politicians, for actors, for lawyers, for everyone--even institutions like think tanks and pressure groups. The reasons for this are open to speculation, but Nunberg has the numbers. A weblogger named Edward Boyd ran his own set of numbers that came out differently, but Nunberg effectively disposed of Boyd's (honest) errors in a follow-up article for TAP Online. In a truly bizarre Village Voice column, Nat Hentoff recently sought to ally himself with the pixilated Goldberg but felt a need to add the qualifier, "The merits of Goldberg's book aside..." Actually, it's no qualifier at all. Goldberg's worthless book has only one merit, which was to inspire my own forthcoming book refuting it. (Hentoff mischaracterizes that, too.) Meanwhile, the merits of Hentoff's column aside, it's a great column.

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reviewed in the nyt


- bill 8-05-2006 10:13 pm