...more recent posts
LANGUAGE CONTROL PATROLmore nunberg radio... / this one from 7/31/06 discussing the book w/ brian lehrer is very good
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]
[....]
Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration’s legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, “all Addington.” Another lawyer, Richard L. Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was “an unopposable force.”
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The Bush Administration's Legal Strategy
In “The Hidden Power; The Legal Mind Behind the White House's War on Terror,” New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer examines David S. Addington--the man many believe is behind the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 legal strategy. (w/ leonard lopate wnyc)
more fatherflot links :
John Conyers released a 350 page report called "The Constitution in Crisis.
New Name Alert: According to Rummy's testimony before the Senate on Thursday it's now the "struggle against violent extremists who are determinded to keep free people from exercising their rights as free people" or SAVEWADTKFPFETRAFP, pronouced sa-ve-wad-tkfpfet-rapf.
But I still prefer the Global Clusterfuck on Terror.