Malaprose-isms

We are awash in a sea of 'sane-washing, cutesypoo bilge, coherence bias, and misogynoir,' a fog of vagureries in communication that can shape public perception - with disastrous results.

I had a number of niggling (and disconnected) thoughts that weren’t coming together - but I wanted to get down. As I wrote, I realized the issue: for more precise communication, we need to coin some new words. I’m not alone. In recent weeks journalists and editors have been struggling to find the right nomenclature to describe a fog of words.

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In reading about the Apalachee High School shooting last week, here was The Washington Post headline:

Investigators seek to determine motive, how gunman obtained weapon

I was briefly confused. Was this a different shooting? and then I realized the reason for my confusion. I didn’t decode “gunman” to be a 14-year old. I am not being glib when I ask do we need another noun: a “gun-child?” (A “gun-boy,” since so many shooters are male?¹ and since they are minors should there be “gun-parents?”). I used a hyphen - but no doubt with so many occurrences the hyphen might be dropped. Some might argue, we should call a child that kills, a gunman. In any event, how did we get to the point where this is even a thing?

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The onslaught of distressing news is jarring. Fascism, wars, innocents being gunned down, draconian laws putting women’s lives at risk. The subjects are dire enough, but the vagaries in communication that impact public perceptions are so disheartening - and even dangerous.

As a writer, I love words - and work hard to find the right ones to convey an accurate thought or emotion. There are more than a million words in the English language. And when those aren’t enough, I’ll borrow from another language.² But somehow, I haven’t been able to put my finger on the right word to describe what is going on in media, namely newspapers.

I grew up addicted to the news and newspapers having grown up with (the defunct) Buffalo Courier-Express. My Dad chose that over the Buffalo News because it was a morning paper and featured Jim Bishop, an author and columnist who “wrote clearly and didn’t use 50-cent words.” Dad’s adage was: “if you read the front page, the op-ed, and the front page of the sports section - you can talk to anyone.”

At least it used to be that way.

A New York Times subscriber for more than 35 years, I dumped it after watching it emphasize “crooked Hillary” and “But her emails,” during the 2016 Presidential race. It wasn’t just my imagination, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) counted that in the 90 days preceding the election, the emails - a literal nothing burger, was on the front page 10 times.³

My switch to The Washington Post has been less than satisfying, as its front page continues to disappoint. I get that conflict journalism sells, and every little misstep will be amplified. I just want the refs to be even handed with their calls. When a presidential nominee calls for blood and revenge — shouldn’t that be, in someone’s judgement, on the front page? If Biden’s age was an issue, shouldn’t age continue to be an issue?

In her substack, Letters from an American, Author and Historian

Heather Cox Richardson

summed up the 45th president’s September 7 rally in Wisconsin. “He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.”⁴

Author, J-school Professor, and Media Pundit Jeff Jarvis has been blunt with his criticisms. On X/Twitter, Jarvis calls the two stalwart papers the #BrokenTimes and #BrokenPost. Using Richardson’s example, he was aghast that neither paper saw it fit to cover the mad utterings. (The Post did eventually cover it - although it was well below the fold.)

Nor did the Post think that former Vice President’s Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris was news either. “A grand coalition in American Democracy is forming,” Jarvis tweeted. “The #BrokenTimes is ignoring this momentous story - as well as the good news for Harris.”

(Weirdly, today both newspapers included reports on the Princess of Wales finishing chemotherapy on their front pages. wut? why?)

Benjamin Dreyer

, retired copy chief, grammarian, and author, showed masterful knife skills when he filleted The New York Times for a completely different reason. He referred to the following paragraph in an Aug. 31, 2024 article as “cutseypoo bilge.”

The Moms For Liberty⁵ can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler ("He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future") and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer ("We should not have quoted him in our newsletter") — but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women.

He excoriated the use of the following words: “carried away,” “accidentally,” “Führer,” and “but still.” I can’t do justice to Dreyer’s outstanding screed - enjoy reading it in full.

Journalist

Aaron Rupar

calls examples like this, “sane-washing.” CJR says this actually isn’t new. It was found on a Reddit page in 2020 and meant “attempting to downplay a person or idea radically to make it more palatable to the general public.”

Parker Molloy

used the same term in her column in The New Republic, as did

Margaret Sullivan

, media critic and former NYT public editor. Other journalists like Greg Sargent, Rachel Meadow, and Paul Krugman are but a few who’ve pick up the term this week.

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, calls it a “coherence bias.” The idea being that a journalist is trained to summarize in a clear and coherent way. So 380 words of gish galloping is transformed into a sane summary. This type of sane-washing can obfuscate potentially incoherent speech. It is also a tactic used by public relations people for reputation management.

Jarvis points out that even when the story is well thought out, the headline and the lead are often skewed for clicks - and inaccurate. He particularly hates passive headlines: “How the Fight to Define Kamala Harris Will Shape Next Week’s Debate.” He writes: “The right’s lies about her do not define her… unless you help them.”

And then of course there is journalism through the lens of misogyny (misogynoir when it’s a woman of color). We can’t have a woman president without wondering her management style. “Kamala Harris ran her office like a prosecutor. Not everyone liked that.” The best the Post could do to support that headline was to proffer this: “You can’t come to the vice president and just ask her to do something,” said another staffer. “You need to have a why.”

The Vice President of the United States needs you to back up your requests? In a future post, I am going to detail bad and brutal bosses — and this wouldn’t rate a blink.

So let’s recap:

• We have information not being given to us at all.

• We have information that when provided is laundered to be nearly without meaning.

• And we have information framed in a way that boxes women (and minorities) into no-win situations.

All of these scenarios are dangerous in an open, Democratic society, where we vote based on perceptions. These scenarios may not be as nefarious as disinformation campaigns being funded by Putin and disseminated by past and current Fox N@#s hosts – but dangerous none-the-less.

It got me thinking as to what to call this media malfeasance.

When we misuse words - and end up with a humorous outcome, we call it a malapropism. The adjective apropos means appropriate or pertinent, and the prefix mal is Latin for bad. The author of the 1775 play “The Rivals” cleverly named his character “Mrs. Malaprop” and dubbed any wrongful and comic utterances as a malapropism.

But when word play becomes word disarray, word misuses can obscure dangers - with alarming outcomes. I think of these as Malaprose-isms. Who is at fault for allowing these Malaprose-isms?

Is this a disinformation campaign, laziness, or naiveté combined with a lack of oversight? I tend to think that it is due to the dearth of copy editors - as well as the incentives for clicks. Media today is financed by eyeballs, and rage-baiting or vague headlines are a way to attract those eyeballs.

However, one of the reasons I think that lack of copy editors is a more likely cause is that these reputable publications do tend to change the headlines when the collective screams are loud enough. (It would be fascinating to know how many times a headline is edited after publishing.)

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a guardian of the truth will not make things better. You need humans - sometimes of a certain age - to know the context, to know that using Führer as a synonym for Hitler is never okay. You need humans to know the difference between incendiary language versus hyperbole.

In the war against disinformation, it will take all of us — readers, journalists, media critics — demanding clear and fair reporting. For all of us who love what media could and should be — we need to root out malaprose-isms.

1. According to The Violence Project, since 1966, the gender of all mass shooter - save for four were carried out solely by males. Two of the four shootings by females - also included males.

2. There is no better word than the Yiddish word schlep to describe hauling a heavy package through the streets of Manhattan in a rain storm.

3. “Warped Front Pages,” Columbia Journalism Review.

4. History Extra for September 7, 2024, Letters from an American.

5. In its 2022 annual report, the Southern Poverty Law Center, labeled Moms for Liberty a far-right, antigovernment, extremist group.