Let’s talk about how to spot Media Bias, and thus avoid the derangement that is symptomatic of Media Damage.
The press use language in a particular way when they want to downplay something bad, and it’s all about tone of voice: The active voice speaks, the passive voice’s words are spoken. The active voice makes the person or thing who caused something explicit in the minds of the reader. The passive voice puts rhetorical distance between actor and action, in a way where you don’t even have to mention the actor.
This trick is occasionally very revealing. Let’s look at a recent example, coverage of violence at a rally a few days ago in America. Last year, something very bad happened in Portland, and it caused a lot of right-wing figures very concerned about free speech to want to assemble a year later to spread their message. For some reason, a certain group of people were opposed to this. Violence broke out and a local newspaper published an article on what happened.
The introduction to the article editorializes a little to set the scene, but when it describes actual violence, something very interesting happens. The author uses the passive voice to describe the actions of one side, and the active voice for the other. There are four examples, see if you can see the pattern:
– As antifascists yelled, a woman “was curled in a ball near a park bench, being kicked repeatedly.” By who? Who was doing the kicking? We’re never told.
– A man hollared about free speech and then Antifa “landed a few blows on his face”. Well at least we know the aggressor – the antifascists hurt someone for standing up for free speech. What rouges!
– “Blows were thrown” in the enclave of a parking garage. What, was it an accident? Some person was just throwing some superflouous blows away over his shoulder? Who was getting beaten? There were apparently some free speech enthusiasts nearby, I wonder if they had anything to do with it.
– “An antifa protestor had thrown a firecracker at opponents”. Oh well, in this case, I guess we can definitively say it was an antifascist throwing an explosive – maybe at someone just like you!
I kept up my pretence of neutrality for a whole three paragraphs, but let’s be clear now: the background of this “confrontation” was that a bunch of violent assholes were marching in support of one of their ideological allies, who one year ago today was arrested shortly after he mortally wounded two ordinary chaps and badly cut a third, who were all trying to prevent him from attacking a couple of muslim women on the subway. He screamed “free speech!” as he stabbed them with a bowie knife. Oh, sorry, I mean to say: some harsh words were exchanged, and a couple of people’s throats were cut while a nearby citizen defended human rights.
This active/passive voice trick has been used in quite a few places recently – perenially whenever the police are violent, but also in any coverage of the ongoing genocide in Yemen being perpetrated by our best friends the Saudis, or the appalling massacre at the Gaza fence. In the latter case the clear depravity of the Isreali army shone through the cloud of media bullshit, but much of the time the only source for people trying to discern the facts on the ground are these same media outlets. The press can’t openly come out in favour of a side that is obviously engaged in evil or they’ll completely lose credibility, but when you see someone using tone of voice like this to describe an event, be extremely skeptical. Any peep out of the passive voice should be enough to completely discredit an article, unless it’s clear that there was no way of knowing who did what.
We had a few months from August last year, after a large number of neofascists rampaged through Charlottesville and murdered someone in broad daylight, during which the media were roused from their supreme misapprehension of the present historical moment. There was a brief period when the pathetic “even-handed” liberal press moved away from reflexively browbeating the left, and clearly stated that there was a good and bad side when people are fighting over genocide. But now they’re back on their bullshit, parroting the lies of the far right, participating in the outrageous slander that the antifascists are the REAL fascists. This article is a classic of the genre, subtly but unequivocally on the side of the American far-right movement, on the side of racist killers, on the side of tyranny, hatred and oppression. Don’t kid yourself about that – the people in the article’s comments were not fooled, they got the message loud and clear. You shouldn’t be fooled either.
Just remember, readers, the antifascists are the aggressors – they’re like a street gang! If only they weren’t around, surely there would have been no violence at all. I’m sure the knife-wielding racist psychopath on the Portland tram last year would have left those women alone if he hadn’t been confronted. Why, I’d bet your life.