Taliban Threatens to Kill 18 Korean Hostages
Indonesian Town Begins Preparation for
Next Tsunami
Denmark Says It Secretly Flew Iraqi Employees
Out of Iraq
Hamas Replaces Gaza Courts
Italy Says Group Uses Mosque As Terror Camp
White House and Military Say Iraq Report….
China Shuts 3 Companies…
Those
headlines are false. Although they
were presented in the guise of straight news (in The New York Times; 7/21/07), they presented fictions. What is more, they delivered variations
on a distinctive, and common, kind of fiction. Cases recur in the texts as well as in headlines of putative
news stories, at home and abroad, written and spoken. Witness these opening sentences:
The Town of Catskill has opted not to fill its empty fifth
seat, but will continue as a four-man body until the November elections this
year.”
Greene County has begun a Hudson
River Corridor Study that will bring together local officials and community
leaders to plan for the growth and development of its Hudson River corridor ....
HONG
KONG — China took steps Wednesday to control rising prices at the most
basic consumer level. But Beijing faces a severe challenge in preventing higher
global commodity prices from igniting broader inflation that could threaten
China’s streak of powerful economic growth.
BEIRUT—
Hezbollah and its allies threatened to withdraw from Lebanon’s government on Wednesday, a move that would force it to
dissolve and deepen a crisis over a United Nations-backed tribunal investigating the
assassination of a former prime minister.
New Delhi: A day after Trinamool Congress said it was prepared to go
it alone in the West Bengal assembly elections, ally Congress on Tuesday
claimed that Mamata Banerjee's party cannot defeat the Left Front alone.
Wall Street retreated Tuesday after [some companies] issued
disappointing reports and the Federal Reserve voiced concern about the slumping
economy.
While all of those sentences expressed falsehoods, however,
for recipients they were not equally deceiving. Some of them delivered fictions which some recipients could
translate into more or less accurate accounts of actual events. Some of them, for some recipients,
worked as useful compressions.
Achieving that benefit, from such
locutions, depends first of all on recognizing figurative speech. That recognition may come quickly. After all, the cited headlines and
sentences allude to events that contravene generally
accepted notions of the laws of nature. Each offers putative information about
the deeds (words; other willful behavior) of an agent who (!) does not possess
a voice box, a brain, or limbs. Each endows some inorganic entity—nation-state,
faction, party, department, building, corps (“the military”), direction (“the
left”)--with faculties which are peculiar to human beings. Each can be processed, then, as a
variant on a singular figure of speech.
Strangely, while that pattern of
figurative speech is a common feature of news (and other) discourse, it has not
acquired a commonly recognized brand name. Labels such as impersonation, personification,
anthropomorphism and reification do come up, but none of them points directly
to a rhetorical device. The best
label, I suggest, drawing on old lexical usage, is Personation.
Recognizing Personation is but the first step toward
decoding. Further progress can be
achieved at times by way of familiarity with conventions governing the use of
particular variants. Thus, “the
White House said…” may be decoded by experienced respondents as the start of an
account of what was said by a particular denizen of a particular white house: the American President’s press
secretary, acting in his official capacity. That interpretation, based on recurring use, may be
validated by a news story’s subsequent
sentences, recounting what was said by a person who is identified
explicitly as the President’s press secretary. The informant does not bother to stipulate that when he
quotes or paraphrases “the White House” he is quoting or paraphrasing the
President’s press secretary. But
we get the idea, and we can then credit the informant with admirable economy of
expression.
So it is too when headlines saying “UNIONS THREATEN…” and
“UNIONS TO PRESS…” are followed immediately by sentences saying “Union
officials threaten…” and “Leaders of two large New York City unions said
Wednesday that they would push…”.
A real-world translation of the headlines is implicitly offered.
A seasoned consumer of mainstream
news might not feel baffled even by the verbal image of a retreating street
named Wall. He might instead draw
the inference that yesterday the average price of stocks composing the Dow
Jones Industrial Index went down.
In like manner he could make sense of reports that the subject
street missed the Cisco story, is poised for a tepid start, or is less anxious
this week.
Again,
reportorial prose averring that “The Senate on Feb. 2 voted 81-17 to remove an
unpopular paperwork requirement from the new healthcare reform law”—behold a “Senate’ who (!) votes and simultaneously votes for AND
against—may deliver, with admirable brevity, a summary of how 88 Senators voted
on a certain measure and of that voting’s legal effect.
By
the same token, ostensible accounts of the doings of China, Britain, and Italy
can be deciphered as accounts of deeds of agents of the governments of those
nation-states. But here, among
other places, the decoding of Personation can be perilous. For example, a headline saying 'BELARUS INTENSIFIES EFFORTS AGAINST FORMER CANDIDATE" invites respondents to infer either that a creature named
Belarus is methodically abusing an individual (who somehow is and is not
Belarusan) or that most Belarusians support the punitive measures that a
rigorously disciplined band of governors are talking against a former
candidate. Such suggestions deter
the inference that some members of an insecure ruling junta are taking desperate
measures amid international and domestic disapproval. And yet the text of the report that appeared below the
headline (New York Times, 1/12/11)
favors the latter inference:
As Belarussian diplomats scrambled on Wednesday to
assuage European concerns about the sweeping crackdown on dissent in their
country, the authorities in Belarus were stepping up their campaign against the family of a
former presidential candidate whose 3-year-old son they have threatened to seize. The security services conducted a
search of the home of the former candidate, Andrei Sannikov, as well as the
apartment of his wife’s mother…
Also misleading is this version of a local event:
Greene County’s Republican Party secured, again,
control of county government’s treasurer and clerk’s posts in Tuesday’s
election….
While the
GOP retained control of the Greene County government treasurer’s and county clerk’s posts,
the tenor of county politics seems to have changed….
Readers may recognize here a metaphorical treatment of
“Greene County’s Republican Party” into as a single, sentient, willful
being. But they could
readily infer from the author’s use of personation that the county treasurer
and county clerk, and perhaps the whole county, now are effectively under the
control of agents of a unitary Machine.
Such things have been known to happen (in Albany, in Jersey City, in
Chicago as well as in Soviet Russia).
But in this case the inference would be wrong. The treasurer and the county clerk of Greene County are not
puppets dancing at the end of strings manipulated by a Boss. Neither are the county
legislators, coroners, district attorney, sheriff and judges who are enrolled
as Republicans. They are not
centrally recruited, subjected to discipline, subject to dismissal if they break
lines, dependent on the local Republican treasurer for their livelihoods. But awareness of that situation depends
on local knowledge. Personation in
this case—GOP retains “control”—falsifies the local political scene.
Cases
of that sort do not necessarily trump the utility of Personation as a
condensing, economizing aid to learning about actualities. A sound evaluation of that practice,
however, must take account of its other [psycho-political] effects.
One
is de-personalization. When
newsworthy deeds are ascribed to animated police departments rather than to
police officers, to senates not senators, to houses (White) and addresses (10
Downing Street) rather than to occupants, to loquacious legislatures not
legislators, to China not Chinese, to extremist groups rather than terrorists,
to a town instead of to four Town Council members, to “the voters” rather than
to voters, to companies and unions rather than to executives or members, then
the effect cumulatively is to belittle—to erase and thereby deny--the
responsibilities, the event-shaping roles, of people.
Business news is rife with
examples. Deeds performed by
company executives or directors are identified regularly by professional
news-givers with the deeds of sapient, vocal companies: “Starbucks Replaces
Chief With Chairman”; “Mozilla Names New Chief, but Reaffirms Open-Source
Commitment”; “The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce fired two executives Monday”; “Conde Nast
Publications announced a management shake-up on Monday”….
International news is similarly
infested. And the
world’s most populous country, as it happens, is the foremost recipient among
nation-states of journalistic personation. “China Moves to Block Foreign News
on Nobel Ceremony.” “China
Resisted U.S. Pressure on Rights of Nobel Winner.” “China no longer resists
becoming emotional.” “China has
waged an extraordinary and unprecedented campaign…to discredit the [Nobel Peace
Prize] award and to dissuade other governments from endorsing it.” China “has
punished Norway….” China “took steps Wednesday to control rising prices at the
most basic consumer level.” China is “trying to build an economy that relies on
innovation.” China “intends to engineer a more innovative economy.” China
“intends to roughly double its number of patent examiners” and its patent
numbers. To that end, “China has
introduced an array of incentives.”
China is busy. Where are
the Chinese?
Related to personation’s
de-personalizing effect is intimidation.
Personation promotes a brand of metaphysics that not only is goofy, but
also is conducive to personal paralysis.
Since so much of history is made not by people but by big, extra-human, super-human
willful entities, surely it would be presumptuous for us Lilliputians to
entertain thoughts about exerting influence. Personation works, cumulatively, against feelings of
personal responsibility and personal efficacy.
Blended
with personation’s de-personalizing and intimidating effects, in more than a
few cases, is political spin. Journalists
(as well as pundits and advertisers) use Personation as a tool of special
advocacy. Intentionally or not,
they use Personation so as to excuse, praise and damn. Witness
this piece of reportorial prose:
The union representing 175 school bus drivers and
monitors who work for Durham Services has voted to strike, potentially
impacting student transportation for the Rhinebeck, Rondout Valley and
Spackenkill school districts and Dutchess BOCES.
By imputing the strike vote to the union, the reporter divorces the actual voters, the drivers and monitors, from that action,
thereby acquitting them of responsibility for ensuing disruption. That treatment fits a popular
mold. In news discourse as well as
in punditry, various unions are Personated in an unfavorable light: greedy,
selfish, disruptive, overly powerful….
Not so the teachers, firemen, pilots, beauticians, stevedores or factory
workers who make up their memberships.
In like manner, profit-greedy corporations are demonized in a way that
exonerates their leaders and members from responsibility for ‘their’ misdeeds.
On
other occasions, personation works to bestow extra force and luster on a chosen
project. Thus, by saying “Greene County has begun a Hudson
River Corridor Study that will bring together local officials and
community leaders…,” a reporter does not just give a metaphorical rendition of
a decision by some or all of a county’s elected legislators. He magnifies the decision’s popularity
and imbues it with merit, to the point of treating residents who are ignorant,
indifferent or opposed as not being of Greene County.
In similar fashion, a headline
proclaiming that “A Town Tries to Protect an Artist’s Inspiration” magnifies the scale and the clarity of popular commitment to a cited
project, thereby conferring an extra measure of nobility. (In this case, it also contradicts the
substance of the story it introduces, which dwells on local divisions over how,
and whether, to protect an Edward Hopper viewscape.)
The headline “India Names Its First
Female President” invites respondents to envision not only a momentous historic
first, but also a first that either was deliberately and heroically taken by an
enormous nation-state or was consistent with the sentiments of virtually the
whole of that nation-state’s people.
Its personation works against the idea that the new female president was
the candidate of the parliamentary majority party, whose adherents out-polled
the main opposition party’s (male) candidate.
According
to the New York Times (12/11/10) the
Swedish city of Kristianstad “vowed a decade ago to wean itself from fossil
fuels.” Kristianstad “and the
surrounding county” now “use no
oil, natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses.” Their “area” has “forsaken” traditional
fuels and, instead of resorting to solar panels or wind turbines, “generates
energy from a motley assortment” of wastes. After it (she?) “started looking for substitutes” for
standard fuels, the area has come to the point of “looking into building
satellite biogas plants for outlying areas….” Such pseudo-expository prose amounts to bandwagonizing. Rhetorically it expunges
Kristianstaders who did not take the vow.
Its personation serves not just to encapsulate, but rather to cheer and
advocate. (Incidentally, in
ascribing this puffery to The Times,
I commit personation; the by-line on the story was that of Elisabeth
Rosenthal. But the personation
here may serve to call attention to plural responsibility, running from writer
to editors to publisher).
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