Print as Hot Medium?

During O.J. Simpson's criminal trial one day in Los Angeles, F. Lee Bailey unfurled his famous ferocity. Then he took up a scalpel, brought it down on words uttered by a witness, and opened some potential holes.

That bit of drama escaped the eye of the courtroom camera. Although it was rich in visual pizazz, it was not shown or even mentioned on television newscasts. And yet its occurrence was attested, in so many words, by a well-credentialed first-hand witness: Linda Deutsch of the Associated Press. Deutsch's story was passed along, as straight news, by scores of local editors to millions of newspaper readers.

Demonstrated by this episode is the falsity of the notion that television is the more pictorial, or visually stimulating, of our news media.

Video journalists, to be sure, dote on spectacle. Few happenings qualify as TV news unless they can be told and can be shown, by way of filmed footage or some other form of pictorial representation. Television news people go to immense trouble to fill receivers' screens not with talking heads or printed texts but with fiery wrecks, with devastating storms and pitched battles, with strenuous movements performed in exotic, picturesque, locations (or at least with correspondents talking in front of news sites).

In the use of verbal imagery, however, authors of scripts for lead-ins, voice-overs and on-scene video reports work under an artistic handicap. Their narratives must be (harumph) metaphysically and iconically conventional. Their prose must point to events that can occur in what we take to be the real world.

Print-media scribes, and their counterparts in radio, are not so constrained.

Unfettered by a need to link their narratives to filmed footage, they can treat ferocities, along with umbrellas and flags, as (un)furlable objects. They can beguile, or boggle, the mind's eye with tales of opening potential holes. They can 'report' (as was demonstrated on national public radio) that on a certain November day (not a recent one) "the American electorate went to the polls and voted for the status quo."

In their efforts to portray actualities in terms that are vivid and gripping, print journalists use some figures of speech over and over again. Thus we have:

Utterance as physical attack. News media have been accused once or twice of over-publicizing crimes, conflicts and violence. Less often recognized, however, is the journalistic practice of inventing acts of newsworthy violence. Reporters and editors do just this when they confound non-violent deeds with assault and battery. Specifically, they equate selected acts of speech with lashing, bashing, killing, cutting to pieces, shooting, knocking, or scalpel-wielding. But this practice is confined largely to print and auditory reporting. If it were done on video, we would expect to see the pictures.

Freakspeakmanship. No less popular with video-free journalists is another way of spicing, or enhancing visually, the reporting of speech acts. The need here is substantial. Most of the events that qualify as "news" are human utterances. And many of those utterances do not get said anywhere. They occur un-photogenically in telephone conversations, in official reports, or in papers, faxes, or electronic-mail messages that are delivered to media organizations as "releases."

Print journalists are better positioned than video scribes to endow speech act stories with dramatic features. They meet the challenge not only by confounding words with sticks and stones but also by enriching, so to speak, the identities of cited vociferators. They publicize words uttered lately by loquacious buildings ("the White House virtually ruled out..."; "the Pentagon announced"), by companies ("General Motors said"), cities ("Moscow, watching...with unconcealed glee, voiced the opinion that..."), by streets (Wall; "Downing Street admitted"), by circles ("scientific circles say"; "political and legal circles claim"; "Gold Coast property CIRCLES were ABUZZ this week after...."), by newsprint spaces ("this column has said repeated-ly"), and by nation-states ("West Germany and Sweden spoke out strongly for human rights [while] Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia attacked what they called the 'malevolent plans' of...").

["North Korea stunned the world by threatening to...".]

Lateralism. Those striking oral events are hard to show on television. So, oddly enough, are many movements that evidently rate as news. These are lateral, as well as occasional forward and backward, movements. They are ascribed to remarkably mobile entities. As dePICted in the Press, nation-states engage not only in newsworthy nattering, but also in shuffling ("France Shifts to Right"; "Oregon stepped forward..."; "Canada Tilts to the Right"). Those sinister and dexter steps, turns, tilts, shifts and rushes occur most commonly in the wake of national elections. Moreover, the steps go in directions that are designated mysteriously by capital letters: "the Left"; "the Right." They would, one might suppose, make great pictures. But they are not screened on the 10 o'clock news.

Animism. The imputation of speech and movement to nation-states is part of a larger pattern, in which print journalists bestow human qualities on all sorts and sizes of objects. Thus, nation-states reportedly engage not only in mouthing and moving, but also in sleeping and waking ("America awoke yesterday to the screams of...."), in kneeling (Bulgaria is "on its knees"--but also is held in the "embrace" of an "economic crisis"), in pondering ("Turkey is considering changes in..."), in shrugging ("China put aside its internal problems..."), in making faces ("our nation grimaced"), or in calming down ("a grateful but weary Guatemla returned to a state of peace Sunday").

No less animated, judging from newspaper reports, are programs ("After being knocked out for nine months, Alamance County's Head Start program is scrambling off the canvas..."; "Like so many other federal programs, disability insurance has lost sight of..."; Medicaid is "a program that asks few ques-tions no matter how high the bills"; "From its inception...Head Start has prided itself on..." ), as well as hospitals ("Duke Hospital is restructuring its upper management"),and currencies ("dollar battled on in offshore foreign exchange trading"; the British pound "was back off its knees, but still groggy...";"The dollar--feeling weak in the knees--fell 3.5 per cent").

So are roadways ("The approach to the bridge is crawling"; "The expressway is creeping"), markets ("The foreign exchange market shrugged off yesterday's balance of payments data, seeing the result as well within expectations"; "When it became clear the British people supported the Falklands War, a wary and watchful stock market relaxed and prospered"), committees ("It's a sunlit Thursday morning, and around a long wooden table, a college admissions committee squints at thick books of computer printouts..."), worlds ("... Sadat stunned the world yesterday by..."; "Claims that some doctors have refused patients their personal file to deter them from an American cancer cure have rocked the medical world"; "The sporting world was in turmoil last night after..."), and numbers ("Real estate and building statistics are on a dramatic upswing following a downtown after the bubble sagged").

It is conceivable, of course, that those luminous verbal images are not meant to be taken at, well, face value. When they put weapons in the hands or mouths of talkers, endow corporations with voice boxes, and treat nation-states as erratic pedestrians and programs as pugilists, journalists use figurative language. They do so, perhaps, in order to compete with television's visual impact. They may do so also in order to blend exposition, or telling what has happened, with situational appreciation, or identifying the social implications of happenings. For this purpose, similes and metaphors can be serviceable. Perhaps they are especially serviceable when mixed and mashed, becoming what William Safire has called malaphors.

Matters of state have accordingly been illuminated by journalists' judgments that a certain politician is skating on thin ice as he wrestles with demons within his party and without, or that the death of another Indian politician has left a giant question mark hanging over his country. Similar in purpose may be putative reports that a political revolving door has spewed out one man and swept in another even while hemorrhaging, or that a certain presidential candidate is wielding a double-edged sword in the shape of a boomerang that is likely to come home to plague him and beat him by a large majority.

Newspaper readers have been invited on memorable occasions also to 'see' that a hoary old chestnut has raised its head again, that an underground shaft has been shelved, that a planned truck blockade has failed to get off the ground, that a certain periodical loves nothing more than to catch tall poppies with their pants down.

Washington Post person George Will has wondered in print whether certain "loopholes" would come "seeping back." Those were not the same loopholes that, according to Australian correspondent Tess Livingston, were prevented from becoming a big problem by being nipped in the bud.

New York Times readers were invited, on a crisp October morn in 1992, to behold a "savings and loan mess" which was "swept under the rug" before it could "explode." Whether commercial banks "are a similar time bomb," Stephen Greenhouse opined, "has emerged" as a political "issue." Other members of the working Press have notified their readers that:

• Ambassador W. has been sitting on one of the hotter seats of diplomacy, striving to bridge the gap.
• The (political) mothballs operation here puts the handwriting on the wall in other States.
• The battle over Eno Drive...is poised to reignite.
• The jewel in the crown of Britain's welfare state, the National Health Service, is bleeding to death.
• Tentacles which are reaching out from a recently opened Pandora's box could prove to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

They don't cover scenes like that on the boob tube.

Cementing Sophistry

Among hot issues confronting mid-Hudson NY denizens is the proposal of St. Lawrence Cement Company to build a new plant in Greenport, on the east bank of the Hudson River. St. Lawrence wants to put a big complex of buildings and smokestacks on an 1800-acre site where, operating virtually around the clock, the factory would produce some 2.2 million metric tons per year of cement. The project has evoked fierce local opposition, with protestors dwelling on prospective heavy air, noise and viewscape pollution. St. Lawrence has responded to critics, and to State regulators, by revising some terms of its proposal. And by way of touting the revised design, SLC took out a full-page advertisement in local newspapers. Some features of the ad (11/14/04) illuminate rhetorical devices that recur in advocacy prose..

WOULD AS WILL. Conspicuous in the ad is a rhetorical device whereby a prospect (proposed event, contingency) is made to appear to be a sure thing. The device consists of using the future tense (will) instead of the subjunctive mood (would; could; might). The speaker then seems to be describing a certain future event rather than a mere possibility (what would eventuate if formative contingent events or decisions come about). Thus: new guidelines and design for (proposed!) cement plant, says St. L., “will reduce critical compounds [emissions]…by an additional 28% over the old design….” “New cement milling technology that reduces certain emissions will now be used….” “New design means that over 90% of the surrounding area won’t be able to see the plant at all.” Replacement Plant “will retain vital cement jobs….” No proper basis for this prognostication has been laid. Use of the future tense marks a variation of the so-called Bandwagon device.

DANGLING COMPARISON. Terms of comparison—“smaller,” “cleaner,” “better,” “stronger”—also play a big part in SLC’s advertisement. In this respect the ad recalls many a consumer product ad. Those pieces of advocacy, expressed in words ending in suffix er or est, often depend for effectiveness on vagueness about objects compared. Consumers are assured that new Tide is “cleaner” or “the cleanest.” The actual claim is that the touted product is better in some respect than itself: its same-brand predecessor. But that claim, from the consumer’s standpoint, is question-begging. What we really want to know is whether the touted product out-performs competing products (at same or lower cost). But the sponsor, while insinuating that the answer is affirmative, avoids that crucial claim. (We know he avoids it because we can assume safely that if he could make it veraciously, he would do so). Now in the present case, St. Lawrence really is only saying that revised plan would make its proposed new plant less visible and less noxious emission-wise than its other, earlier proposed new plant.

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AND AVOIDED COMPARISON. Also noteworthy, to students of rhetoric and to prospective neighbors of a new St. Lawrence Cement plant, is another kind of comparison that the company makes—and avoids. Here the comparison is not between two plant designs but rather between a design and an existing factory. And the focus is on emissions of toxic particles. SLC has said on various occasions that its proposed new cement factory would be “cleaner” than what it would replace, namely, its west bank plant in southern GreeneLand. That claim, however, pertains to the volume of toxic particles per ton of emissions. Not addressed is the question of what would be the volume of pollutants emitted per day or per year—by this vastly bigger cement plant, whose output would be quadruple that of the old plant. St. Lawrence’s evasion on that point, accordingly, qualifies as a contribution to the annals of Half Truth-telling. Meanwhile, St. Lawrence says “New SLC Plan Cuts Emissions By Another 28%.” On top of what?

AUTHORIAL SOPHISTRY. Now for a confession (unless it’s only an acknowledgement). In the foregoing remarks I used another bit of sophistry. I pretended to recall certain sentiments and deeds of a putative personage named St. Lawrence Cement. Rhetorically, I invested a non-human object with human qualities. In doing so I used a device that is remarkably common not only in advertising (words about what companies and even products believe/say/do) but also in mainstream journalism, and especially in elite journalism. Thus, in just one puytative news story in The New York Times, reporters Douglas Jehl & David Johnston gave ostensible accounts of deeds by “the White House” (“urging,” “expressed opposition”), the Senate (“approved”), the Pentagon (they “would have” been “required” to “report to Congress about…”), the Defense Department (“sent a letter to Congress” saying it “strongly urges” abstention from a pending move), a commission (“recommended”), the Bush administration (“disavowed”; is “keen to maintain some legal latitude”; “has said almost nothing about” a certain CIA operation; “expressed disgust”), the CIA (it’s under fire for “treatment of detainees”), and the Justice Department (issued a certain opinion; approved certain techniques). Most suitable of labels for this rhetorical anthropomorphism, I suggest, is personation. The costs and benefits of its use deserve careful consideration. Not today.

WAR COVERAGE: NAME VS. THING

Every time the television broadcasters promise more "news of Operation Iraqi Freedom", they engage in an act of Mouthpiecing, or parroting a party line. They are saying not just that Operation Iraqi Freedom is the name given by the Bush Administration to a set of activities, but that the activities really are (by motivation and effect) a compound freedom-giving operation. The insinuation is particularly strong in oral discourse, because the capital letters O, I, and F aren't audible. To avoid the arbitrary, prejudicial mouthing of one side's propaganda, they could allude to "what the Administration calls Operation Iraqi Freedom."

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