Aggressive thinking about passive-voice COVID journalism

The New York Times repents on an important issue -- sort of

How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer: Fish.

OK, that isn’t a perfect example of humor based on grammar — but I will argue that it is grammatical humor adjacent. As a former newspaper copy-desk pro, I love humor based on grammar and unique forms of word play.

Long ago, a Charlotte News colleague of mine (alas, in pre-Internet days) wrote an entire column about journalists doing clever and even sneaky things with words, and he managed to write the whole thing without using the LETTER E! There were no misspellings or grammatical errors, although he did some rather stilted writing to get around using “the.” That was 5-star work.

Here’s one of my favorite one-liner gags of this sort: “What would happen if there were no more hypothetical questions?”

Let me offer a few more before we get to the main event — which is an important grammatical wrinkle linked to that New York Times op-ed the other day, by Zeynep Tufekci, that ran with this headline: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”

Here’s a gag from my own life . Years ago, I was explaining the “typology” concept to some teen-agers — a circle of hyper-articulate nerds that included my son. I explained that a typology (dictionary definition here) is a kind of intellectual filing system that helps people communicate about complex issues in a clear manner.

I offered this joke as an illustration: “There are two kinds of people in this world, people who believe that there are two kinds of people in this world and people who do not believe that there are two kinds of people in this world.” This drew some chuckles. Then a quietly snarky girl muttered: “But what if you don’t CARE?” OK, then there are THREE kinds of people in this world ….

Hang in there with me on this, since I am struggling with some serious post-Down Under jet lag.

This next gag may be the best one ever (here is a good academic source):

An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

Wait! A linguistics professor at MIT?

This brings me (finally) to “Kooks and Cranks,” a Demotivations With Anne post in which Anne Kennedy digs into that New York Times coronavirus confessional piece that everyone has been talking about.

I watched that online circus a bit while traveling and vowed to write about it once I got home.Then Kennedy wrote her piece on precisely the angle that had me laughing out loud while reading the Gray Lady op-ed.

It’s a grammar and word play thing.

Trust me, I understand that the hellish effect that COVID-19 news coverage has had on how millions of Americans view journalism is serious business. It’s one in a series of important news stories (hello Hunter Biden laptop) in which strategically located journalists did everything they could to ignore, bury or warp important information.

But this Tufekci essay represents a major (and stunningly late) Times effort to write about this subject that had been taboo for years.

This is serious stuff.

Ah, but if you love grammatical humor, the article does have it’s hilarious moments. This brings us to Kennedy’s piece. Start with this quote from the Times essay:

… In 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization. So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.

Take away, Anne Kennedy:

Like so many others, I am excessively bemused by the passive voice in this editorial. I love using the passive voice whenever possible. I think it is maligned unfairly as a literary device. In this case, it’s quite perfect. “They were treated like kooks and cranks.” Who was it, do you suppose, who treated them that way? Five years is a long time, and I am pretty forgetful, but even I remember that the New York Times labored overtime to make sure those designations stuck to the people who tried to ask any questions. It might be a little bit more honest to say something like “We treated them like kooks and cranks.”

We. Treated. Them. Active voice, in other words.

Let me put on my Reporting 101 professor hat for a moment.

In several decades of grading papers and news reports, I frequently saw students — in rough drafts, especially — trying to use passive voice to hide the fact that they didn’t have interviews of their own to actively quote (with clear attributions). Also, some wanted to quote sources, such as public relations documents, without admitting that this was what they were doing.

The result was language such as “critics of the legislation have said ….” There are millions of variations on this device.

Now, read the Times essay and note the many creative ways that passive voice and specific word-play tactics are used to spray fog around the actual journalism problems that existed (and often still exist) in COVID-19 “news” coverage. This is a laugh, to keep from crying, situation.

Back to Kennedy for another round. First, a quote from the Gray Lady:

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story.

Take it away Anne:

Yes, we have since learned. Everyone has learned something, though not all at the same rate and at the same time and with the same level of enthusiasm.

It has since been learned by … Can we name names?

One more! First the Times quote:

You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test possible gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research. Why haven’t we learned our lesson?

To which Kennedy responds:

Gosh, I don’t know why you haven’t learned your lesson. You should work on that, writers of the New York Times.

Lessons have been learned by whom? Did I get the grammar right on that one?
Come on, folks. Quote your sources clearly and identify some of these principalities and powers hiding in the word “we.”

As for me, I’ll end by repeating what I used to tell my students: In journalism, passive voice is to be avoided like the plague.