IT CAN'T BE THIS HARD
With a couple of communication degrees, I think of it as my job to comment on media matters. But at this point the relentless barrage of infelicity — from serious reporters and journalists at all our leading news outlets — has become pretty overwhelming. To be honest, I find it tiresome, too. But it's also hard to look away.
Aside from how I feel about all this, folks also like to tell me this “obsession” of mine is both pointless and overly pedantic. All I can offer in response is that, as ever, I'm not concerning myself with voices that don’t matter. Nor am I interested in folks who don’t know what they’re up to and are just making noise. Instead, I’m talking about the words chosen by teams of career wordsmiths. These are people, many from the Ivy League, who are thrilled to get into semantics and who’ve spent an inordinate portion of their lives agonizing over individual words and moving words and letters and sounds around to impart exactly the message they intend and in the manner they intend.
And then, deeper, these people aren’t just passionate about language. They aren't poets or English teachers but journalists and reporters. All of them tell us publicly that, as newsfolk, they’re pledged to be uncommonly honest, careful, and accurate in their outputs and place themselves to be criticized for exactly that. And when do I bring this stuff up? Just any time anyone in the mass communication game has something to offer? No, I tend to bring this up regarding events I believe are of consequence and that are not readily open to wildly differing interpretation; when, I contend, there are facts on the ground that are knowable but, while uncovered and understood, they're still being willfully misreported.
To me, that this ever happens at all at present is astonishing. And the only thing stranger than feeling one needs to point out those errors (that is to say, that the system is not so aggressively self-correcting that such things never occur or that if they do they aren't instantly admitted to and fixed) is receiving push-back when doing so. Yet, here we are.
