On Friday, The New York Times conducted an exclusive, 35-minute interview with the president aboard Air Force One, and published the transcript on its Web site. One of the questions the Times asked was, “The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?”
The simplistic framing of the question drew attention from the blogosphere, with some calling it a gotcha move and others arguing that the question didn’t get very much substantive bang for its buck.
Part of the criticism seems rooted in the Times’s open-ended, minimally contextualized use of a politically loaded term that is often deliberately misused. Given the nature of the political and cultural understanding of “socialism” in this country, which is still almost exclusively grounded in the cold war, it seems naïve of the Times to think it could just ignore all that baggage and have a discussion about socialism the way it might about, say, progressive taxation.
In the past, we’ve called for a rhetoric beat to help clarify the similarly used and abused words and phrases of our national discourse—like “death tax,” “war on terror,” “working class,” “post-racial,” etc. What are some words and phrases that the press needs to do a better job of parsing and explaining the full context of their usage?
Here are just a few: "collateral damage," "middle class," "terrorist," "liberal," "conservative," "bipartisanship," "nationalization," and "the American people."
#1 Posted by Alex, CJR on Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 11:07 AM
"Freedom" is my all time favourite.
#2 Posted by Andrew, CJR on Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 01:18 PM
Given the extraordinary nature of this moment in America's history, I think the question of how we approach the word "socialism" deserves special attention in our press. Consider, for example, how the notion of "spreading the wealth around," when broached by the Obama campaign last year, was immediately attacked by the right as "socialism," even though the concept of progressive taxation--which is what Obama was talking about--has formed the basis our tax policy in this country throughout history--at least until the last thirty years. The term has been frozen, purposely, in its cold-war context, and it is time that we began to rehabilitate it. Because socialism does not mean the dictatorship that took root in the former Soviet Union in the last century, and if America is to adapt and thrive in the 21st century, it will need to crush the myth of socialism and engage the reality. The press needs to stop simply amplifying the rhetorical debate over socialism, and start explaining what kinds of values are actually inherent in the term.
#3 Posted by Brent Cunningham, CJR on Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 01:21 PM
"Freedom" is just another word for nothing left to lose. Next!
#4 Posted by Bobby McGee, CJR on Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 01:44 PM
Brent,
Until such a time as the press "stop[s] simply amplifying the rhetorical debate over socialism," I see Media Matters has launched a daily "Red Scare Index" to keep tabs on how many times the terms "Socialism, Socialist, Socialistic, Communism, Communist, Communistic, Marxism and Marxist" appear (are "thrown around") on cable news.
Yesterday, Fox News led the way by far with 24 mentions of Those Words (11 of which were "socialism/ist/istic").
#5 Posted by Liz Cox Barrett, CJR on Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 03:17 PM
@Liz: Why am I not surprised you rely on Media Matters for research? And of course you use their data to bash Fox News.
This is not journalism, it's pure partisan ideology. And the idea that any of you at CJR have the moral / intellectual / political authority to recommend best practices for reportage is a joke.
Honestly.
#6 Posted by JLD, CJR on Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 04:01 PM
JLD: Why don't you grow some stones and identify yourself, so we can discuss just what YOUR moral/intellectual/political authority chops might be?
#7 Posted by Brent Cunningham, CJR on Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 05:20 PM
I would remind the editors that 'socialist' did not acquire a bad odor just during the Cold War; I believe Hitler's party called itself the 'National Socialists'. The term is rather alien to the American experience in the same way that the vocabulary of individualism and free-enterprise is rather alien to the western European ears. (We're often told by left-leaning writers that American-style capitalism can't be transplanted to other countries, for cultural reasons, but that we, on the other hand, can transplant social democratic systems from other countries, like Sweden.) At the same time, some of the European countries have 'National Front' parties in elected positions, a term that would be anathema here.
My guess is that Americans on the 'Left' are trying to sanitize a term that has a lot of historical baggage, most of it negative. Germany has its Social Democrats, but its leading conservative party is called the 'Christian Democrats', a party name and ideology that might also cause some journalists to look askance if employed here. (Parties with 'Christian' are also strong in other countries; Scandinavian nations have the cross right there on their flags.) I expect as many people died at the hands of regimes invoking 'socialism' than any other type in the 20th century, and the term is still used proudly as self-description by any number of other authoritarian regimes. I believe it is an error in manners for conservatives to do this kind of labeling, but the vocabulary of the mainstream media already has great tolerance of negative terms used to describe opponents of urban liberalism - 'religious fundamentalist', 'right-wing', 'racist/sexist/homophobe', 'ultra-conservative' - which are also not well defined and have little context attached.
#8 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 12 Mar 2009 at 01:58 PM
The logic of this CJR editors' opinion escapes me. We aren't socialists, because socialists smell bad?
Well, actually, we are socialists, maybe, editors imply, but it's not right for reporters to admit they report from a socialist system because everybody knows socialists smell bad, and we don't smell bad.
Just one thing. Go to any U.S. city and sniff that smoke rising from the government subsidized highways. Walk into any one of the prisons maintained by the nation that incarcerates more of it's population than any other. Go to any of the thousands of small farms shut down and replaced by new real estate development, reeking of pine-pitch on new lumber from now decimated nationalized forests. Something smells bad. That's not socialism I smell?
#9 Posted by De Odarante, CJR on Thu 9 Apr 2009 at 07:54 PM
"universal health care" -- why not just call it what it is: a law that imprisons people who don't make extortion payments to large insurance companies to pay for other people's dubious medical procedures.
#10 Posted by Dr. Gotbucks, CJR on Fri 10 Apr 2009 at 10:02 AM