Mea Culpa: when to keep our distance in headlines

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

John Rentoul
Friday 02 November 2018 15:53 GMT
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How far should we distance ourselves from Trump?
How far should we distance ourselves from Trump?

A headline this morning read: “Outrage as Trump blames Democrats over police murders in ‘racist’ midterms campaign.” That word “over” seems to be trying to distance The Independent from Donald Trump’s accusation. As the report makes clear, the controversial Republican advertisement blames Democrats for the murders of police officers, and I think we should say so in the headline.

On the other hand, it was quite right to distance The Independent from the word “racist” by putting it in quotation marks, as that was an opinion, expressed by a professor of political science. Although many readers may agree with it, and although the professor’s point was that journalists should describe the president’s words and actions as racist, there are many people who would describe them differently – “racially charged”, for example, as the professor herself said.

Doggone metaphor: Another headline on the same report called the Republican propaganda a “‘racist dog-whistle advert”. Again, we were merely reporting what other people were saying about it. But we ought to remember that the point about a dog-whistle is that it is audible only to dogs. The metaphor, therefore, is for a message that only one section of the audience – in this case, racist voters – will pick up. Other, non-racist, voters are not supposed to notice.

So when Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called the advert the “dog-whistle of all dog-whistles”, he was making no sense, because the point of the story is that anti-racist Democrats were furious about what they see as an explicitly racist advert.

Doctoring the record: A caption on a still from the film Peterloo, accompanying an interview with its director Mike Leigh, said: “Peterloo tells a story that sometimes seems to be airbrushed from British history.”

This is pure pedantry, but airbrushing became a metaphor when it was used to doctor photographs in the Soviet Union to remove people who had fallen out with Stalin. The Peterloo massacre was in 1819, before the invention of photography – and the airbrush wasn’t invented until 1876. Today we would call it photoshopping, although that is a trademark, and doesn’t carry the implication of political censorship.

Also, I don’t think it is true. All the histories of the period I have read mention Peterloo as an important moment in the agitation for wider voting rights – as well as in the creation of a London police force by Robert Peel 10 years later.

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