The weasel voice in journalism

ON MAY 14th, as Palestinians massed at the Gaza Strip’s border, Israeli soldiers fired on them, killing around 60 people. Shortly afterwards, the New York Times tweeted: “Dozens of Palestinians have died in protests as the US prepares to open its Jerusalem embassy.” Social media went ballistic. “From old age?” was one incredulous reply. #HaveDied quickly became a hashtag campaign.

The fault was soon laid not only at the door of the Times, but at a feature of English grammar. As Glenn Greenwald, a left-wing journalist, put it, “Most Western media outlets have become quite skilled—through years of practice—at writing headlines and describing Israeli massacres using the passive tense so as to hide the culprit.” His view was retweeted over 5,000 times and echoed by other critics.

The problem is that the Times’s tweet was not passive. “Have died” is the verb “to die” in the active voice and the perfect tense. Ironically, many people, in “correcting” the Times’s supposed passive, replaced the active “have died” with a passive alternative, such as “Dozens were shot by Israeli troops.”

English and most other European languages have both an active voice (Steve kicked John) and a passive (John was kicked by Steve). Style manuals, including The Economist’s, generally deprecate the passive voice. It is longer, for one thing. For another, it is often found in heavy academic and bureaucratic prose. Inexperienced writers tend to over-use it.

But critics of the passive often confuse two different things: syntax and semantics. Syntax has to do with the mechanics of putting a sentence together. In Steve kicked John, Steve is the subject and John is the direct object. But in John was kicked by Steve, John is now the subject, even though he is still the kickee, and Steve is still the kicker.

To diagnose what readers did not like about the Times’s summary, you need semantics, not syntax; the description of meaning, not form. In both the active and passive sentences above, Steve is the “agent” and John is the “patient”, in the jargon of semantics. Flipping their syntactic form does nothing to their semantic role. There is one big wrinkle. Only in the passive can the agent be omitted entirely (John was kicked). That is another reason for the passive’s bad rap.

In the case of “have died”, though, neither patients nor passives come into it. To die is an intransitive verb. Intransitive verbs have no direct object (you can’t say Steve died John). There is no patient. For the same reason, there is no passive form at all. You can’t say John was died by Steve.

So what the critics really meant is that the Times erred in using an intransitive verb. This is, in fact, an unfortunate choice. When gunshots land, someone shoots and someone is shot, two roles, a subject and an object, an agent and a patient, in any reasonable description. Journalists are often told to report “who-what-when-where-why” in headlines and first sentences. In cases like this they really need “who-whom-when-where-why.”

But merely reporting the full facts accurately does not save journalists from espousing a point of view. “Soldiers kill dozens of protesters” has a very different feel from “Dozens of protesters killed by soldiers”, even though they describe the same proposition. The first seems to point the finger more squarely at the soldiers; the second highlights the victims.

And this is to say nothing of word choice. Both active and passive forms can give the victims’ perspective, with active verbs like “Soldiers massacre protesters” or passive formulations such as “Protesters gunned down by army”. The same goes for the other side: “Soldiers shoot rioters”, say, or “Rampaging mob turned back from border”.

So the passive can be clear and the active can be a dodge. Words are more important than grammar. And no matter what their sympathies, reporters have a duty to give all the relevant facts. Headlines and the openings of stories are especially important. Nobody gets them right every time, but subeditors might consider letting enormous font-sizes shrink to accommodate more information.

As for the armchair grammarians: it is time to give attacks on the (mostly blameless) passive voice a rest. If critics want to decry shoddy headlines, the internet has offered alternative culprits: “evasive voice” goes well with “active” and “passive”. But since this is not really a feature of grammar at all, consider another popular suggestion—“weasel voice”.