Richard Aedy: There’s been a bit of fuss recently about the language used by a certain media organisation in its reporting of the war in Iraq. Most of the controversy has hinged on the use of specific words, but there’s a great deal more to the language than words. The rules of grammar, which I’m ignoring in such a cavalier fashion right now, are important too: grammar conveys meaning.All of which explains why Macquarie University’s Department of Linguistics is looking at how the war in Iraq is being reported in the media. The project leader is Annabelle Lukin.
Annabelle Lukin: So in general terms the question is, how does the media mediate our experience of war. So for most of us we don’t have first-hand experience of it, so our sense of say, the Iraq war is built up over time, news report by news report, so each news report gives us some kind of impression of the war, some kind of angle on it. So it’s selective, it has to be selective, because you can’t say everything all the time. OK, so each time a journalist, and editors and whoever puts some story together, then they’ve made decisions about what goes into it. So it’s a selection of what gets reported, who gets to have a say in it. But also I’m looking in quite detailed ways about how our sense of the action of war is communicated. So when some kind of event in war is reported, is it reported so that it’s actually done by somebody or something? So do we get a sense that there’s an agent involved, or is it a process that seems to happen all by itself?
Richard Aedy: Right. Let me just backtrack a little. How can it not be an action that’s done by somebody or something? It must be, by definition.
Annabelle Lukin: OK, well if say something like an attack occurred in Baghdad. OK, so if you get a formulation like that, which is quite a common way of saying something, then what you’ve got is a kind of grammatical structure which projects the event as if it just happened all by itself, rather than being something that was done. So if we said, ‘The coalition forces attacked Saddam’s palace’, for instance, you’ve got a structure that has an agent. So it gives you a very strong sense of an action that’s affecting something. So this is a really fundamental grammatical distinction. Do you have agency or not? And every time you say anything, you have to make that grammatical choice go have agency or not to have agency.
Richard Aedy: Right. This goes to the heart of what you’re looking at, doesn’t it, because to say ‘An attack occurred’, that’s not even as I understand it, in the passive voice, is it?
Annabelle Lukin: No, that’s right, that’s what we call middle voice. So to go back to my earlier example, ‘Coalition forces attacked Saddam’s palace’, the passive voice would be ‘Saddam’s palace was attacked’. Now you have the choice then of saying ‘by coalition forces’, so you can have the agent in the passive voice, but the passive voice gives you the option to leave that out. Now when you move over into middle voice, you don’t have a choice to put it in or put it out, there’s no implication of agency. It just happened, OK, nobody made it happen, nobody did it. So you can imagine if that is a common way of representing action, so if as the listener or the reader of news reports over a long period of time, if that’s a really frequent way of reporting an action, then it gives you a very kind of muted sense of who’s doing it, how it’s being done, that kind of thing. It’s less impactful in the way it represents the actions of all.
Richard Aedy: It’s more removed altogether. But it occurs to me that journalists don’t have an interest in presenting war in this way. I mean the history of journalism shows that you paint it as big as you can.
Annabelle Lukin: Well in the small sample of news reports that I’ve started to look at, my sense at the moment is that when you get what you might call a hard news story, say a front page story on the war, that the tendency is to favour the kinds of grammatical structures that I’ve also seen when I look at the coalition press briefings.
Richard Aedy: You’re not accusing journalists of just lifting press briefings, are you?
Annabelle Lukin: Well no I’m not, I think the problem actually is deeper than that, because if you say they lift the press briefings, then you can go and track word by word is it exactly what was said? No, I’m not suggesting that, but what I am suggesting is that in order to achieve what we see as the kind of ‘neutral objective style’, then the tendency in achieving that is to background agency, to background causation and to background human involvement in the war, because as soon as you start to specify agency, and in particular to specify human agency, you are much more likely to get into a situation where you’re seen as attributing blame, and I see this for instance when I look at Robert Fisk’s news reports.
Richard Aedy: He does in effect attribute blame, because he gets in there on the ground and talks to people whose lives have been changed and often wrecked.
Annabelle Lukin: That’s right. And so he’s much more likely to give you a configuration in which you get either humans as the agents of war, or humans as directly affected by war, whereas in again what I’d characterise as your hard news report, you’re more likely to get either technology as an agent, or to get something abstract as an agent.
Richard Aedy: I think I know where you’re going with this. If I recall, and it’s obviously two years ago, those CENTCOM briefings, I think the ABC had Jonathan Harley park there for a miserable month or so, all of those briefings from people like Tommy Franks, they were fairly dry, weren’t they?
Annabelle Lukin: Yes, they were, and I’ve just been looking at a really fascinating little piece from Tommy Franks from in fact the first day, the first press briefing he gave at Centcom. And one of the things I’ve noticed is his use of ‘the plan’ as the agent.
Tommy Franks: We’re in fact on plan. And where we stand today is not only acceptable in my view, it is truly remarkable.
Annabelle Lukin: So he sets out various things that are part of their policy and their approach to how they’re going to prosecute this war. And once he’s done that, he can simply refer to ‘the plan’. So it’s the plan doing this, the plan doing that.
Richard Aedy: The plan becomes an entity in itself.
Annabelle Lukin: That’s right. So it’s this abstract thing that takes on a life of its own, and it’s the thing that seems to make decisions, and command or take control of the flow of events. And the effect of course, every time you think through this, you have to think Well what could have been said? Because that helps us understand why something has the meaning that it has. So in this case we say OK, we’ve ended up with an abstract entity as the agent, we could have had a human. So the choice that’s been made is to defer to something larger than actual physical humans making decisions. So you can see the effect of that.
Richard Aedy: You’ve also mentioned technology as having the agency. Can you give me an example?
Annabelle Lukin: Yes, things like you know F1-11 radar evading jets dropped bombs on Baghdad. So instead of saying ‘Coalition forces dropped bombs on Baghdad’, you make it the jets who do the doing, and that is a really common thing. And I think it is historically part of the fact that war is much more technological than it used to be, when you’ve got a very technological war like we’ve got now, then it’s not surprising that grammar has been part of how we understand that experience.
Richard Aedy: Is this spin, or is it just an extension of military euphemisms? I remember the one that came to light in 1990-’91 was ‘Collateral damage’.
Annabelle Lukin: Well I think what we have to see is that when the military talks about the war, it’s in their interest to present it in a way that people will continue to support what they’re doing. And what’s really important in that, I think, is that you downplay the human effects, the physical effects, the destruction of it.
Richard Aedy: But the overall effect of these subtle, rather sophisticated choices, is that you end up presenting a Clayton’s war, the war you have when you’re not having a war, in effect.
Annabelle Lukin: Well that’s strongly my sense, looking at the Centcom transcripts, and the analysis I’ve done so far suggests that if you get a grammatical configuration where you have a human agent, and a human as the thing that is affected in that process, it’s likely to be presented in very positive terms like ‘Our ground forces support our airmen doing such-and-such and so-and-so’, OK? So it’s a very kind of benign action where the US, one section of the coalition forces, are supporting another section. You’re very unlikely to get a human as agent, and a human as the affected when it’s a negative process of killing, wounding, destroying, that kind of thing. You know, something that’s about the killing of civilians is going to be represented in much more abstract, muted terms, either without agency, or in a much more abstract sense like we’ve attacked targets of opportunity.
Richard Aedy: It’s hardly ‘We will fight them on the beaches’, is it?
Annabelle Lukin: Well that’s right, that’s exactly right.
Richard Aedy: It’s been educational Annabelle, thanks for joining us on The Media Report.
Annabelle Lukin: My pleasure.
Richard Aedy: Annabelle Lukin’s a research Fellow at Macquarie University’s Centre for Language in Social Life. And we’ll keep track of her results.
10 March 2005
