Just a dash

I know, I know: I keep going on about this. And the ship sailed a long time ago. But look at this:

It’s a perfect example – the best I’ve ever seen  – of when a Fowler comma is not only desirable but necessary.

Fowler, as we have discussed before, took a strict line on parentheses in Modern English Usage, advising as follows:

1. Parentheses may be indicated in any one of four ways: by square brackets, by round brackets, by dashes, and by commas …

2. After the second bracket or dash any stop that would have been used if the brackets or dashes and their contents had not been there should still be used.

Unlike his proposal for separating the use of “which” and “that”, which has been widely applied and misapplied in formal English, this idea – that if you add a dashed parenthesis at the end of a subordinate clause, you must still retain the closing comma of the clause – has been totally disregarded. That’s not surprising: it looks very peculiar, however you arrange it – even like this –, when you include every mark.

But look at the sentence above, describing the way that reality show Educating Yorkshire was filmed. The dashed parenthesis in the middle, “64 automatic cameras and microphones rather than intrusive film crews”, looks normal. But, in fact, it has been placed in the middle of a list, and inserting it has caused one of the delimiting commas to disappear.

So when you parse the sentence, you go wrong. The standard editor’s test is that you should be able to lift a parenthetical clause out of a sentence without affecting the syntax or grammar of what’s left, and this apparently passes with flying colours:

The key to the programme is the use of the fixed rigs […] retaining the trust of teachers.

That’s clear: the automatic filming system wins teachers’ confidence by not having disruptive outsiders in the classroom.

But that’s not what it means. It was only when I got to the apparently unnecessary comma after “teachers”, and thought it looked suspiciously like an Oxford comma, that I realised: this isn’t a two-part list, it’s a three-part list. There are three things that are key to the programme’s success: (i) using fixed rigs; (ii) retaining the trust of teachers, and (iii) selecting the right school. There is no causal relationship between the teachers’ trust and the fixed rigs. The insertion of the dashed parenthetical clause has caused the first and second points to merge into one, because we don’t put commas after dashes.

The fix is simple, of course: put the parenthetical clause into brackets.

The key to the programme is the use of the fixed rigs (64 automatic cameras and microphones rather than intrusive film crews), retaining the trust of teachers, and selecting the right school.

But that only works because it is acceptable to punctuate after a closing bracket mark. If you take the comma out, you’re back to the original, mistaken reading. Curiously, we can punctuate after some parenthetical marks but not others.

Too late to do anything about that, of course; if Fowler’s suggestion didn’t catch on in 1926, it’s not going to catch on now. But accidental ambiguities like that haunts the lives of sub-editors.  It’s nice to know that they alarmed Fowler too.

Unfairness and balance

Partiality can be dangerous. Impartiality can be too. Hot on the heels of his last post on “innocence” in the American media, Professor Rosen has developed his theme, seizing on a recent example of excessively balanced reporting, or what he calls “he said, she said” journalism.

The story – about a recently published book on Reagan – appeared in the New York Times, and dealt with allegations of plagiarism made against the author by one of Reagan’s biographers. The Times carefully reported the claims, gave ample space to the author to rebut them, and left it there, without drawing any conclusions. The reader was left to judge the prosecution and defence cases. Unfortunately, as Rosen points out, that isn’t good enough this time:

The problem here is that the Times had what it needed to make a call. “Perlstein plagiarized Shirley” was a checkable claim. Shirley’s accusations were online. Perlstein’s source notes were online. The Times knows what plagiarism is. Its writers and editors have to guard against it every day. Under these conditions, “leaving it there” amounts to malpractice …

In fact, the NYT’s public editor was moved to intervene and came down firmly against the paper, saying the article “amplified a damaging accusation of plagiarism without establishing its validity and doing so in a way that is transparent to the reader”.

As Rosen observes, “he said, she said” is not always the fairest way. “Instead of favoring one side, it pushes the account toward a phony midpoint. [It’s] still distortion, but it looks more innocent.”

So perhaps “warrior journalism” of the best kind – partisan, but ethical and conscientious – as advocated by this blog last time is a better model? But, as the always-perceptive Picky wrote in the comments to that post, there are serious potential problems here too, even if every partisan newspaper were to hold itself to the highest standards of fairness.

In that world,  I could (sufficiently resourced) find a story a day about some cock-up or catastrophe somewhere in the NHS, all of them true, and print them. The unstated unproven concomitant (the lie) would be that the NHS, reeling from the government’s cuts, is about to collapse. Or I could by examining the bureaucratic tomfoolery of the European Union find a story a day, all of them true, about the latest bit of ineptitude. The unstated unproven concomitant (the lie) would be that we are ruled by a bunch of Napoleonic idiots in Brussels out to destroy Tunbridge Wells.

Balance, as Rosen makes clear, is not always enough; but, as Picky says, fairness isn’t always enough either. A series of correct and ethically impeccable stories about NHS disasters are fair individually, but not collectively if there is never a story about NHS success or improvement.

British journalism suffers from its own plurality: to grasp the British news agenda, you would need to buy every paper every day. But it is also blessed with the moderating influence of its studiously impartial TV channels. And perhaps the “he said, she said” method is at its best in this environment, with BBC news perched on top of a warring press and synthesising a balance of views. (Even if, as I contend, that forces it to act willy-nilly as an umpire, ruling some subjects in and others out of a national debate that even it does not have the resources to cover in full.)

Britain’s partisan press model is a dangerous one, for sure: it requires not just active regulation at source but also a series of downstream media organisations to act as filters. But maybe it is more robust, and truer to the spirit of the profession, than a system in which conclusions are not drawn even when they could be. After all, not many people go into journalism to be cautious.

Innocence abroad

Over at PressThink, Jay Rosen writes:

Alongside the production of news and commentary American journalists working in mainstream newsrooms have to continuously reproduce their own innocence. By ‘innocence’ I mean some kind of public showing that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of unfairly tilting the news this way or that.

This has come up in connection with Gaza: in particular, in connection with two tweets sent out by the Associated Press a couple of weeks ago. The first read:

As much of world watches Gaza war in horror, members of Congress fall over each other to support Israel: http://t.co/DepO2etLQS

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 29, 2014

The second, embarrassed, one came a few hours later:

Many U.S. lawmakers strongly back Israel in Gaza war (revises wording in this @AP tweet: http://t.co/RZs5dh0m2L ): http://t.co/OvBKx75U6Z

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 29, 2014

The language has been hastily cleared up: the faint appearance of commentary expunged. As Rosen says:

The original header produced the news well enough but it failed to produce enough innocence for the AP. “Many U.S. lawmakers strongly back Israel…” is not more true than “they fall over themselves.” But it is more innocent. When the switch is made the AP feed suffers a loss of vivid. Its colors wilt. There is less voice, less urgency in the language. And the AP willingly pays this cost.

Why does it pay that cost? Because American media is different. In a newspaper culture partly defined by the vastness of the continent, US newspapers are frequently regional monopolies or part of metropolitan duopolies, operating as bipartisan fair dealers for readers of all political hues. There are almost no true “nationals”, so conceived; American papers are branded and differentiated by region, not politics. As Rosen says:

In the American setting media bias is a driver in politics, and culture war is where some people go to live. A major provider like the AP gets hit hard in the bias wars, so the principle, don’t give them ammunition! has to be built into its routines. That’s the production of innocence.

In Britain, with 22 newspapers all vying for attention in a country slightly smaller than Michigan, national distribution and monopoly status are not a problem, but differentiation is. So the market has been segmented by attitude, not region. Your paper is the one that shares your views, not your place of residence.

So, in America the culture war is waged outside the mainstream media, via new conduits – cable news, talk radio, political websites. But in Britain, the mainstream media is the culture war. The Guardian fights with the Telegraph and the Mail and Murdoch; the Telegraph (increasingly staffed by Mail veterans), fights with the Guardian and the Independent; the Sun fights with the Mirror; the Mirror fights with the Sun and the Mail.

There is no compunction about this. Everyone in Britain knows that papers are rightwing or leftwing; everyone understands that, to grasp the full UK news agenda, you need to take a conspectus of what all the papers say (or have the BBC do it for you). There is no “innocence”. But that doesn’t mean that British newspapering is unreliable – or, at least, that’s not the reason why it is.

American journalism, as Rosen indicates, is on the retreat in the bias wars, accused by the new-media right of leaning institutionally to the left. This is a vast lie: to quote HeadsUp, it is logically incoherent to claim that “the presence of a right-wing media outlet in a dyad makes the other outlet ‘liberal'”. It’s also a very unlikely charge to make against a trade as formalised and scrutinised as US newspapering. The only reason the lie gains any traction is because of the area in which all media outlets struggle not to be partial: the issue of story selection.

Reporters are never expected to be equally interested in everything. They specialise. They become immersed in defence, sport, economics, the environment, and their engagement with their subjects is what make them valuable. As they move up the ladder to the newsdesk and the editor’s office, their interests and priorities travel with them. And editing is about judgment, response and discernment; it is never rigidly judicial. It’s impossible to pretend to yourself that you care about Britney Spears more than the Middle East if you don’t. If talks are reopening over Syria and you’re short of space, then the showbiz piece bites the dust. Everyone is naturally biased for or against celebrity stories, foreign stories, crime stories, policy stories – and political stories too.

Imagine that you are coming out of morning conference with two equally spectacular exclusives: the abysmal neglect of war veterans with injuries on the one hand, and evidence of shocking violence towards prisoners by the same armed forces on the other. Walter Reed and Abu Ghraib on the same day.  Only one of them can lead page one. Which one will it be? Whichever way you decide to go, bias for or against the military – and, by direct implication, bias to the right or left – will be perceived from the moment you make the decision.

This, Rosen suggests, is all new to American journalism. Of the several questions he asks himself after the AP Twitter incident, one of them is:

Q. 6 Let’s say you junk the innocence machinery. What gets put in its place? (My bet: “here’s where we’re coming from” + make a good argument + high standards of verification beats the old system.)

He’s right. But he doesn’t have to bet, and he doesn’t have to wonder what gets put in innocence’s place. He can just look at Fleet Street.

The way post-innocence journalism works, at its best, is this: the news list is biased, but the articles are not. Once your organisation’s political preferences have dictated which story goes on the front, that story, once written, will be impeccable. It will contain documentary evidence, well-sourced quotes, pre-publication legal editing and an authentic right of reply.  The news editor will enforce that on the reporter; the subs’ desk will enforce it on the news desk; and the editor will enforce it on everyone. All those people will be empowered to raise objections; some of them will be empowered to stop the story outright. Everyone involved will remember that nothing is more potentially dangerous to a paper than a story it wants to be true.

British readers are untroubled by a newspaper’s partisan loyalties. Of course the Mirror wants to yell about fat cat pay, we think; of course the Mail always flies into a rage about NHS waste. In the hypothesis above, to no one’s surprise, the Guardian would splash on Abu Ghraib and the Telegraph on Walter Reed. A paper’s underlying motivations are taken as read: the quality of the story is the only thing that matters. We don’t care where the story is “coming from”; we only care that it can back up its claims.

You can be partial in what you choose to write about, but not in how you choose to write it.