Am I right in thinking that the British government found itself innocent, and that it blamed Colonel Wilford and a number of pseudonymous underlings?
Well, you would not know ANY OF THAT from the headline, now would you? Which is the pointâŚ
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I followed the links in the storyâŚ
But a midranking officer ignored part of the order and allowed members of the unit to break cover behind a barricade. As a result, there was âno separation between peaceful marchers and those who had been rioting, and no means whereby soldiers could identify and arrest only the latter,â the 2010 inquiry report said.
The PROBLEM is the HEADLINE.
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Maybe meet at Kellyâs Cellars in Belfast? I hear itâs mellowed out in the last 15 years or so.
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I think soft pedaling the language around this? It doesnât matter where.
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To link this in to Spotify, Brendan McFarlane has his own channel:
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The purpose of a headline is to get you to read the article. If you do, it has served itâs purpose, and you forget about the headline. If you donât, itâs a bad headline. ANd thatâs why the reporter doenât write them.
Please stop extending your own internal narrative to the rest of the population of the world. Itâs insulting and neglects the real harm caused by this kind of propaganda.
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Citing a NYT puff piece about how they write their headlines in a discussion about how NYT headlines are propaganda seems⌠not as persuasive to the point you were trying to make as I think you think it was.
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Passive-voicing in journalism is a category for this form of propaganda. Most of the time, itâs a grammatically accurate description, but even when it uses other constructs, such as inverting the direct object and noun of the sentence, itâs still about removing accountability and agency in the defense of the status quo.
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Fair call. But it drives linguists up the wall, because âpassive voiceâ means something very specific, which this isnât.
We should call this thing (which is definitely a thing which requires its own term) âAgency negationâ or something. Even if only to remove another layer of euphemism. Itâs not about the grammatical convolution, itâs about what the convolution is being used for. Calling Agency Negation (hey, maybe it will catch on) âpassive-voicingâ is, itself, a form of passive voicing.
Please, think of the linguists!
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Great. Now the Wordle will be enabling killer cops and fascists.
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I just posted the fucking NY Times story in the Wordle Cheat thread.
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Firstly Iâve âstood my groundâ in this forum on many occasions arguing about reporting of mass killings, suicide clusters, and even people driving into other people to say that US standards are pretty fucking piss poor. Not at the forefront of best practice.
They are actively changing parts of it however.
In this case allowing that the gunfire âunfoldedâ like your washing on a windy day when you are taking it off the line takes away from the simple fact that the army, egged on by their command, murdered civilians doing nothing illegal. This was not their first rodeo and they knew that the media would work to justify them - theyâd gone on a murder spree a few months previously. Ballymurphy massacre - Wikipedia
The general in charge, responsible for murdering children, got himself a knighthood and all that, he was whooping it up straight after:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvc852TztSs
You talk about Mai Lai, or Kent State (or Amritsar why not?) and you talk about killings where state actors went and let themselves do what they wanted to do with people they had systematically dehumanised and in which the organs of the state went straight into action obfusticating, excusing, both siding and in every possible way covering their arses. They did this with the very active collusion of most of the media in all cases. (why I could never understand American liberals liking that scumbag Colin Powell).
If the NYT were to say tomorrow that âgunfire unfoldedâ in Amritsar I would call it out just the same. The thing here is that it is still active, the victims families have not let go and the desparate attempts of the English Tories to retrospectively provide immunity for British soldiers killing people for shits and giggles failed last year.
But time is running out and the UK establishment are fighting tooth and nail, digging in, delaying, lying, hiding, sowing confusion etc, and the NYT is complicit.
And it knows it is.
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This is a great movie on how gunfire âunfoldedâ on that fateful Sunday in Derry.
If they want to use passive voice to appear unbiased or whatever, they should at least use the word âerupted,â because thatâs how it actually happens.
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