I was proceeding on foot in an orderly manner, your honour, when I espied the defendant micturating freely into the gutter.
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“Mistakes were made.” … and similar. It’s ducking all responsibility and does not reflect well on professionals in either law enforcement or reporting the news.
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“man’s neck breaks during arrest”
Holy shit, the passive voice is saying so, so much here…
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Passive voice really does a lot to remove responsibility, which will certainly come up in any case. A lawyer could theoretically argue lots of things from a police report, such as bias against the suspect from the get go just based on the way they write up the report. But it also does a lot to remove responsibility in the sense that it distances the office from the action and gives wiggle room down the line.
“Responding officer discharged their service weapon’s entire magazine and struck the unarmed suspect.” Would be active.
“Responding officer’s service weapon was discharged and suspect was struck. Upon inspection of suspect, no gun was found. Suspect was pronounced dead at scene by EMT’s, cause of death to be determined by medical examiner.” Is all passive all the way and just gives so much shifty fucking wiggle room and makes the situation not sound nearly as serious as it really is.
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Okay, so Journalism (and indeed any commentary) in Australia is limited by defamation laws, explained in this article in The Guardian a year ago.
There’s a big fight going on in Oz around press freedoms though.
However, an additional twist is that The Age (among other newspapers) have been recently purchased by a big local conglomerate, the Nine Network, and the article appears to be a cross-promotion with the local version of “60-Minutes” which is mid-range tabloid journalism not exactly noted for balanced reporting.
So the TL;DR is that the Age may be getting pressure from Nine, they may not be able to report in anything other than generalisations because there are ongoing investigations into the incident or overall, avoding breaking defamation laws.
Alternatively, there’s the old adage: never ascribe to conspiracy what can easily be explained by a fuck-up.
EDIT: And another thing to bear in mind is naming the officers involved or stating that something categorically occurred because of specific acts can influence juries should this incident go to trial. And as@jyoti noted, the legal department will have tweaked things because they’ve got to earn a dollar too.
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There’s no “passive voice” here. (The passive-voice version of the headline would be “Man’s neck broken during arrest”. You can easily assign agency/blame with the passive voice: “The man’s neck was broken by the police during his arrest” is in the passive voice.)
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Is there another term for the grammatical construction? Necks lack agency, and do not break unless broken. Even if it has another name, it is functionally equivalent to passive voice here in that the agent is missing from the sentence.
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Yeah. Describing a cop shooting someone as “an officer-involved shooting” is fundamentally totalitarian language, and tells you everything you need to know about the person using it.
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The active voice has nothing to do with “agency” in the sentient-being/moral-responsibility sense, it has to do with the presence of a grammatical subject. (Which, confusingly, is sometimes referred to by linguists as the “agent”, but without the “has agency” sense.) Wind blows, rain falls, hopes fade, tensions rise, bombs explode, bridges collapse, time passes – all those are in the active voice, and if necks lack agency, then so do the subjects in all of those sentences.
If you want a detailed explanation of what the passive actually is, you might try this post by Geoff Pullum at LangageLog, which has some nice examples of how the passive can be used to put focus and emphasis on agency (“Don’t you see? The patient was murdered by his own doctor!”)
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A long time ago, I was a journalist at The Age. From that experience, I’d say the phrasing arose out of walking a difficult line, trying to balance the competing needs of public interest reporting, an ongoing IBAC investigation, defamation laws, a relationship with Vicpol, and demands or expectations of the new owners. The article was likely also ‘legalled’ several times before being published and that can impact language and phrasing too.
Finally, and @beschizza knows this, headlines are written by sub-editors, not journalists.
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I just hate when I’m standing around minding my own business and my neck breaks.
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Sophisticated propaganda is about framing and emphasis.
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This is not a good comparison.
Drug companies have to list all reported side-effects, whether or not they can be proven to be caused by the drug. That’s why the lists are so long and so many medications have so many similar ones. If you report an earache while using it, they have to list it, even if it is really caused by water from your shower. That’s why it’s phrased as reported side effects or “have been reported to occur”. Yes, it’s weaselly, but it’s because they are forced to be overcautious, when the drug might not actually be at fault.
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“Truck drives into group of protesters”
Wait, Ford is putting Boeing’s MCAS in its trucks?
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Fair enough, and I appreciate the grammar correction for personal reasons - I’m currently involved in a project to revamp the writing style guide for the company I work at, so this directly affects me and suggests I need to reword some points.
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A charitable word to the wise:
Don’t use that advice in the real world unless you want to mislead people unnecessarily about passive clauses vs. passive voice vs. passive construction.
You’ll make yourself look like a grammar revolutionary on a suicide mission over a misguided technical point, and people following your advice will write with less confidence and clarity.
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Oh I 100% agree. Any reworking would be vaguely along the lines of “Make sure your language specifies who does what, here are examples of good and bad, in general passive voice is a red flag”
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No ‘passive voice’ avoiding all personal accountability, there; the truck was obviously acting of its’ own free will.
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“Necks were broken.”
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