entitlement programs
WTF, USA Today??
Is that, like, normal parlance in the US? I thought that was a propaganda term on par with āwelfare queensā that was only used by the usual suspects
Itās a sneak attack-people pay into these programs through paycheck deductions and thus are entitled to them. But the right has long been pushing the connotation that entitlement means getting something you donāt really deserve, but are taking from others.
Yes, entitlement vs. self-entitlement. They depend on their supporters lack of education (or lack of concern) to make the lie work.
Just because they donāt pay any taxes doesnāt mean the rest of us donāt.
Something that is yours as of right!
But thatās the meaning the American right has been poisoning for decades. āThose workers feel entitled to a reasonable wage!ā āThose elderly people feel entitled to enough income to survive on, that they paid for with their wages!ā āThose poor people feel entitled to access to healthcare!ā āThose kids feel entitled to a college education!ā The subtext being āand YOU will have to foot the bill!ā The idea of taxation as theft and thus the uses of tax money by the government to help the whole society as waste and creating dependency is the lie first widely used by Regan and never let up on since. Basically itās āwhat is mine is mine, and what is yours is mine too.ā
Is as right wing as Newsweek, but for readers at the 2nd grade level instead of 5th grade.
USA Today: Still good to wrap fish in, line the bird cage and kitty litter box, and for paper machƩ art projects. Beat that one, Newsweek.
Get ready for a laugh (this is not a high quality market analysis butā¦) :
Yes.
Uh, does this mean that WSJ and NYT etc. are lowering their standards for grammar, vocabulary, and oh I dunnoā¦ fact-checking etc.?
If you take a chunk of text from any mainstream liberal, upmarket, English language newspaper and analyse it for reading level, breakdown of parts of speech (% verbs, adverbs, nouns etc.) and the like they will be almost exactly the same All of them. Like down to the 0.1% if you take a few tens of thousands of words from each.
They write in Serious Newsish, the gestalt impact of Serious Newsish on the reader is the most important signifier in their language.
Hmm.
https://www.fullmedia.com/how-do-you-measure-readability
Flesch-Kincaid scores are readability tests designed to show how easy or difficult a text is to read. This score is given in two different ways. First is the āFlesch Reading Easeā and the other is āFlesch-Kincaid Grade Levelā.
The Reading Ease number is from 0 to 100. With a score of 90 to 100 your writing could be understood by an average 11-year old and a score of 60 to 70 could be understood by average 13 to 15-year olds. A score of zero to 30 means your writing could be understood by a university graduate. The higher the score the easier the writing is to read and comprehend.
To give you an idea of where some major publications fall in this range Readerās Digest has a Flesch Reading Ease around 65, Time magazine has a score of 52 and the Harvard Law Review falls somewhere in the low 30s.
The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level applies a reading grade level to your writing. New York Times articles have a tenth-grade reading level ā¦
I could not find much on USA Today readability but hereās one:
Somewhat related:
Sorry, I wasnāt really talking about USA today. Iāve never done the above with it but I have with a basket of liberal upmarket newspapers from English speaking countries. From memory we used the NYT, Grauniad, Irish Times, Sydney Morning Herald. Iāve done it to some extent with others and it really is striking how close they all are. We were using corpuses on the same topic though I should stress.
Maybe the words āupmarket, liberalā are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but there is high variability in the US. Some newspapers are quite literally written for a grade school literacy level, and even some of the ones that would consider themselves āupmarketā are written to a middle school level.
They wonāt be on databases used for research I guess. NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LA times etc. are the kind of thing that are and they track very closely with international counterparts. There are newspapers internationally that are written very differently too, tabloids we call them here. They have the football and radicalise people towards racism.
Iām not talking about tabloids. Iām talking about regular newspapers.
WSJ would surprise me if itās written above 9th grade level. I mean, MBAs and traders have to read that.
