Someone on Facebook yesterday posed an interesting question: What are some of the phrases the mainstream media use that give away their liberal bias? There were a lot of good answers, like "white privilege" and "peace activist." I suggested "income inequality." We're talking about concepts that can be expressed in any number of ways, depending on your point of view, and that the media invariably chooses to express in the language of the left.
That's because the people writing the stories are also people of the left, and while they're supposed to be "objective" in their writing, they write the way they think, and sometimes they let slip their bias by demonstrating that the language of their side has become their own.
You will rarely see a better example than a story this morning from the Associated Press - published on FoxNews.com of all places - that is mainly about a meeting on climate issues yesterday between Donald Trump and Leonardo DiCaprio. I'll withhold comment on the merits of that meeting for the moment so I can get to my real point. Slipped in at the end is the following aside from the AP:
The meeting came after word got out Wednesday that Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a climate-change denier whose policies have helped fossil fuel companies, is expected to be announced as Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
A "climate-change denier"? This is apparently now the AP's stock description for people who are skeptical of the claim that man-made global warming is ravaging the planet, and that only left-wing environmental and regulatory policies will save us.
The writer of the story is Nekesa Mumbi Moody, about whom I know nothing, but she is hardly the first AP writer to co-opt the language of the left in what is supposed to be a straight "news" story.
Now, a left-winger might ask, why is the description objectionable? If Pruitt denies that climate change is real, the he's a climate-change denier. It is not really a judgmental description, the argument goes, so much as it's a simple fact-based description of the man's position.
But that's obvious nonsense. There's a massive difference between a "denier" - someone who pretends something that's obvious true is false - and a skeptic. Remember when journalists though skepticism of a popular notion was a healthy thing? Yeah, you'll see that revived somewhat now that Donald Trump is about to become president. But when it comes to things that the left treats as articles of faith, the media will continue to treat those who don't buy it as apostates.
By the way, the term "denier" first became widely used in reference to the holocaust. It was applied to Jew-haters like Mahmoud Ahemdinejad who tried to dismiss the historical suffering of the Jewish people by - among other things - denying that the holocaust ever happened. Holocaust deniers are widly reviled, and rightly so, and the global warming crowd thought they could pin the same type of scorn on skeptics of their cause by co-opting the same language and labeling them "deniers" of "climate change."
Think about the logic of that one: The holocaust denier insists that a historical event never happened. The "climate-change denier" is skeptical about whether a predicted future event - the ravaging of the planet via rising temperatures - will actually happen. Hardly the same thing, but the left applies the same language because it's useful as propaganda.
And as we can see from this story, the AP has co-opted the same language, because it is little more than a megaphone of the left. AP. All Propaganda.
