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Bottles & Cans: A tribute to inanimate objects is a blog run by my friend Ritchie with some occassional input from the Bottles and Cans’ poet laureate, Chad S. Brice, among others.
After dismissing the "editorial We" in a bold and shocking move on November 12 of this year, the need for a retraction brought the "We" back, though apparently only for a short enough period of time to pass the buck.
I decided to ponder and give some thoughts on the "We" and its cohorts. The editorial "We" is indeed a good device for shifting blame from oneself and into the atmosphere so that the buck-passing can continue unabated. However, there's another editorial system that I think is equal or better than the famed "We,"
The Passive Voice
A great example comes from Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's Manufacturing Consent. The murder of Jerzy Popieluszko, a Polish priest, by Polish police in October 1984, was treated with extensive media coverage in the United States and lots of active verb usage. Poland was a Communist state and therefore not a friend of the US. It was clear from Western media coverage that the government of Poland had murdered him.
However, when it came time for the media to discuss murders and "disappearances" by US client states during the same time period,the media coverage was scant and editorial buck-passing devices were used not-so-sparingly. For instance, 72 religious victims in Latin America, 23 religious victims in Guatemala, Oscar Romero, and 4 U.S. nuns murdered in El Salvador (all these murders took place in US "friendly" client states) didn't receive the amount of media coverage that one man, Jerzy Popieluszko, received for being murdered in a non-US-friendly country.
As an example of passive voice usage, Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered in El Salvador by El Salvador's US supported military government for being an outspoken critic of its actions. All of the evidence not published within western media sources pointed to the government's complicity in the murder. However in the "Newspaper of Record" the New York Times, there was a statement that "the extreme left is being blamed" for the death. Using the passive voice allows the article to avoid speculation over who actually committed the murder, because actually pointing the finger at the Salvadoran government would have been a no-no.
Personification of Action
One of the passive voice's little helpers is a little diddy I like to call "personification of action," in which an article uses omnidirectional finger pointing in order to assign blame to the action itself, rather than those responsible for the action. A great example of this is the media coverage of the murder of four US nuns also murdered in El Salvador. Time described the women as "victims of the mindless, increasing violence" of El Salvador. Newsweek observed that "The violence in El salvador is likely to focus with increasing ferocity on the Roman Catholic Church."
Note the personification of "the violence," which spectacularly allows no one to actually be blamed for the crimes, even though all of the evidence pointed to members of the Salvadoran national guard who were given high orders to find and kill the women.
Well, I hope that my little foray into the editorial world has not caused any of you too much boredom, but Ritchie's bit about the editorial "We" gave me an itch that I had to scratch. As you can see, the "We," when coupled with action personification and passive voice can help almost any media publication shift the blame for any act far away from those actually responsible and, in the case of personification, the actions themselves can be blamed, thereby giving an inanimate object the blame card. This, I feel, makes this information especially important in light of Bottles and Cans' subtitle: "A tribute to inanimate objects."
I also wanted to be a nerd and ruin the good mood that Ritchie's humorous blog brings, because I don't think that editorial blame shifting is anything to laugh at ;)
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