The one element of style even good writers can't handle
To write well in the passive voice, one must understand the nuances of power and oppression as they move through you...*and* decline their call to collusion.
News at six: language is political. Writers’ stylistic choices are political. The ways editors modify those choices are also political.
Duh. Anyone who’s ever taken any kind of expository writing course—particularly freshman comp—will have learned as much from “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell’s 1946 essay examining the relationship between bad writing and tyranny.
Among other things, Orwell argues that the passive voice is linguistic propaganda. Bad actors in power—and their allies in media, publishing, and PR—use it to shift blame and obscure responsibility.
He’s not wrong, of course. Consider the newspaper lede announcing that a victim of police brutality “was shot” (by whom?); the felonious CEO at the press conference, acknowledging that “mistakes were made;” and—most recently—this headline spotted by my client Soraya Chemaly, author of the forthcoming The Resilience Myth:
This is exactly the kind of bullshit Orwell had in mind. There’s a refusal to acknowledge the gendered power dynamics at play in what these TikTok influencers are describing. A punch is pulled.
Before you come at me with your buh-buh-buts about journalistic caution and legal liability: yes, I’m aware those things are important. There are good reasons why Yahoo News news might have wanted to exercise caution in declaring “men” responsible for the punchings. The object of their story is clear enough: a handful of women on TikTok, all describing similar experiences. The subject is less clear: were the women all punched by the same man? Was it different men? Perhaps the perpetrator(s) were male-presenting, but not actually men?
Absent ironclad facts, no one should presume to know the answers to these questions. Yes, and: that doesn’t mean Yahoo News was right to run their story with a passive headline. It means that they exercised reprehensible judgment in running the story at all.
Of course I want to know if there’s a trend involving random men punching women on the sidewalk just for shits and giggles in New York. Of course I want to know if it’s just one guy or many—and if the latter, whether they all coordinated this and how long it’s been going on.
I also want to know for sure that I’m not seeing a national media outlet handpick anecdata from the millions and millions of online testimonies posted to the internet every day, then using that anecdata—subconsciously or no—to perpetuate a propagandistic, antidemocratic narrative. (“America’s innocent white women are unsafe walking alone in blue-state cities with their crime and their homeless people and their Black people and their immigrants! Stay inside, ladies! Vote Trump, gentlemen!”)
You know who’s supposed to provide that context? JOURNALISTS. Doing REPORTING. But if you click the Yahoo News link Soraya shares above, you’ll find no original reporting whatsoever. It’s just a description of the TikTok videos and the comments underneath them, coupled with a naive “is this a trend?” type narrative stance.
Yahoo News has done none of the work they’re supposed to do here. None. Their passive voice evinces an institution overtaken by—capitulant to—flaccid in the arms of—the status quo.
Like I said: the passive is always, always political.
But that’s not why it’s so annoying to read.