In his famous novel 1984, George Orwell invented a fictional language called Newspeak, which was used by the totalitarian regime in his novel to mislead people through ambiguous language. It was designed to confuse people who heard it, so they could never actually be sure what was being said. No matter how it was interpreted by the listener, the speaker could always say it was intended differently.
Newspeak was fictional, although it reflected how authoritarian regimes would manipulate language to mislead people and thus control them. If people could not be sure what was actually happening, they would have no basis to take any meaningful action.
However, this doesn’t just happen in authoritarian regimes. Even in democratic ones like ours, the temptation to manipulate people through misleading language is very strong. One of the more common ways to do this is through the misuse of passive voice:
- “X was said” is passive voice; you don’t know who said X.
- “He said X” is active voice; you know that a specific person said X.
Passive voice is not inherently bad, in and of itself. For example, there are times you can’t attribute a statement to a particular person or group, so you can’t really avoid using passive voice in that case. The problem comes when people use passive voice in a misleading way, such as when the media uses what I call “newsiespeak” to provoke people. For example, the New York Times published an article on July 3, shortly after the debate, headlined “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome”. This headline sure sounds scary, doesn’t it?
But wait a sec, that headline is in passive voice. Who was saying “Biden’s lapses are increasingly common and worrisome”? The article seemingly answers that in the first sentence with “people close to Biden said”. Except that isn’t any better. It doesn’t actually answer the question of who said it; it disguises the passive voice of the headline with something that seems like active voice but doesn’t actually tell you anything meaningful.
And guess what? If you read just a bit into the article, you find out that his lapses
seemed more likely when he was in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule
A large crowd is noisy even if it’s trying to be quiet; if you’ve ever been one, you know that at times it can be hard to even hear yourself think, and distracting even when people making an effort to be quiet. You know how people often pause their speeches when the crowd starts making noise? That’s why. And someone working a “particularly bruising schedule” means they’re going to be tired and worn out. As the article says, in the 23 days leading up to the debate
Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic Ocean twice for meetings with foreign leaders and then flew from Italy to California for a splashy fund-raiser, maintaining a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides.
Let me repeat that for you; President Biden maintained a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides for more than two weeks, to the point where his team cut short his debate prep by two days so he could rest before going straight into six additional days of debate prep.
Is it any surprise he looked like hell the night of the debate? To give you an idea of how hard he must have been working, think of it as if he worked more than two weeks straight of 12-14 hour workdays, took a normal weekend, and then worked another six days of at least 8 hours a day. I bet you nobody, no matter their age, would be in good shape to hold even a normal debate after a schedule like that, never mind against someone who might as well be a firehose of lies. Even if they hadn’t come down with something, which President Biden apparently did.
To continue with the article, it lists several specific examples of President Biden having a lapse:
- June 6: had points of confusion during a D-Day Anniversary speech.
- June 7: made a misstatement about Ukraine military aid.
- June 10: had a momentary pause at an early Juneteenth celebration.
- June 18: had brief trouble naming his Homeland Security secretary.
All of these examples happened during that 23-day period. Meaning, these particular lapses of President Biden’s were due to him overworking himself, rather than because he’s getting older. Even someone half his age would have had lapses after a schedule like that; the astonishing thing is not that he had some lapses, but that he had so few of them.
As for his later lapses, per Occam’s razor (the explanation which makes the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be true), it is much more believable that they are also due to him working hard afterwards to try to rescue the situation he caused through his earlier grievous overwork. He is not just campaigning, but actually doing important presidential work
More importantly, every single time this NYT article talks about President Biden doing poorly, it does so through passive voice, often disguising that fact by listing unidentified sources, such as the following:
But by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Mr. Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago.
Again, “by many accounts, as evidenced by”. They didn’t list who made the accounts. They didn’t list where they got the video footage from. They didn’t list who made the observations. They didn’t even list who they had the interviews with! Passive voice, over and over and over again in the article.
The article’s writer clearly knows how to use active voice, because every time they presented something positive about President Biden, they did so with active voice: “this person said this about Biden” or “this was said about Biden by this person”. So what does it tell you when a writer who clearly knows how to present information in active voice puts forward every single negative statement in passive voice, while not giving any meaningful information on who actually said it or where they got it from?
It tells me that this whole thing stinks worse than cow manure left out in the sun for a week. If the author had actual people to attribute these negative statements to, even if they had to keep them anonymous due to them not having permission to discuss it, they would put it as “this aide close to Mr. Biden said” or something like that. The fact that they are not putting it that way is a strong indication that they aren’t actually getting this from anyone who had anything to do with the situations they’re writing about, which is very galling once you realize what that means.
I suspect that if you actually examine this negative media coverage of President Biden, most of it will be written in the same way as this article — by the author using passive voice to paper over who actually told them those things. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they are disguising this use of passive voice to create the impression that specific people (i.e. Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, and so on) are saying it, but if so, the tell will be when you dig into the article and discover it’s attributed to sources who were briefed on the matter, or who are familiar with it. Meaning it not only isn’t firsthand knowledge (from someone involved), it isn’t even secondhand (someone who heard it directly but was not involved).
There’s a word for when people repeat things they’ve heard from someone else: hearsay. And when that “someone else” heard it from someone else (and possibly a string of someone elses), it’s even worse. You know the game of Telephone, where people whisper messages to each other? The more people the message goes through, the more it gets distorted. Even just passing a message onto one other person will distort it.
As such, I strongly, strongly encourage you to not take anything you read in the media on this whole mess as true without checking it out first. If someone says something, find out who they heard it from. Then find out who they heard it from. Trace it back to a firsthand source if you can, and if you cannot, then treat it as newsiespeak until you can confirm otherwise.
The media is not friendly to us; their incentive is not to present accurate information, but to get clicks and eyeballs, which means, to them, there are no downsides to them using newsiespeak to present things like this in a misleading way. Especially if they can also provoke us emotionally, because people who have been emotionally provoked are much more likely to act (usually prematurely) rather than investigate further to make sure of what’s going on.