The word “factoid,” I learned this week, is not a word for “‘factlet; or a ‘little bit of arcana,’ which is the CNN meaning,” as William Safire put it. Instead, it comes from Norman Mailer’s picture-book biography of Marilyn Monroe (“It has been obvious for some time,” said a 1980 book review in the New York Times, “that Marilyn Monroe is a character Norman Mailer would have liked to invent”). Factoids, in Mailer’s coinage, are “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.”
At the risk of inventing a cute neologism, what we have in journalism right now is a culture replete with “offensoids” — phrases or linguistic slights that had no inherently offensive existence prior to being declared as such by a magazine or newspaper. Sometimes, these come from journalists themselves, other times from outside pressure campaigns.
One such example comes from an open letter written by leaders of left-leaning groups, including former top Obama staffer Valerie Jarrett, to “News Division Heads, Editors in Chiefs, Bureau Chiefs, Political Directors, Editors, Producers, Reporters, and Anchors”:
“A woman VP candidate, and possibly a Black or Brown woman candidate, requires the same kind of internal consideration about systemic inequality as you undertook earlier this year. Anything less than full engagement in this thoughtful oversight would be a huge step backwards for the progress you have pledged to make to expand diversity of thought and opportunity in your newsrooms and in your coverage.” The whole thing is written with the tone of an ultimatum. “As we enter another historic moment, we will be watching you.”
Here are some of the specific verboten verbiages: For one, “Reporting, even as asides in a story, on a woman’s looks, weight, tone of voice, attractiveness, and hair is sexist news coverage unless the same analysis is applied to every candidate.” As the Donald Trump presidency has taught us, no man’s absurd hair, weight, or coloring would ever be mocked in the press. Another: “Reporting on whether a woman is liked (a subjective metric at best) as though it is news when the ‘likeability’ of men is never considered a legitimate news story.” Pete Buttigieg and Ted Cruz would like a word on whether male politicians’ likability factor is ever adjudicated in the press.
The worst offense to good sense in the letter is this: “Reporting on and using pictures of a woman’s, particularly black women, show of anger at injustice or any other kind of passion in communication perpetuates racist tropes that suggest unfairly that women are too emotional or irrational in their leadership or worse ‘hate America.’” Apparently, this asinine logic would have you believe the subjects praised in feminist magazine writer Rebecca Traister’s recent book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, were actually being viciously attacked. Or that erstwhile VP shortlister Karen Bass praised Fidel Castro’s regime earlier in her life because she, in fact, loved America’s foreign policy in Latin America.
It’s not necessary to examine the wisdom of the rhetorical tendency of Democrats to get burned by wrapping themselves in the flag and then setting it on fire. What Word of the Week readers ought to take note of is that political hacks are telling writers that they can’t so much as air certain issues, because the words necessary to discuss those issues are off-limits. This is profoundly anti-journalistic, and it’s creepy, particularly when done on behalf of offensoids.
