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Wednesday, September 13, 2006

The Media Use of Modifiers

You get used to it after a while and you catch yourself grinning as you see the descriptive adjectives that are used to “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” tell you what to think about a fact.

Here are two very recent examples.

The first is from Back Talk blog which is edited by a self described: “professor at a major research university, a registered Democrat, a liberal by most measures, but a radical conservative relative to the large majority of my colleagues.”

He has followed an reported on casualty figures in Baghdad month-to-month and predicted that the earlier, erroneous reports of a 50% drop in deaths was not accurate. But he notices one other thing:


Subtly Shaping your Perception of Iraq
Here is a new story on August casualties in Iraq, which is a topic that I have posted on several times before (e.g., here and here, for example):
U.S. omitted key casualty details

By Patrick Quinn
Associated Press
Published September 12, 2006

BAGHDAD -- The American military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks, including suicide bombings, when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.

The story includes this paragraph, which is what I'd like to focus on:


But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of "murder" weren't made explicit at the time. That led to confusion after Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed that 1,536 people died violently in and around Baghdad in August, nearly the same number as in July.

Nearly the same as July? Let's look at how the media hysterically reported the apparent increase in casualties that occurred in July compared to June:
The July morgue toll of 1,815 marked a big jump over the 1,595 in June and is the largest since the aftermath of the February bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque of Samarra, which triggered an explosion of sectarian violence.

Oh, I get it. The reported increase from 1595 to 1885 that occurred from June to July (290 additional deaths) is a "big jump," but the reported decrease from 1885 to 1536 from July to August (349 fewer deaths) is negligible because the two numbers are "nearly the same."

And there you have it. That's how our media subtly influences how you feel about what is happening in Iraq.



The second is from MSNBC.

Remember those poll numbers from spring and summer when Bush’s poll numbers were always accompanied by the adjective “plummeting?” Well they got pretty low, around 32% approval rating in some polls as I recall. And as they hung around that number (not going lower) the term “plummeting” was still being used. Well, guess what, Bush’s approval rating is now at 42% in the NBC/Journal poll. How does Mark Murray, political reporter for NBC News phrase it?


Slight Bush uptick.

To be fair to Murray, it appears that the NBC/Journal poll appears to have Bush bottoming out at 36% approval.

Going from 32% to 32% approval means Bush’s ratings were plummeting. Going from 32% to 42% and this is a “slight uptick.”

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