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Comment by mtgp1000 | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting that media are pro-police right now? After nearly universally coming out in support of the current protests?

What term would you prefer? One that does not presume innocence?

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A bunch of passive-voice examples here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...

> The deputy’s gun fired one shot, missing the dog and hitting the child.

Or here:

https://reason.com/2020/01/28/passive-voice-deployed-in-myst...

> The suspect was struck several times by the officer's duty weapon.

Passive-voice is the most appropriate for the vast majority of news stories.

Perhaps, but how often do you hear tortured, nonsensical phrasing like "the suspect's gun shot the victim" when discussing non-police incidents?

Sometimes the voice switches mid-tweet when the subject does:

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1266935666274906113

> Minneapolis: A photographer was shot in the eye.

> Washington, D.C.: Protesters struck a journalist with his own microphone.

> Louisville: A reporter was hit by a pepper ball on live television by an officer who appeared to be aiming at her.

"A photographer was shot" (cop), "A reporter was hit" (cop), but "Protesters struck".

I won't disagree that journalists are crap at consistency, sticking to provable facts, and avoiding injecting biased language into reporting.

If that was the problem then you'd expect loaded phrasing to be about equally distributed, but I don't think that's the case.

Passive-voice is frequently nonfactual. Cars do not run people over (unless they are rolling, and not being driven); guns do not shoot people (unless they experience a mechanical malfunction). This phrasing is _designed_ to mislead, to divert blame from the responsible parties, and has no place in the vast majority of news stories.

I disagree many times it's often the only 100% factually correct statement. Person A was run over by a car. Person B was arrested at the scene sitting behind the wheel. The reporter often only has that information to go on. They can not know 100% for sure that Person B ran over Person A.

2 weeks later camera footage comes out showing Person C driving over Person A, getting out of the car and running, and Person B moving over to sit in the drives seat.

This would be a great point if not for the heavily skewed application of this technique towards the police, as a sibling comment gives examples for.

It's purpose is to presume innocence, a tenet which seems to be rapidly fading from society.

Indeed, it presumes innocence of the police, a standard that is rarely applied to any other group, especially not protesters. That is precisely the problem.

Just police shootings would be fine.

I don’t understand the point about presuming innocence. These are cases where it has been determined that a police officer has shot someone. Not cases where somebody was shot whilst police were nearby and we don’t know who did it, which would be “police involved shootings”.

Yeah police shootings doesn't say anything about guilt. Seems ok from that angle.

Although I don't read clearly that the police were the ones that pulled the trigger. And "police involved shootings" doesn't say anything other than there was a shooting and an officer was involved. So the media does dance around the details.

Maybe it's cop-speak, maybe it's liability protection, maybe it's to get the readers to be curious on the details or a combination of all. I don't know.

"Officer was shot" or "officer-initiated shooting" is more clear.

This is not something I just came up with. The observation that the media heavily uses the passive voice when reporting on the police, a practice that the police started using to deflect blame in their reports, which the media often cites uncritically, has been criticized for decades. I suggest you just give "passive voice police" a google and look at the overwhelming amount of studies, articles and reports on this topic.

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