Gag reflex

Mainstream US broadcast and print news makes my stomach churn. 

On TV, there’s the perfectly veneered, bleached top-to-bottom toothy grins. The salon styling that refuses to waver in hurricane strength winds.  Scrolling electronic words strings tied to mouths. Tug. Tug.

On Sunday mornings (more ritual than desire), I skim whole newspapers at café tables. Wall Street Journal. New York Times. More and more stories are deep-fried in human interest angles and corporate PR interests. The headlines leave grease marks.  No one I know speaks in carefully crafted quotes. 

I exercise my news gag reflex for obvious reasons.

But it took Economist’s editorial style guide (a book of rules distributed to the British magazine’s team of journalists) to articulate the subtleties why US news presentation makes me hurl.

Specifically, Americanisms and Journalese.

Here are some brilliant style guide excerpts.

Americanisms
If you use Americanisms just to show you know them, people may find you a tad tiresome, so be discriminating. Some are short and to the point (so prefer lay off to make redundant). But many are unnecessarily long (so use and not additionally, car not automobile, company not corporation, court not courtroom or courthouse, transport not transportation, district not neighbourhood, oblige not obligate, rocket not skyrocket, stocks not inventories unless there is the risk of confusion with stocks and shares). The military, used as a noun, is nearly always better put as the army. Gubernatorial is an ugly word that can almost always be avoided.

Other Americanisms are euphemistic or obscure (so avoid affirmative action, rookies, end runs, stand-offs, point men, ball games and almost all other American sporting terms). Do not write meet with or outside of: outside America, nowadays, you just meet people. Do not figure out if you can work out. To deliver on a promise means to keep it. A parking lot is a car park. Use senior rather than ranking, rumpus rather than ruckus,and rumbustious rather than rambunctious.

In an American context you may run for office (but please stand in countries with parliamentary systems) and your car may sometimes run on gasoline instead of petrol. Trains run from railway stations, not train stations. The people in them, and on buses, are passengers, not riders. Cars are hired, not rented. City centres are not central cities. Cricket is a game not a sport.  

Do not feel obliged to follow American fashion in overusing such words as constituency (try supporters), perception (try belief or view) and rhetoric (of which there is too little, not too much—try language or speeches or exaggeration if that is what you mean). And if you must use American expressions, use them correctly (a rain-check does not imply checking on the shower activity).

London is the country's capital, not the nation's. Ex-servicemen are not necessarily veterans. In Britain, though cattle and pigs may be raised, children are (or should be) brought up.

Make a deep study or even a study in depth, but not an in-depth study. On-site inspections are allowed, but not in-flight entertainment. Throw stones, not rocks, unless they are of slate, which can also mean abuse (as a verb) but does not, in Britian ,mean predict, schedule or nominate. Regular is not a synonym for ordinary or normal: Mussolini brought in the regular train, All-Bran the regular man; it is quite normal to be without either. Hikes are walks, not increases. Vegetables, not teenagers, should be fresh. Only the speechless are dumb, the well-dressed smart and the insane mad. Scenarios are best kept for the theatre, postures for the gym, parameters for the parabola.

Grow a beard or a tomato but not a company. By all means call for a record profit if you wish to exhort the workers, but not if you merely predict one. And do not post it if it has been achieved. If it has not, look for someone new to head the company, not to head it up.

Try not to verb nouns or to adjective them. So do not access files, haemorrhage red ink (haemorrhage is a noun), let one event impact another, author books (still less co-author them), critique style sheets, host parties, pressure colleagues (press will do), progress reports, trial programmes or loan money. Gunned down means shot. And though it is sometimes necessary to use nouns as adjectives, there is no need to call an attempted coup a coup attempt. Vilest of all is the habit of throwing together several nouns into one ghastly adjectival reticule: Texas millionaire real-estate developer and failed thrift entrepreneur Hiram Turnipseed...

Journalese 

Do not be too free with slang (eg, He really hit the big time in 1994). Avoid expressions used only by journalists, such as giving people the thumbs up, the thumbs down or the green light. Stay clear of gravy trains and salami tactics. Do not use the likes of. And avoid words and expressions that are ugly or overused, such as the bottom line, high profile, caring (as an adjective), carers, guesstimate (use guess), schizophrenic (unless the context is medical), crisis, key, major (unless something else nearby is minor), massive (as in massive inflation), meaningful, perceptions, prestigious and significant.

Politicians are often said to be highly visible, when conspicuous would be more appropriate. Regulations are sometimes said to be designed to create transparency, which presumably means openness. Governance usually means government. Elections described as too close to call are usually just close.

Try not to be predictable, especially predictably jocular. Spare your readers any mention of comrades when analysing communist parties. Must all lawns be manicured? Are drug traffickers inevitably barons?

One weakness of journalists, who on daily newspapers may plead that they have little time to search for the apposite word, is a love of the ready-made, seventh-hand phrase. Lazy journalists are always at home in oil-rich country A, ruled by ailing President B, the long-serving strongman, who is, according to the chattering classes, a wily political operator—hence the present uneasy peace—but, after his recent watershed (or landmark or sea-change) decision to arrest his prime minister (the honeymoon is over), will soon face a bloody uprising in the breakaway south. Similarly, lazy business journalists always enjoy describing the problems of troubled company C, a victim of the revolution in the gimbal-pin industry (change is always revolutionary in such industries), which, well-placed insiders predict, will be riven by a make-or-break strike unless one of the major players makes an 11th-hour (or last-ditch) intervention in a marathon negotiating session.

Prose such as this is freighted with codewords (respected is applied to someone the writer approves of, militant someone he disapproves of, prestigious something you won't have heard of). The story can usually start with the words, First the good news, inevitably to be followed in due course by Now the bad news. A quote will then be inserted, attributed to one (never an) industry analyst, and often the words If, and it's a big if... Towards the end, after an admission that the author has no idea what is going on, there is always room for One thing is certain, before rounding off the article with As one wag put it...