Dialogue: Dramatic cliches falsify the news

By DAVID HILL

At least once a week on television or radio, we get told that someone is in hospital, fighting for his life.

Actually, he - it's usually a he - is doing no such thing.

He is almost certainly unconscious. His body's autonomic systems are reacting to the injuries he has suffered. Immune and metabolic processes are occurring.

That is quite different from fighting for his life, which should mean a conscious act of will, made by someone awake and choosing.

Almost as often on the news, Judy or Carol tells us the town is in shock. Translation: a number of people in the town are in states ranging from mild concern to rending grief, states that last for seconds or years.

So ... so what? We all know what these phrases mean, don't we? Actually, I am not so sure. I am not so sure the newswriters and newsreaders know, either.

News bulletins use such expressions to save time and tidy things up. And to attract viewers or listeners, which we will come to later.

Trouble is, in doing so they falsify and exaggerate. They also pre-empt and demean. Suppose someone is trapped on a mountain for three days, really fighting to stay alive. Or a town suffers Balkan War-type atrocities and its inhabitants are truly in a state of trauma. The news will have no phrases in reserve to describe such situations.

These easy-come, easy-use cliches also make no acknowledgment of the huge diversity of human responses to the same situation. They lump everyone together. They narrow the emotional range: the upper extremities of feeling are made blander and the lower extremities are hyped up.

Another example: what is a hero? According to television and radio and - less often, thank goodness, to print media - it is an All Black who scores the winning try against the Aussies. Okay, I often feel inclined to agree.

But what word do we then use for someone who shows the sacrifice and the loftiness of purpose that hero should mean? Did Sir Peter Blake, for example, really die a hero's death? I would rather not get into that, but I wonder if any journalist on that occasion thought for a second before using the word.

Such language is also emotionally manipulative. It pressures you to react in pre-programmed ways. It squashes disagreement or non-conformity. Question whether the people referred to are genuinely fighting, in shock or being heroic, and you are instantly classified as callous.

There are many more undermining examples. There was carnage on the roads one weekend. Yes, seven people were killed, and each death was horrible. But carnage?

The Oxford Dictionary says carnage is great slaughter, usually in war. What happened in New York on September 11 last year was carnage. Applying the word to road deaths is not only unthinking overkill; it also blurs individual responsibility for such deaths.

Bernard Shaw noted that a newspaper is something that seems unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the end of civilisation. Change the culprit to television or radio, and he is still largely right.

Let's try a few more gaps between script and sense.

A community mourns means that quite a few people came to a funeral (or regretted the demolition of an old building). The harvest/crop has been wiped out/devastated - the harvest/crop has been severely damaged. June and Jim have lost everything - J and J's house has been flooded/burned down. The neighbourhood is up in arms/a verbal war is raging - some people are arguing. X is stunned - X is startled but conscious.

You can (dis)credit a lot of such hyperbole to the ratings game. When television channels, radio stations and newspapers compete, of course they will try to present their views in more dramatic news bites than their rivals.

Aldous Huxley fretted so much about the way sloppy, superficial language led to sloppy superficial thinking that he felt television/radio news channels should be state-run. Yes, well, I think I would sooner have sloppy language than censored language.

But can't media studies and journalism courses show their students the most obvious of these sterile, inflated cliches, and teach them how to find more accurate, more spirited, more respectful alternatives?

If they don't, I could end up in shock, fighting like a hero for my mental life.