New and Troubling Questions

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellows,

Here is the very start of a 40k strong global warming protest march that was just lining up and getting ready to march to the Beehive as I went out for lunch today.

I hate that it is "climate change" now and not "global warming". The reason I hate it, is because it is only because of a right wing effwit under George W. Bush that the terminology changed to something less alarming. This was the same berk who came up with "enhanced interrogation". I think they even mention this PR manipulation of reality in the movie "Vice".

However, manipulation of news terminology reminds me of a story I read by Malcolm Gladwell, called "Perverse and Often Baffling".

In the story, Gladwell explains how he got his first job at a big newspaper and was assigned to the financial section. He hated it. He knew nothing about finance, and then went ahead and proved it by missing a decimal place on one company's estimated assets, thereby wiping millions from their share price the next time the stock market opened.

Oops.

So he lost that job, but the experience taught him something. Information is perception, and that can be a powerful thing. In his next job, he and a friend were putting together headlines and bylines and because they got bored, they started having little competitions with each other. They discussed whether they could turn phrases they invented into common parlance.

They started with, "raises new and troubling questions". 

For a while, they would try and insert "raises new and troubling questions" into every news item, even if the questions were old and not particularly worrisome. They had a bet, with beer on the line for the winner. Double points if you managed to squeeze it into a headline, and quadruple if you managed to get it twice into the same article.

They were amazed how well it worked. Soon, even tv news presenters with no association to their newspaper were saying that a certain dress "raises new and troubling questions on the Lewinsky affair" or satellite imagery "raises new and troubling questions about global warming".

Gladwell and his colleague decided to set themselves a real challenge. Because nearly EVERYTHING is new and troubling if you stop and think about it. So the next phrase had to be difficult. They decided on "perverse and often baffling".

Apparently this was nigh impossible to get into an article, and they realised that the problem was the word "often". It wasn't enough for something to be "baffling". It was that sometimes it had to be clear. It had to oscillate between a state of baffling and non-baffling. What does that?

Malcolm's rival tried to plant an article on the sex lives of molluscs, which he claimed was perverse and often baffling. The copy editor refused it, on the grounds that yes, the sex lives of molluscs was definitely kinda perverse but either it was baffling or it wasn't. Molluscs, said the copy editor may swing, but they do not oscillate.

Malcolm tried to write an article about breast-feeding including the phrase, but got slapped down pretty quickly for claiming that breasts were "perverse". He had to try harder.

In the end, he managed to squeeze the phrase into an article about healthcare costs in Washington DC. The article provoked complaints from doctors, claiming their charges were neither perverse nor EVER baffling, but it didn't matter. It was in print.

There you go. A story about news for you today, instead of all these new and troubling news stories.

S.