MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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When media outlets lend legitimacy to a poll survey charade

I’m delighted to report that from an English grammar and usage standpoint, today (January 15, 2010) is a good Friday for the major Metro Manila broadsheets. I have just gone over their major news stories and found their journalistic prose grammatically airtight and semantically aboveboard. I could hardly find any serious usage error from which any worthwhile lesson could be drawn for English learners, so I thought of giving myself a little rest this week  by not commenting at all on their journalistic output.

I had a sudden change my mind, though, when I came across the reportage of two of the broadsheets about a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey whose results were released yesterday (January 14).

The Philippine Daily Inquirer, in a story headlined “SWS: People power looms if election fails,” made the following report based on an SWS media release about the survey results:

I must emphasize that I’m not questioning the grammar or language of the Inquirer report, for I saw that another broadsheet, The Manila Times, reported the survey results in essentially the same tenor. After all, their stories were based on the same SWS media release.

I must hasten to point out, however, that the English of the SWS survey itself struck me as terribly out of line, both from the grammar and language standpoint. Take a look again at that question and examine its phrasing more closely: “If the 2010 elections fail for any reason, e.g., malfunctioning of the counting machines, then people power will probably happen already.” (In the actual questionnaires, that statement was probably rendered in Tagalog as follows: “Kung hindi matuloy ang eleksiyon sa 2010 sa anumang kadahilanan, malamang magkaroon na naman ng People Power.”)

We can probably forgive the semantically ludicrous use of the adverb “already”—it’s a mannerism in Filipino English that some foreign acquaintances of mine find so annoying—but I think we shouldn’t let pass the fact that that survey statement is seriously leading in language, information content, and sentence construction. It’s almost as if it was designed to elicit and encourage a predetermined or desired conclusion—an organized uprising like the two previous “People Power” events in the country!

For, indeed, why should “People Power” figure specifically—if at all—in that statement? And why introduce it in the statement as if it’s a natural and unavoidable result of the possible failure of the 2010 elections? For that statement, isn’t it more objective, logical, and prudent to make the possible outcome of election failure open-ended, to be figured out and stated by the survey respondents themselves? Why not, for example, ask this objective, dispassionate question: “If the 2010 elections fail for any reason, e.g., malfunctioning of the counting machines, what do you think will happen? (“Kung hindi matuloy ang eleksiyon sa 2010 sa anumang kadahilanan, ano sa palagay mo ang malamang mangyari?”)

(To ensure total objectivity, typical survey questionnaires would then list three or four possible outcomes—none of which are shown to the survey respondents—to be shaded or marked by a check by the field researcher, who will then ask “What else?” once or twice to make sure that the survey instrument had really captured what’s in the mind of the respondent.)

Really now, by openly declaring that “then people power will probably happen already,” the sponsors and framers of that survey had inadvertently shown their hand—they had already concluded before the survey that “People Power” is just waiting in the wings and is just biding its time for the 2010 national elections to fail.

The strong negative bias of the SWS survey instrument is also evident in this other strongly declarative question: “The machines that will be used to count the votes in the 2010 election can easily be sabotaged in order to fake the election results.” (“Ang mga vote-counting machine na gagamitin sa eleksiyon sa 2010 ay madaling masabotahe para mapeke ang resulta ng eleksiyon.”

Imagine yourself being told—not asked—about that possibility in such blunt, violent terms and see how you would react to and answer that question. In my case, I can say with great fortitude that by being spoon-fed with that statement, I am being manipulated to give an affirmative answer, a manufactured outcome—and so I’ll take the extreme recourse of driving out the field researcher out of my living room rather than participate in and lend legitimacy to a charade.

Having worked in a market research organization myself in my younger days, and having more than just a passing acquaintance with probability and statistics, I know that a well-designed, well-thought-out, and well-phrased survey instrument can indeed be relied upon to objectively and accurately measure the public pulse and possible outcomes in the public sphere. However, if the two SWS survey statements that I critiqued above are any indication, I strongly doubt if that survey had accurately plumbed and reflected the real sentiments of the people about the possible failure of the 2010 national elections.

SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:

(1) Philippine Inquirer: An awful redundancy

Column: “When Noy met Lani”

“The story sent thrills through the women journalists sharing dinner with the senator-turned-presidential-candidate. Part of the reason was because all throughout the roughly two hours we had been grilling him, pinning him down on the subject of Shalani proved difficult.”

Being a newspaper columnist myself, it’s with a heavy heart that I call attention to a fellow columnist’s use of this awful redundancy, “the reason was because.” I thought I had seen the last of this redundancy several years ago after I first wrote about it in my English-usage column in The Manila Times, but here it is again—rearing its ugly head, so to speak.

Here’s why the phrase “the reason was because” is a redundancy—the word “because” already means “for the reason that,” so using that phrase is the same as saying “the reason was for the reason that.”

The correct phrase to use in such constructions is “the reason was that,” so here’s that passage shorn of the redundancy:

“The story sent thrills through the women journalists sharing dinner with the senator-turned-presidential-candidate. Part of the reason was that all throughout the roughly two hours we had been grilling him, pinning him down on the subject of Shalani proved difficult.”

(2) Philippine Inquirer:

Editorial: “Devastation”

“THE VERB in yesterday’s page 1 headline was dramatic, and deadly accurate: ‘Earthquake shatters Haiti’ conveyed the epic scale of the devastation that has broken Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, and its surrounding towns. The extent of the impact of the strongest earthquake to strike the country in over 200 years still needs to be determined, and indeed seems to grow bigger by the hour, but eyewitness accounts and the first pictures and video images already paint a bleak portrait of utter ruin: thousands of buildings and houses and structures collapsed, perhaps (according to one Haitian official, who could only speculate) over a hundred thousand people dead.”

This broadsheet often comes up with some of the best-crafted editorials in Philippine journalism, but I’m sorry to say that the editorial where the above opening paragraph was taken is definitely not one of them. That editorial, as we can see, also distinguishes itself for extreme verbosity. And as far as I know, this is the first time that a major newspaper has editorialized on its own choice of verb for its own headline for its own story for its own front page—“THE VERB in yesterday’s page 1 headline was dramatic, and deadly accurate.” But frankly, I don’t think the verb “shatters” is worthwhile describing as dramatic (“demolishes” probably would be more apt and descriptive of the horrendous thing that happened to Haiti), and I think that further describing that verb as “deadly accurate” is an outright journalistic travesty, for it implies that some verbs used by that paper for its headlines are inaccurate—and, really, what has being “deadly” got to do with being “accurate”?

(3)  The Manila Times: Farmers are honorable but need more respect

Teodoro to make farming an honorable profession

“Lakas-Kampi Christian Muslim Democrats presidential candidate Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro Jr. Tuesday vowed to boost the agricultural sector with greater investment and financial support in order to transform farming into an “honorable and profitable” profession.”

Motherhood statements are, of course, a major staple in national election campaigns, but I think a candidate who promises “to make farming an honorable profession” should seriously reexamine his premises as well as his English vocabulary. Having been born to a farming family, I know for a fact that farming has always been an “honorable profession”—much more honorable, I would say, than being a lawyer, a priest, a jueteng operator, or one who crafts fancy financial derivatives. To be “honorable” means “characterized by integrity” and “guided by a high sense of honor and duty,” so to imply that farming is less than “honorable” right now or before is to say that the farmers who feed this nation day after day are lacking in integrity.

Of course, I’m sure that Gibo Teodoro meant “respectable”—meaning “worthy of respect” or “estimable”—so I’m hoping that if he still wishes to pursue that campaign line, he would henceforth say “respectable and profitable” instead of “honorable and profitable.” On the “profitable” aspiration, though, I think Gibo is right on target. Indeed, for their indomitable but largely thankless efforts in feeding this nation, farmers could use more profits from their toil instead of most of those profits going to the middlemen or viajeros.

(4) Manila Bulletin: A fused sentence that confuses; wrong choice of preposition

Strong sea waves delay PCG retrieval operation

“Strong sea waves prevented Thursday divers from the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) and Philippine Technical Divers (PhilTech) from continuing their retrieval operation on the remaining two missing passengers inside the sunken M/V Catalyn-B as the recovery mission was temporarily halted anew.

The sentence above violates English grammar on three counts.

First, its phrasing of “prevented Thursday divers” gives the wrong impression that the timeline “Thursday” is a modifier of the noun “divers,” giving rise to a nonexistent entity called “Thursday divers.” To avoid such confusing phrasing, that sentence could have been started as follows: “Strong sea waves on Thursday prevented divers…”

Second, the preposition in the phrase “retrieval operation on the remaining two missing passengers” should be “for” instead: “retrieval operation for the remaining two missing passengers.”

And third, the prepositional phrase “as the recovery mission was temporarily halted anew” not only dangles but is also needless in that sentence. It can be dropped altogether and nobody will miss it.

Here’s that problematic sentence as corrected:

“Strong sea waves on Thursday prevented divers from the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) and Philippine Technical Divers (PhilTech) from continuing their retrieval operation for the remaining two missing passengers inside the sunken M/V Catalyn-B.”

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