MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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Wayward goes media’s coverage of the national election campaign

During the second week of my media coverage watch of the current Philippine national election campaign, I came across some strongly figurative, semantically questionable, and politically suspect language in the reportage of at least two major Metro Manila broadsheets and a business paper.

Reporting on the latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey results as announced by Kris Aquino on her Twitter account*, the Philippine Daily Inquirer headlined its front-page story last May 7 as follows:

Binay ties Roxas; Aquino pulls away
Legarda rating dives 12 points in SWS survey

Frankly, when I first came across that banner headline, “Binay ties Roxas; Aquino pulls away,” the image that formed in my mind was Jojo Binay hog-tying Mar Roxas and his presidential running-mate Noynoy Aquino running away from the scene of the crime for fear of being associated with it. That was the split-second virtual reality created by the headline in my brain and, perhaps, in the brains of other readers as well. Of course, that virtual reality suddenly vaporized when my eyes flitted to the subhead, “Legarda rating dives 12 points in SWS survey.” I then realized that the Inquirer headline writers had simply used overly strong figurative language for what turns out to be not a real physical event but only a poll survey result—very much like the way sports writers use hyperbolic language to jazz up their reportage of what’s otherwise a boringly static chess match.

My fleeting misinterpretation of the statement “Binay ties Roxas” as a brutal, unlawful act on Roxas’s person was, of course, triggered by its questionable use of the transitive verb “ties.” In the context of that headline, my Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary says “ties” could mean either of these two sets of definitions:

The Inquirer headline writers obviously couldn’t have meant Def. 3 but Def. 4 instead, which was to say that Binay was able “to make an equal score in a contest” with Roxas—not in the actual elections, I must emphasize again, but only in the SWS survey. This meaning would have been unmistakably conveyed if the headline was more properly phrased as “Binay ties with Roxas in SWS survey.” In fact, in reporting the same story, the Philippine Star avoided conveying that misleading meaning by using the following headline using the preposition “with”:

SWS: Binay now tied with Mar; Noynoy widens lead  

Note, too, that unlike the Inquirer, the Philippine Star scrupulously made it clear that the “tie” between Binay and Roxas was only in the SWS survey and not an established, real-world electoral tie.

The big question now is this: was the Inquirer’s dubious use of the headline “Binay ties Roxas; Aquino pulls away” simply a semantic gaffe or biased political reportage?

For some clues, let’s take a look at the first three paragraphs of the Inquirer’s reportage for that story:

Note that the lead sentence of the Inquirer story makes it appear that Binay has tied with Roxas in the vice presidential race as an established fact, without giving any basis or citing a source for that claim. It only mentions as an afterthought in the next paragraph—and only in the attribution of another direct quote from Binay—that the tie was only in the results of the latest SWS survey.

Contrast this reportage of the Inquirer to that of the Philippine Star:

Within the lead sentence itself, the Philippine Star was mindful not to present the “tie” between Binay and Roxas as an established fact but only as a finding of an SWS survey, and was equally mindful not to present Aquino’s widening lead over his rivals as an established fact but only as coming from a report by the abs-scbnnews.com website.

We can see the same striving for balance and objectivity by BusinessWorld in its reporting for the same story, considering the fact that the paper itself happens to be a partner of the SWS in conducting that pre-election survey:

In summary, the Inquirer in its lead sentence took the “tie” between Binay and Roxas as an established fact and just left it to the reader to find out afterwards that it was only an SWS survey finding. In contrast, in their lead sentences, both the Philippine Star and BusinessWorld made sure of attributing the tie as only an SWS survey finding both in their headlines and in the body of their stories. (By the way, as far as I can gather, the Manila Bulletin and The Manila Times didn’t report at all or didn’t give as much play to that SWS survey.)

Are the stark differences in the headlines and reportage of the Inquirer, Philippine Star, and BusinessWorld about the Binay-Roxas “tie” due to outright political bias or simply due to the varying levels of journalistic and semantic competence of their reporters and editors?

You be the judge.

JUST ONE MORE THING:

I must say that I was actually impressed by the painstaking effort of the BusinessWorld to objectively report the results of the latest SWS pre-election survey, taking into account that BusinessWorld itself was a partner of SWS in that survey. However, I was taken aback by the following headline used in its own story about the survey results:

Aquino pads poll lead

Was BusinessWorld’s use of the verb “pads” in that headline simply a semantic slip of the keyboard or was it an inadvertent, subconscious way of telling the reader exactly what happened behind the scenes in that SWS survey?

I ask this question because my Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines the transitive verb “pad” as follows:

pad
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form: padded ; padding
Date: 1827

2 : to expand or increase especially with needless, misleading, or fraudulent matter  <pad the sales figures> —  often used with out  <they pad out their bibliographies — J. P. Kenyon>

There’s only one other definition for the verb “pad,” which is “to furnish with a pad or padding” or “to mute” or “to muffle.” I’m sure BusinessWorld didn’t mean this other set of definitions, so I wonder…

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*As far as I know, this is the first time in Philippine journalism history that a personal posting in a Twitter account has become the basis for a major front-page story in at least two mainstream broadsheets.

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