Orwellian Newspeak officially adopted by the Associated Press
“The Associated Press is an independent global news organisation dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in all formats and the essential provider of the technology and services vital to the news business.”
That claim, under the title “Advancing the power of facts”, appears at the head of the Associated Press (AP) website. It is presumably intended as a mission statement; today it reads more like an obituary.
For the reality is that this 174-year-old institution, for so long dedicated to impartial and accurate news reportage, has succumbed to politically correct partisanship in the very language it employs. The AP Stylebook has become the trusted vade mecum of journalists and communicators of every type – broadcasters, marketing personnel, public relations firms, corporate communicators and many others. Between 1977 and 2011the Stylebook sold 2.5 million copies. Its influence on the nuancing of communication is incontestable and, until recently, that was regarded as beneficial because of AP’s perceived commitment to neutral language and reporting.
No more. The Associated Press announced on June 19 that when reporting news involving black people it would in future capitalise the adjective “Black”. On 20 July it further announced that in the same context it would keep the adjective “white” lower-case. “We agree that white people’s skin colour plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” said John Daniszewski, the AP’s vice president for standards, in a memo to staff. “But capitalising the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”
That is, by any objective criteria, a racist position. That it is unconsciously so does not absolve AP executives of blame for indulging in PC virtue signalling; on the contrary, it exposes how far a formerly neutral and authoritative news agency has lost sight of its principles and joined in the lemming stampede to adopt the most extravagant postures demanded by the proponents of identity politics.
To make a parade of describing one racial group with an upper-case letter and another in lower-case is not only fatuous, but mischievous. It signals a preference and disowning any such intention does not alter the objective reality. But objective reality, for so long the guiding principle of AP, now takes second place to PC posturing. How does it “advance the power of facts” to discriminate in this way in what should be neutral news reports?
How can a news agency be regarded as impartial when it states that “white people’s skin colour plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems”? Apart from the decline in literary authority signalled by the split infinitive, since when was it the AP’s function to explore problems, rather than convey objective information? Are there not sufficient leader writers and columnists at The New York Times and the Guardian exploring “systemic inequalities” without a news information service taking up cudgels in the culture wars?
This abandonment of neutrality is not merely a knee-jerk response to the Black Lives Matter riots; it has been infecting the AP for some years. On April 2, 2013 the AP Stylebook banned the term “illegal immigrant”. This occurred precisely at the time when the problem of illegal immigrants was rising up the news agenda, which it would dominate by 2015. It is a fact of life that there are two kinds of immigrants: legal immigrants, who form the majority, and illegal immigrants who are criminals. Naturally, “woke” leftists contradict that reality, but why on earth would a neutral news agency do so?
Because it is no longer neutral, is the only credible explanation. Vocabulary disciplines thought, as Orwell highlighted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, by controlling expression and, by extension, belief. Until recently, one of the chief reassurances against the advance of censorship and fake news was the gold standard of impartiality supposedly represented by the Associated Press. Now, if its terminology is biased, how much confidence can consumers feel that its news is not slanted?
This biased behaviour by the AP is just the latest in a tsunami of surrender by respected institutions to leftist pressure, a trahison des clercs that has left Western civilisation dangerously debilitated. It has a significance far beyond the capitalisation or otherwise of two letters of the alphabet. It is about driving an ever deeper wedge between two races, and that is malevolent. Some commentators have rightly objected that “Black” signals something out of the ordinary, while “white” looks like the normative or default ethnicity.
The chief preoccupation of the far left now is to prevent integration and assimilation between ethnic groups: that would dissipate grievance and prevent manipulation of ethnic minorities for culturally revolutionary purposes. In Britain, two or three decades ago, people of good will entertained two hopes and expectations regarding the immigrant community. First, they hoped that immigration would be efficiently controlled, to prevent the creation of social problems and alarm or resentment among the existing population.
Secondly, they looked forward to the day when people would not see a black accountant/nurse/electrician, but a British accountant/nurse/electrician. Instead, the children and grandchildren of immigrants have had imposed on them the ugly and ghettoising label “BAME”, reflecting the obsession of predominantly white liberals with perpetuating differences. They adamantly refuse to allow ethnic minorities to integrate, in an evolutionary way, into British society.
No doubt the left will want to coin some catchy phrase to sanitise this unhealthy aspiration, so how about recycling a couple of golden oldies? How about “separate but equal” (Plessy v. Ferguson, US Supreme Court, 1896)? It has proved to have staying power: thanks to the lunacy currently afflicting American society, some college students now sleep in segregated black dormitories. Or why not go the whole hog and revive “separate development” (hat-tip Henrik Verwoerd)? Apartheid is back, but this time it is trendy and woke.
The exploitation of latent ethnic resentments by nihilists who want to overthrow the entire fabric of Western society is a real danger; but a far worse danger is the cowardice, conformity and stupidity of individuals and institutions with crucial roles in the preservation of civilised standards, supinely crumbling before Marxist aggression.
“More than half the world’s population sees AP journalism every day,” boasts the Associated Press website. In that case, it is time AP executives woke up to the fact that their virtue signalling is not mature but infantile, not beneficial but irresponsible, and returned to their long-established function of conveying factual news impartially. And the same goes for all the other institutions – local authorities, universities, corporations – that have abandoned their responsibilities and joined in the Danse Macabre that is trampling down a civilisation painfully wrought over two millennia.