On Ukraine: Words shape facts, shape understanding

I had a Twitter thread go viral and turned it into the longform post below. This is an edited, cleaned-up and expanded version.

My introductory mass communication class here at Lehigh is in middle of studying what objectivity means practically in U.S. news and what it ought to mean. It’s my annual takedown of performative neutrality. This coming Monday we’re going to do an exercise on how the news takes sides by virtue of choosing words, and we’ll use the situation in Ukraine as an entry point to show how unavoidable bias is in news construction.

Want to try it? Sure you do.

To play along, here’s what you do. Before you go to the next paragraph, I want you describe in your own thinking what the situation with Russia and Ukraine is, but only in one word. What would you call it if you were relaying it to someone new to the news? Think of it in terms of something like “The situation is a _____” or “_____ is happening.” What is the best descriptor?

I’ll wait…..

(Jeopardy theme plays)

So what word did you choose? That word matters! It frames how someone new to the story is going to perceive and frame the news out of Ukraine going forward. Their encounter with that frame shapes how they will digest facts.

While there will be lots of answers in class Monday, I expect most will say something like:

• War
• Invasion
• Conflict

After listing your chosen word, the goal is to get you to think about how those words differ, why they matter, and why journalists spend lots of time thinking about words and their power to shape understanding. When they are doing it well, at least.

Think about the word you chose implies. I’ll use the ones I had above as an example:

War: A conflict that the audience might be tempted to think of as symmetric in terms of claims, fighting ability, etc. But it is a claim about the current fight while stripping the news of all context. It ignores power imbalances, history, and dodges any sense of culpability. It also could give the impression that the conflict is happening in multiple theaters, across multiple countries. Finally, this term has more totality to it, and invites you to think of innocents caught up in it.

Invasion: Unlike “war,” this term implies an aggressor and an afflicted party. It implies a territory has been crossed into, a sovereignty violated. It is more likely than the previous term to present by nature of use the existence of a good side and a bad one.

Conflict: Similar to “war,” but I personally find it a bit more stripped of violence. It’s antiseptic to the point of almost playing the situation down. Marriages have conflict, not militaries. Also, it is a frame that is mostly focused on the fight, not the effects.

You might disagree with my take on the word meanings, and that’s fine. I’m not here to argue definitions but rather the effect of words. It’s true that those words have precise definitions in dictionaries (which might agree mostly but diverge in parts), but words also have a public meaning when absorbed in media. Words have definitions, but also cultural, historical and moral meanings depending on the context they’re used. And all of that is in play with the news.

My point is these words greatly differ in the public imagination and each comes with frames that shape how news users judge the same set of facts. It’s why you can have multiple people encounter the same facts but see the news differently.

Now why does this matter for objectivity? Modern journalism, defined roughly as the past 80ish years, has slowly evolved an ethic that journalists ought to be unbiased, neutral observers. It asks them to pretend they’re just about the facts, ma’am, and not deciding what they believe at the point of narrative creation.

So this exercise is a good example of how modern objectivity is bunk, and also impossible. Just choosing a word for the headline alone shapes the story.

“INVASION!”

“WAR!”

These words in 120-point type on the home page or front page of your newspaper say different things, yes? Just a single word — one! — shapes the user’s understanding of the conflict. You encounter the headline and it sets expectations for everything else you consume about that story.

And so these words matter tremendously. And here’s the thing: those word judgement rely on a reporter’s or editor’s assessment of the facts. Because Putin would verrrry much like you to believe Russia has a historical claim to the idea that Ukraine has always been part of Russia. Ukraine is saying the opposite. The claimant you believe really determines the word choice. And when you choose the term, war vs. invasion, you have picked a point of view to explain the facts you’ve been able to gather and verify.

My own view: this is an invasion. It’s informed by my reading of the facts. The minute I make this choice, I am no longer a neutral observer. I can say I am, I can claim to be unbiased, but I am not.

The thing is, journalists do this all the time. Global warming vs. Climate Change. Protest vs. Riot. Pro-life vs. anti-choice. One reader on the thread pointed out the terms torture vs. enhanced interrogation. In many ways, democracy is about a struggle for the best ideas, and often that struggle is about getting your preferred language adopted by the press knowing that will frame how people see things. Journalists end up choosing, as well they should because it can provide understandings to lists of facts. The public simultaneously tells us in survey data they want just the facts but also want to understand the news.

That’s why I say modern objectivity is actually performative neutrality. It’s a fake dance news businesses feel like they have to sell so they can’t be accused of bias. But it offloads analysis to audiences that don’t have near the research base or depth on a topic to sift through it all, particularly on a complex story such as Ukraine.

The good news is journalists can still do objectivity without shying away from analysis in the service of truth. It looks like a return to the original version practitioners argued for in the early 20th century, and it looks like social science methods.

Social science weighs evidence, uses reason, tests ideas for truth. And that all happens before the narrative is crafted. The narrative, the story, is the result of this process. You test claims, show your work in the story, and serve the truth first. Objectivity is a method, not a point of view. If you want more on the history of objectivity, Tom Rosenstiel has spilled a lot of ink on the subject. He’s as good as it gets on how objectivity ought to look. I recommend his “Elements of Journalism” that he co-wrote with Bill Kovach.

This, by the way, should give us pause whether you’re a journalist or a news consumer. This is hard. Words are imprecise. They never fully capture what is happening. There is a qualitative difference between a journalist recklessly using words and one who is struggling, revising, and upgrading their language as they know more. I know in reading this your tendency might be to say this is a diagnosis for why the news outlet you despise the most is doing it wrong, but I’d urge you to have some nuance here. From the exercise above, could you confidently say you can do better on a daily basis on a wide range of topics? The nuance here should be critique of methods and motives, with the goal of making our news better.

Anyhow, that journalists are picking sides with words (war vs. invasion) tells you they are applying this type of process. They are using their minds to weigh claims and they are providing evidence in their stories (showing their work). This is how it’s supposed to be done when it’s done well.

If there’s one thing I want my students to remember from my class, it’s that objectivity ≠ lack of bias. It is impossible in practice, unattainable in reality, and makes the news unusable for audiences the more journalists try to pretend otherwise.

√ Testing claims
√ Pointing out lies and half-truths
√ Being fair to points of view
√ Researching for context
√ Transparently reporting results
√ Choosing words that strive for truth frames instead of pandering to bad-faith accusations of bias

That’s how you do it.