Dumbing down

Some words and headlines  recently used in the media, were provocative, sensationalist and for effect.

"Thug" used to be such a tabloid word. It's short enough to fit in the fattest headlines, and it's got a gritty, onomatopoeic directness: it sounds like what you'd gasp upon being kicked in the gut by, well, a thug. It's even a little bit spicy, perhaps because it seems to bear an aural family resemblance to a familiar four-letter Anglo-Saxonism. ("Thug", however, comes from Hindi, says my dictionary.)

The upmarket press and broadcasters such as RTÉ recognised "thug" as essentially polemical, and so its use by them was more or less confined to quoted speech and to opinion pieces in which the writer was playing at spittle-spraying street-talk, for the sake of the effect.

Now, however, news journalists seem happier to throw the word around in allegedly objective reportage. It turned up to describe the phantom menace on the streets of New Orleans, and then on an RTÉ new bulletin about the all-too-real loyalist rioters in Antrim. A word with no precise technical meaning in this context, it's a meaningless oomph-adder, and another sign that even the most dramatic stories aren't immune to the pressures of hype.

It was funny, all the same, that journalists' linguistic hype about the riots was accompanied by an extraordinary amount of rationalisation for them, much of which passed unmolested through media lines. Most striking was PSNI chief Hugh Orde's description of loyalists as "disenfranchised". He didn't say they "feel disenfranchised" and, articulate chap that he is, he didn't simply stumble over "disenchanted".

"Disenfranchised" is a word with a real technical meaning – which, if it can be stretched to apply in the North, must apply to everyone under direct rule from a London government they've no hand in electing – but also with a long history of rhetorical-hype usage.

The RTÉ interviewer didn't challenge Orde to clarify, and The Irish Times editorial quoted his use of the word with apparent approval, adding: "This has been reflected by the virtual collapse of those political organisations linked to loyalist paramilitary groups." Now, translating Irish Times leaders is a tricky business, but this appears to suggest that folks got "disenfranchised" by not voting for the PUP or UDP. Or maybe not: Meejit is not as fluent in Timespeak as he used to be.

The PUP's David Ervine also sailed serenely through his Morning Ireland outing, allowed to spout a tragic soliloquy without facing anything remotely resembling the sort of grilling Gerry Adams would get if republicans were orchestrating riots in Belfast.

The media's dilemma – are those people on the streets "thugs" or Ervine-like sensitive souls? – carried over into its coverage of the Junior Cert results night. Those were, after all, our babies out there, but their wantonness appeared to know no bounds.

Meejit has written previously of how the press treats working-class adolescent boys (in their hoodies) as though they should all be locked up. This week's coverage was directed firmly at middle-class readers, and the message was "Lock up your daughters!" The Irish Times put its Moral Panic Correspondent, Kathryn Holmquist, on the story, with a series of features promising that our kids will be in mental institutions at 30 if they take a drink at 15.

This was a useful follow-up to the Irish Examiner's recent series on "teens and sex", which assured us that if the kids survive all their sexually transmitted illnesses and actually live to see 30, they'll be sterile and emotionally crippled anyway. The Examiner series, in fairness, had a few good moments, but its statistics were of questionable relevance, its warnings (against, eg, "fingering") were dubiously all-encompassing, its sex was exclusively hetero and, most stupidly, in four days and eight pages it never once used the word "pleasure".

Do middle-aged readers and journalists really have such short memories? Have we managed to forget all the fun-and-scary experiments we survived? Or are we simply consumed with envy of the kids who have it all ahead of them?