Language Politics

By Nicholas Fleisher

Author Archives: Nicholas Fleisher


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Nothing but the truth

Political speech is an exercise in framing. Though the world is full of facts, language affords us nearly limitless flexibility in describing a given state of affairs: we can say that a house is located “in Abbottabad” or “within a mile of the Pakistani military academy”; that Detroit is “the most populous city in Michigan” or “roughly one-third of its size in 1950”; and so on. While facts themselves are independent of language and thus politically inert, our capacity to state them is not.

Which brings me to PolitiFact Wisconsin, home of the Truth-O-Meter. PolitiFact investigates the truthfulness of claims made by political figures, providing what is in principle a useful public service. An unwavering focus on a claim’s truth, however, often distracts our attention from—and thereby unwittingly, through repetition, reinforces—its point of view, that is, the rhetorical frame it seeks to impose on the facts in question. So it is with PolitiFact’s latest investigation, of Scott Walker’s claim that Milwaukee County spent over $170,000 in 2010 on union-related work done by county employees.

As detailed in PolitiFact’s report, Walker’s claim is true; in fact, it slightly understates the amount spent (and significantly understates it when associated benefits are taken into account, bringing the total to around $260,000). PolitiFact sees its role as “not weighing in on the merits of the practice,” but rather “checking the accuracy of Walker’s claim on the cost to Milwaukee County.” By adopting Walker’s framing of the facts, however, PolitiFact inevitably echoes his negative assessment of the practice.

Framing is especially important in talking about money: the underlying mathematics allows for an infinite variety of truth-conditionally equivalent statements of a given financial fact. To wit, the amount in question is equal to roughly $4,375, on average, for each of the roughly 60 county employees PolitiFact reports were paid for union work in 2010; it is equal to $48.12 per county employee in 2010 (based on the county’s report of 5,457 full-time employee equivalents in 2010); and it is a bit under two one-hundredths of one percent of the county’s total expenditures in 2010, which were approximately $1.46 billion, according to the same report. All of the statements above are equally true. Stating the amount as a per-employee average or as a percentage of the county budget is intended to make the expenditure look small. Stating the amount as a lump sum, as Walker and PolitiFact do, is intended to make it look large; among other things, this invites the politically contentious inference that the county’s overriding priority should be to spend as little money as possible. While the total amount spent is a politically neutral matter of fact, stating it as such is a rhetorical choice that reflects a particular political point of view, PolitiFact’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Indeed, there is a steady undercurrent of anti-union sentiment in the PolitiFact report. Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators are described as having decided to “hotfoot it to Illinois” in February. The report asks whether county employees were paid “not to do work for the county, but for their unions,” a construction that presumes, without argument, an antagonism between the interests of the county and those of its collectively represented employees. While comparisons with city and state practice are made in an attempt to provide some context for the discussion of the county figures, no comparison is made with the cost structure of public contracts issued to private entities, where public payments are used, directly or indirectly, to fund administrative, advertising, and other costs not associated with work done for the public (to say nothing of the amount the private entity collects as profit).

By focusing entirely on the truth of Walker’s claim and ignoring its framing of the facts, PolitiFact tacitly endorses Walker’s point of view. While PolitiFact’s mission is admirable, its execution leaves much to be desired. Like PolitiFact, my intention here is not to assess the wisdom of paying county employees for time spent on union activities. Rather, I hope to have shown that PolitiFact grossly overestimates its ability to stay above the political fray while talking about such matters. Lost in the cheerful green glow of the Truth-O-Meter is the fact that the truth always comes in a specifically chosen and politically interested linguistic package.


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Tense and aspect not enjoined

From today’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel coverage of proposed budget cuts to the Milwaukee Public School system:

The district also doesn’t benefit from savings provided in Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill, which curtailed collective bargaining and imposed cost-sharing with public employees for health insurance and pension benefits. MPS already had ratified a contract with its teachers union through 2013 that doesn’t include the same level of concessions.

As is well known, due to a restraining order, the law in question has not been enacted. The use of the passive participle provided in the excerpt above, however, strongly suggests otherwise. Alongside the present tense expressed by doesn’t benefit and the past tense expressed by curtailed and imposed in the following sentence, the language above presupposes that the law is in force and that school districts and other public institutions can now make use of its provisions, contrary to fact. A liberal sprinkling of hypothetical/modal woulds in the first sentence above would bring the text into closer alignment with reality.

For details on the deeply euphemistic sense of cost-sharing intended above, see here.


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Chromatic relativity and contrastive focus

From today’s New York Times coverage of the Canadian election:

“The key to understanding Stephen Harper is his determination to establish the Conservative Party as the dominant party in Canada,” said Michael Bliss, a historian. “He wants to gradually shift the shade of government from red to blue.” In Canada, the Conservatives are blue.

What is striking about the final sentence in the excerpt above—apart from its oddly terse, field-guide–like tone—is its economical handling of the implicit contrast with American political color terminology. An American audience needs the final sentence above not just because it knows nothing of Canadian political color associations, but because those associations are exactly the opposite of what they are in the US. The swift cultural entrenchment of red–blue color-coding in American politics that has taken place since the 2000 presidential election (and the associated brief reign of Tim Russert’s whiteboard) makes Michael Bliss’s final comment above seem like a misstatement or a typo before we arrive at the final explanatory sentence.

It is no accident, then, that the final sentence begins with the prepositional phrase In Canada. This immediately establishes a contrast with the reader’s location and paves the way for the contrastive focus to come. Consider, for comparison, the following reformulation: The Canadian Conservative Party’s official color is blue. This gets the facts right, but does not invite the contrast with American political color terminology that the original does. In the reformulation, a crucial part of the explanation is missing; as a result, the sentence is far more awkward.

The contrastive focus itself, with its associated prosodic emphasis, falls most naturally on the adjective, blue. That is, the implicit contrast seems to be with a sentence like In America, the conservatives are red (this despite the fact that “the conservatives” is not the name of any American political party). But the focus could instead fall on the subject, the Conservatives; the implicit contrast then would be with the sentence In America, the Democrats are blue. Even if the first option is the preferred one, the availability of the second indicates that there are two questions under discussion: “What color are the Conservatives?” and “Who is blue?” The first arises from the mention of politically associated colors in the midst of a discussion of the Canadian Conservative Party. The second arises from the implicit contrast with American political colors, where blue has an altogether different association. The subtleties of linguistic information packaging are on full display in that odd short sentence.


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De re headlines

The respondents to a recent CNN poll did a less than encouraging job of estimating how the Federal budget is allocated. One detail that gained widespread attention, in light of recent attempts by Congressional Republicans to eliminate Federal funding for National Public Radio, was the respondents’ median estimate of how much of the Federal budget is devoted to public broadcasting: they estimated 5%, which is equivalent to about $178 billion.

While the equivalency just noted happens to be true, it is not obvious or automatic: we have to know the actual size of the Federal budget and do multiplication in order to derive it. Much of the media response to the poll, of course, was an extended lament of the poll respondents’—and, by extension, most Americans’—inability to perform either of these tasks. While we are perfectly able to understand and recognize the two figures—5% of the Federal budget, $178 billion—the equivalency between the two remains opaque to most people.

Opaque equivalencies of this sort have been studied extensively by linguists and philosophers. In particular, there is a well-known connection between referential opacity and belief. Predicates that express propositional attitudes, such as believe or think or, in this case, estimate, are sensitive to the beliefs of the attitude holder (the believer, or thinker, or estimater). Importantly, sentences containing such predicates are often ambiguous between a de dicto interpretation, in which we refer to some term relative to the attitude holder’s beliefs, and a de re interpretation, in which we refer to the term relative to the facts of the actual world (which may differ substantially from the attitude holder’s beliefs).

The media response to the budget poll shows the importance of propositional attitudes in political rhetoric and reporting. For example, Talking Points Memo offered the following headline: “Poll: Americans Wrongly Estimate $178 Billion In Fed. Budget Goes To Public Broadcasting.” Of course, the poll respondents did no such thing: they were asked for percentage estimates, not absolute values. In this context, anything other than a de dicto report of the respondents’ estimate (i.e., “5%”) is misleading: their presumed inability to grasp the equivalency between 5% of the Federal budget and $178 billion makes a de re report (i.e., “$178 billion”) an inaccurate statement of their beliefs, even if it is a true statement about the actual-world value of their estimate. Of course, there are any number of reasons for putting a de re report in a headline like this: shock value, highlighting of general ignorance and innumeracy, and so on. Examples like this remind us that propositional attitudes and their associated ambiguities are ripe for rhetorical exploitation.