(Published on the Huffington Post, May 26, 2015)
If you subscribe to the Facebook page of the organization “Killed by Police“, you will receive a depressing parade of daily updates on police shootings. This litany of posts drives home the fact that the police in the U.S. kill several people a day on average. But one will also notice that the media typically reports these killings as “office-involved shootings.”
Why has the media taken to reporting the shooting and killing of people by law enforcement this way? It is dangerously misleading. Moreover, it is not just the headline that employs such ambiguous language. Typically, the report goes on to explain that the person “died” as a result of the “officer-involved shooting.” This use of such euphemistic language to describe an incident in which an organ of the state has killed a citizen is not only bizarre, it should alarm us. As Orwell so eloquently explained in such essays as “Politics and the English Language” and “Writers and Leviathan,” such deliberately misleading and opaque use of language can pose a danger to the fabric of democracy. If we do not write clearly about our political system and public institutions, we will cease to think very clearly about them too.