Clichés in the news media
Image: Kaptain Kobold via PhotoPin cc
It is customary, when writing an article about clichés, to load one’s sentences with them to demonstrate the point through exaggeration of the error. This feeble trope reached its apotheosis with William Safire’s endlessly reproduced ‘Rules for Writers’.
I’ll try to avoid those traps by referring you to a rather more up-to-date hit list (which nevertheless still plays the ‘I’m doing what I’m telling you not to’ game) from the Washington Post. Yes, it’s an American publication, but with the increasing homogenisation of news, most of what they have to say applies just as much to the Australian media.
With time pressures always weighing heavily on journalists, the risk of a lapse into meaningless cliché grows exponentially as deadline approaches. And because news never stops coming, neither do the deadlines.
While there are clichés in every field, the ones that come to us through journalism are especially pernicious, as we are all exposed to them and they can propagate themselves like a contagion. It’s part of an insidious feedback loop whereby a necessary shorthand is adopted pertaining to a certain issue, and is then endlessly recycled whenever the issue reappears in the media.
Here’s part of the Washington Post’s list of unbearable contemporary clichés from the news media:
Literally
Kingmaker
The [anything] community
It’s the [anything], stupid
Redux
That’s just [person’s name] being [person’s name]
It is what it is
[Anything]-gate
Part and parcel
Ironic Capitalisations Implying Unimportance of Things Others Consider Important
While the cliché can be a warm bath of convenience into which the lazy writer is often tempted to sink, a fresh, arresting image is more likely to call the inattentive reader to attention.
Remember that it is far more memorable to be slapped with a fish than with the bog-standard open palm to the face.
