Con­fu­cius once wrote: “If lan­guage is not cor­rect, then what is said is not what is meant…Hence there must be no arbi­trari­ness in what is said. This mat­ters above everything.”

 Putting a 2,500-year-old Chi­nese sage and a tele­vi­sion news leg­end in the same head­line might seem like incon­gru­ous overload.

But in fact, they are linked — by a les­son for today’s broad­cast journalism.

Wal­ter Cronkite and the cor­re­spon­dents of his day spoke — and wrote — with crisp author­i­ty. Their tone and gram­mar con­veyed a clear intent and a sol­id mes­sage: “I’m telling you some­thing that you need to know. It is the truth, and you should con­sid­er it.”

                     HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN

Accord­ing to two recent sur­veys how­ev­er, near­ly half of Amer­i­cans now per­ceive hid­den agen­das, polit­i­cal bias and delib­er­ate mis­re­port­ing by news organ­i­sa­tions and reporters.

A mere eigh­teen per­cent of view­ers expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in TV news. Giv­en that Wal­ter Cronkite was once “the most trust­ed man in Amer­i­ca”, that’s a fall from grace of Lucifer­ian proportion.

Redemp­tion sure­ly lies in part with lan­guage, which makes it less like­ly with every broadcast.

Television’s defin­ing moment is wide­ly held to be encap­su­lat­ed in one solemn, clear­ly enun­ci­at­ed line, deliv­ered by Wal­ter Cronkite:

 “From Dal­las Texas, the flash, appar­ent­ly offi­cial, Pres­i­dent Kennedy died at one p.m. Cen­tral Stan­dard time, two o’clock East­ern Stan­dard time, some thir­ty-eight min­utes ago.” 

 Cronkite’s only actions were to remove his glass­es, glance up at a clock, and put his glass­es back on.

Today’s “style” would be: “Pres­i­dent Kennedy dying today at one p.m. in the after­noon…”

And if the reporter was in the field, chances are it would be deliv­ered in an over-hyped tone akin to a teenag­er regur­gi­tat­ing some­thing from social media, punc­tu­at­ed by hand ges­tures that look like the reporter is toss­ing a sal­ad while prac­tic­ing for a hand-jive competition. 

Even respect­ed anchors and cor­re­spon­dents have no shame in report­ing some­one “say­ing”, instead of the gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect and fac­tu­al­ly accu­rate “said ”.

The intent (encour­aged if not man­dat­ed by man­age­ment) seems to be to pro­vide a sense of imme­di­a­cy, and eru­di­tion be damned.

        EASY MISTAKES VERSUS DELIBERATE ERRORS

Gram­mat­i­cal and oth­er errors are all too easy to make when report­ing live, espe­cial­ly when, as often hap­pens, you’ve had bare­ly enough time to gath­er your thoughts before going on air.

I’ve made more than a few, some embar­rass­ing, some fun­ny. Cov­er­ing an earth­quake in Italy, I announced live on the CBS morn­ing news that Pope John Paul II would vis­it the vic­tims. At that stage he’d been dead for four years. I meant Pope Bene­dict XVI. 

But inten­tion­al­ly using gram­mar that would earn a D‑minus in a high school fresh­man Eng­lish essay falls well out­side those bounds.

A prime exam­ple was a report by a net­work White House cor­re­spon­dent that began: “Pres­i­dent Trump asked today…” 

The cor­re­spon­dent meant “Pres­i­dent Trump WAS asked today…”. Big difference.

It should not be left to the view­er to fig­ure the verb out.

                            ‘STYLE’ OVER SUBSTANCE

Broad­cast news has a unique abil­i­ty to take peo­ple places they’ve nev­er been, show them things they’ve nev­er seen, and tell sto­ries they need to know in a way that is inter­est­ing, infor­ma­tive and above all, moving.

It seems to me the best way of doing that is with thought­ful­ly craft­ed copy, deliv­ered cogent­ly under well shot pictures.

Cor­re­spon­dents appear­ing on cam­era three, four and more times in a piece that runs a minute and a half at best, ges­tic­u­lat­ing and bab­bling about what they’ve seen or what is going on isn’t report­ing, it’s show­boat­ing. Although in many cas­es, sad­ly, that’s prob­a­bly the point.

Sup­plant­i­ng actu­al news footage with cor­re­spon­dent-as-talk­ing-head, oth­er than in a brief stand-up (the TV ver­sion of byline and date­line), is a waste of television’s most pow­er­ful tool.

It also makes it hard­er for view­ers to dis­tin­guish prop­er reporters from pun­dits and com­men­ta­tors, whose opin­ions are rarely based on hav­ing had their boots on the ground.

The line is even more blurred when reports con­sist sole­ly of an anchor-cor­re­spon­dent Q&A.

Some­times that’s the only way to get news on the air on dead­line. Overuse tends to high­light the on-air per­son­al­i­ties rather than the story.

And lest it seem only TV cor­re­spon­dents are gram­mar-dumb, news­pa­pers as oth­er­wise eru­dite as the Wash­ing­ton Post, with the advan­tage of time to edit before pub­li­ca­tion, allow redun­dan­cies like this into print: “The first tweet came just after 11:50 a.m. last Sat­ur­day morn­ing…”, and a recent head­line that includ­ed “…déjà vu all over again.”

 Con­fu­cius and Cronkite must be spin­ning in their graves.

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