Under the Blue Light of Live at Five

I am entertaining thoughts of another morning ban on the Today show and what passes for our local news . Every so often I do this, shunning Matt and Katie for NPR until the radio newsreaders' pretentious pronunciations and trumpet-voiced Pujoles send me back to TV-land. It's like cycle between elitism and populism, or between my inner Mom and my inner Dad.

Usually, it's Couric who sends me away, but this morning it was a promo for the WTMJ's ten o'clock "news" [sic]. As I was preparing for another productive day at the office, Mike Gousha leaned in to tell me: "Sex offenders choosing to live close to your kids. Why isn't there a law to stop it? The I-Team investigates. That's Tonight, Live at 10:00 on TODAY'S TMJ4."

The question of whether this qualifies as news or sensationalism or an act of cultural aggression is a good one, and one that has been answered well in a few places, but ultimately my only reasonable response as a local consumer (and, um, stockholder) is to not watch and I haven't made it all the way through a local news broadcast in quite some time. But, since I watch in the morning, I am not entirely free of fault.

Instead, let's look at the language. This will require me to "close read," or as my former students would call it, "overanalyze."

The first sentence ("Sex offenders choosing to live close to your kids") is not a sentence. It is trying so hard to be active that it has avoided the potentially passive but required "are" to link the nouns (sex offenders) to their action (choosing). But if it is not a sentence, what is it? It's descriptiveness but lack of activity works much like a caption, like those you find below pictures in newspapers (i.e., "Mourners leaving an Atlanta church"). It also sort-of does what a caption is supposed to do, in that it promises you (later, at ten, if you tune in) a picture to accompany it.

This first sentence -- or caption -- also presumes that I have kids. After all, Gousha says that these sex offenders choose by choice to live close to MY kids. Not Milwaukee's kids, or kids in general, but mine specifically. Except I don't have kids, so the only way I can make this sentence meaningful to me is to willfully extend that "your" to some larger "you" -- that is, not me but a group of people of whom I must be one. So Gousha has forced me to consider myself part of a community, one that doesn't actually exist, since it's created only by speech act rather than by, well, community. Gousha's language makes me feel like I am a part of something, even if I'm not, even if I pass by my neighbors without saying hello, even if I curse their damn, noisy kids.

Then there's the query "Why isn't there a law to stop it?" The "it" in this question has no clear referrent in the previous statement. "It" is probably meant to refer to the "the act of choosing to live close to your kids," but why doesn't Gousha say "stop them" (meaning the sex offenders) or "stop this" (more clearly refering to "the act of choosing to live close to your kids")? A "choosing" is not an "it," after all, but an action. Perhaps that "it" is meant to draw our attention away from the "choosing" part of the previous sentence and to the "living close to your kids" part. But if the law that doesn't stop this "it" refers to the living, than the "choosing" part of the previous sentence isn't needed and in fact muddies the issue. So the "choice" must be central to the question posed. The question, then, is presuming that this "choosing" should be stopped, and that a law could stop it.

By posing the question in the negative, Gousha frames the question in the negative; he does not ask why there is no law to stop this, which looks for logic and clarification, but asks why there "isn't" a law, which asks for justification and defensiveness. By asking this question in this way, Gousha again constructs me onto his side. He does not ask me to consider whether there ought to be such a law, but to consider why there isn't one yet (or at least why there isn't one that is working). Not to put too fine a point on it, but this constructs me out of a part of my own governance -- laws should be made for me, or should have been made for me before now, without my participation. The question assumes I am a consumer of governement but not a participant, that I believe government and laws exist to protect me from others, and that as a decent person I would want this choosing to be stopped.

As to what exactly a law could stop -- the choosing, the sex offenses, or the living close to my kids -- we'll have to tune in at ten. (The sex offenders would have saved us a lot of trouble if they'd only chosen to live away from all children, or at least far away from your kids.)

But here's my larger point: this is a sloppy use of language. And rightly so, because language is a fluid thing that is highly adaptable to speaker and message and the quality of thought. Where the purpose of language is to sensationalize, misdirect, outrage, and simplify, the language itself will be sensationalist, inaccurate, maddening, and stupid.

If we presume that this sort of thing would attract customers who would respond to it, we can probably begin to understand where all those suppositions of "trust" and "accuracy" come from.