Monday, March 22, 2010

The nouns of lawbreaking and how the immigration beat overuses labels like "illegal"

Defining the person by a label
Photo by Bill H-D. Licensed under Creative Commons.

How do we frame people who break the law? From my observation, reporting on immigration law violations tends to define the person who is on the wrong side of that law much more than reporting on people who are on the wrong side of any other law.

For example, a January Tennessean cover story on business tax amnesty described the people who had violated the law as, "companies," "people," "businesspeople," and "owners." Barely used were terms that turned the lawless behavior into a noun or adjective that defined the offender, like "scofflaws" and "noncompliant businesses." The term "illegal" doesn't appear once.

I point this out because of two stories in the Tennessean today.

The first is a story about a driver who crashed a stolen car onto the steps of City Hall yesterday. The AP story refers to the person as the "driver" five times (including in the headline) and uses no other description. WSMV's report uses the word "man" once, "driver" four times (including in the headline), and "car thief" only once.

The second carries this headline: "Lipscomb University recruiter bonuses broke federal law." Note that no person broke the law; it was the bonuses who did it. And that frame carries beyond the headline to this statement in the story itself: "Unfortunately, the incentives also broke federal law." The words "unethical recruiters" appear in the story, but only as background for why the law was created. (No surprise, then, that after the article concludes with "Lipscomb did not suffer any penalties for the incident, and all the recruiters were allowed to keep their bonuses," the normally venomous Tennessean commenters chimed in with "Yawn. Non story" and "Just another non-story from The Thin-essean.")

When the law is immigration, however, defining the person by the legal violation is much more prevalent. Just look at the story today in the Tennessean on the 100,000-500,000-strong immigration march yesterday in D.C.: people with immigration law problems are described only three times, and with the exact same words: "illegal immigrants."

In theory or in isolation, that use of the modifier "illegal" to construct and repeat the term "illegal immigrants" might seem to make sense, but not when businesses that violate tax laws are called - without any legal modifier - "companies," "people," "businesspeople," and "owners;" not when a man who violates property and vehicular laws is called a "driver" with no accompanying adjective; and not when the people who commit recruiting violations at a Nashville university are merely called "recruiters."  Those stories all explain the violation without legally defining the violator.

Legal tags like "undocumented" or "illegal" are unnecessary.  The right practice is not to choose which is the least offensive or the most accurate of the two.  The right practice is to stay away - from these labels or any variant.

It's not that reporters on immigration should do anything different that their colleagues working other legal beats. Avoiding labels like "undocumented" or "illegal" is standard media practice in every other context. Deviating from that practice at the immigration desk is probably an unconscious act, but as a result, it is both unwarranted and unprofessional.  It has become a scarlet letter.  I'll leave it for you to decide who's wearing it.

1 comment:

  1. In a Tennessean story about red light cameras, people who have been caught running red lights are labeled only twice in the story: once as "motorists," and once as "traffic violators." So exactly half of the labels used refer to the law. That's about par for stories outside the immigration context.

    I wonder how using only two labels for the lawbreakers, in an article that long, compares to the frequency of use of labels for lawbreakers in the immigration context.

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