The graphic below is a screen capture from the main page of CNN.com on the afternoon of October 15, 2007. The headline, highlighted for emphasis in this article, links to a CNN.com story about Lindsay Roberts, wife of the president of Oral Roberts University. She is at the center of a scandal involving improprieties alleged in a lawsuit file by three former professors against the private, religious college. The most salacious of the allegations—backed up by pictures, cell phone records, and other documents—involve Mrs. Roberts' interactions with underaged males, one of whom was photographed in a car with Mrs. Roberts after midnight even though a local curfew prohibits minors from being out after 10 p.m. without their parents. Among other allegations are some backed by extensive records of late-night text messaging between Mrs. Roberts and underaged males, as well as representations that the boy who was in the car with her was ultimately moved into the Roberts family's university-provided home to the dismay of her children. Further allegations have to do with the firing of a long-time employee, who was replaced by a convicted sex offender, and lavish clothing expenditures by Mrs. Roberts, purchases paid for by the ministry because she was to wear the apparel in her television broadcast appearances.


Note carefully the manner in which the headline is presented:


The reader who clicks on the headline finds that the associated article recaps the highlights of what is on an official Webpage of Oral Roberts University, wherein Mrs. Roberts is given space to express her dismay about the allegations being leveled against her.

That front-page CNN.com headline might, however, give a somewhat different impression, possibly even that the allegations have actually made her physically ill. Once a reader clicks on the headline and goes to the article, the word "sicken" is in quotes because it is how she, herself, on the official Oral Roberts University Website, is characterizing how she feels about being accused of improprieties.

Now, let us pull back to exactly one week before, on October 8, 2007, when Blackwater USA was still headline news at CNN.com and many other media outlets. The Iraqi government had just ordered Blackwater out of the country. An official investigation by the Iraqi government concluded that 17 Iraqi civilians killed when Blackwater employees opened fire in a town square were murdered by the mercenaries. Gruesome photos and moment-by-moment accounts of the massacre had been delivered by news media outlets for more than a week, with at least one account by the Washington Post providing multiple, eyewitness accounts and on-the-scene interviews with those who saw and survived the relentless onslaught of firepower by the private American security firm's personnel. So, on October 8, recounting the conclusions of the Iraqi government report, which held Blackwater criminally and civilly responsible for the deaths and injuries of Iraqi citizens from the September 16 shower of gunfire in a Baghdad square, CNN.com had the headline, again highlighted here for emphasis, in the screen capture graphic below:


Note, again carefully, but this time also comparatively, the manner in which the headline is presented:


Note the single quotes around the word victim. Such quotes have the effect of removing a word or term from the realm of the factual and placing it squarely in the wide-open field of the claimed, the alleged, the scrutinizable, the questionable. That's the intended effect of so-called "scare quotes": they diminish the representation made by the words within them; and that's exactly what those single quotation marks did with respect to the use of the word victim to describe a person killed or injured in the September 16 Blackwater shooting incident at a square in Baghdad.

According to CNN.com, then, allegations sicken Mrs. Roberts, but someone killed or wounded by Blackwater mercenaries on September 16 is a 'victim' of the attack. A civil lawsuit backed by extensive photographic and textual, documentary evidence can sicken a wealthy, religious, American defendant in a sexually charged lawsuit; but when extracted from a foreign government's official report that included dozens of appallingly gruesome photographs and testimony from many eyewitnesses, the term 'victim' must have quotes around it.

CNN.com has used and avoided using scare quotes before, and it will undoubtedly do so in the future as a way of subtly shaping the perception its readers have of information it reports. Although journalism students are taught about this and other means of "framing" early in their training, many people, even those well-educated, are not consciously aware of it in actual use, even when it is deployed repeatedly, over an extended period of time, by a single news source deliberately attempting to shape perceptions and opinions. While it might have been hoped that, by now, framing would be relegated to local media, CNN.com is demonstrating that what is considered at best disingenuous news presentation and at worst dishonest journalism is alive and quite well in the ranks of 'professional' 'news media' outlets.


The Dark Wraith encourages readers to keep a close eye on CNN.com for more 'journalistic' hijinks.