Narrating Civility: A Word to the Media on the Language of Political Coverage
By Tim Shaffer
Democracy is happening every day in America. It’s been said, however, that lately, the stakes are higher. Increasing incivility feeds a growing sense of instability. The media -- whether it's commercial media, reporting, or the broader journalistic frame – play a key role in this moment. It’s become ever more vital that the media think about not only how to cover our democracy, but how exactly to speak of it. Language matters.
The election is one of these recurring flash points that we have in our democratic society. Divisions are highlighted and escalated in these moments every two and four years. How we talk about politics can excite and exacerbate divisions and detract from the often tedious, but necessary, work and problem-solving between elections. This is the basis of a stable society.
I assure you, it is possible to inform, be informed, and govern together through a shared commitment to civility, without losing our positions, values, or beliefs. It's about coming into ostensibly polarized conversations, viewing these as attainable interactions, listening for understanding, and dealing with differences constructively. It's about finding places where there might be some common ground. The media plays a major role -- in either further deepening the divide, or reinforcing the idea and practices of civility.
So, how do we continually recognize and elevate our differences without capitalizing on them in a way that squashes the possibility of civility?
In the day to day, one thing we can all do is avoid simplistic categorization, what my colleague, Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, author of “Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States,” describes as the gamification of politics. The way we talk and think about politics is framed by game language with easy categorization of winners and losers. We talk about “Team Red” and “Team Blue.” Even though this is the language we have become used to when politics gets covered-- and know it’s because sports are so dominant in our lives--this language increases tensions. Just the other day, the New York Times had a headline about a case in Pennsylvania that was discussing the question of mail-in ballots, signatures, and how they would be counted, or assessed. And, the way that it got written about was, that it was a win for Democrats. Well, that might be true, but in fact, it's a win for citizens, right? Regardless of who receives the votes. This is one single example of gamification, but illustrates the habitual framing. We perpetuate the problem as we regurgitate these things.
In addition to being mindful of the language of our coverage and things like gamification, the media can think about civility in the form of our conduct. The philosopher Anthony Laden, who contributed to our book, “A Crisis of Civility? Political Discourse and Its Discontents,” wrote about how one component of civility is a certain code of conduct, or behavior management, as in a focus on manners and politeness, rather than motivations. So, incivility, in this scenario, is about being rude, insults, inappropriate tone, interruptions. On Twitter, it would be the all caps sort of thing. The second component of civility is this idea of responsiveness: the concept that citizenship imposes a moral duty to be able to explain and listen in a fair-minded way. And so, if the slogan for civility as politeness is, “we can disagree without being disagreeable,” then the slogan for civility as responsiveness might be, “we can agree to disagree.” Or perhaps better, “disagreement is no reason to stop talking to one another.”
If we take seriously the idea of being this liberal democratic society, and I'm saying liberal in a classic sense, not like a liberal/conservative way but as a liberal pluralistic society -- we must want and need to have in our midst a range of ideologies, perspectives, and views on the world. This range allows us to wrestle with ideas, think about them. Some of them are going to win out, others are going to lose. But if they're able to co-exist in that sense of common space in life, there's something to be said about that, right?
Some things will be beyond the pale. And I think that's a big part of what we're always negotiating. Where are those boundaries that define who we are? What's the permissible language? After all, at the heart of communication is this idea of shared symbols and words that make the world around us, this idea that our rhetoric makes the world. Russell L. Hanson stated it well in “The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations with Our Past:” “Rhetoric, ideas, and action are inexorably linked… When ideas about democracy change, so do the practices of democracy."