Hermeneutic Heretic

Evening News 24 - Refuse fire near City Hall  Arsonists sparked an emergency response after setting light to a rubbish container near City Hall on Saturday evening.

The suspects started the fire shortly after 7pm on St Giles Street.

Two fire engines were sent to the scene and firefighters used hoses to extinguish the flames.

This is an online newspaper article in its entirety. What caught my attention was the use of the word ’suspects’. By the rules of pragmatic implicature, this word is out of place in this context (we could even call it wrong or agrammatical). Suspects implies that the article is about people who have already been apprehended and it is not clear whether they had committed the crime (or legal restrictions require this unclarity). However, is we’re talking about the people who really committed the crime, even though they remain unknown, the word perpetrators or vandals or arsonists (as inthe introductory sentence) would be much more appropriate. In that case, there would be no confusion.

This created an interesting garden path text (flow of inference). When I caught sight of ’suspects’ I had to go back to reread the article to make sure whether they had been caught or not. And I’m still not sure. This is a quick bit of online news rather than a published and copy-edited piece (although similar errors slip through anyway) so the source of the error could be in both directions: 1. the writer misspoke or 2. forgot to mention the arrests. The former is more likely but the latter is not impossible particularly if the arrests had already been mentioned elsewhere or are being kept out.

But what is the source of this slip? Quite obviously the implicature of the word ’suspect’ was overridden by the constructional conventions of journalistic prose where ’suspect’ is used to describe agents in crimes as a matter of course. To use the word ’suspect’ is always safer and largely understandable so the pragmatic concerns can be shelved. So what we have here is a clash in constructional conventions which both enter into the cognitive modeling of the situation as described. In this case, the convention of genre-specific language use won over the the use where the logic of implicature is preserved. This is important to keep in mind when looking at pragmatics as equivalent to the study of logic.

The importance of convention in these cases reminded of the principle of ‘convention over configuration’ introduced by the programming framework Ruby on Rails:

"Convention over Configuration" means a developer only needs to specify unconventional aspects of the application. For example, if there’s a class Sale in the model, the corresponding table in the database is called sales by default. It is only if one deviates from this convention, such as calling the table "products_sold", that one needs to write code regarding these names.

This is exactly what happened in this case. The use of ’suspect’ causes the reader (or rather some readers) to search for information about the implied arrest. When none is forthcoming other avenues of resolving the conflict need to be sought. However, even though the process can be described broadly algorithmically, it is really much fuzzier and parallel and could not be all that easily modeled through a conventional flowchart that would be appropriate for a computer language. But the analogy is striking nevertheless. Particularly, since we could see this RoR convention as an expression of a hypostasis of the underlying pragmatic principles of language.

Film examines Daily Mail ‘diet’ | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited
In the footsteps of Supersize Me, a documentary-maker has attempted to find out whether we are what we read by giving up all news sources except the Daily Mail.

For 28 days, Nick Angel screened out all television, radio, print and online news sources except for the middle market tabloid.

…

Mr Angel said: “It’s important to know what the Mail thinks, because it’s a lightning rod (or so it claims) to ‘Middle England’ - that ill-defined and slightly scary mass of people whose various incarnations include the ‘Moral Majority’ and ‘All Right Thinking People’.

I don’t know if Nick Angel realizes it, but he’s in good academic company. An entire field of inquiry called Critical Discourse Analysis (previously Critical Linguistics) is devoted to investigating the overt and covert vision of the media and other forms of public discourse. And like him, they face a potential pitfall, in some of the assumptions of conceptual inevitability as opposed to conceptual autonomy. The title and inspiration of Mr. Angel’s work (I haven’t seen it yet so I can only speculate on the details; but I doubt I’m far off in guessing) is very telling. It starts with an interesting conceptual blend (metaphor) of food and news. Food provides nutrition and nourishment to the body but the wrong composition can have adverse effects on the body. We (our body) have no control over the effects of what we ingest. We can only make choices about what we eat. If news (and information in general) is like that, than we are completely powerless against propaganda. That is quite obviously not true and neither CDA nor Nick Angel would claim that. These people read the Daily Mail professionally and it doesn’t “poison” their minds. If it did, they would stop doing what they are doing and start writing for The Daily Mail. But the implication of this metaphor (blend) is strongly in the direction of strong influences (particularly over ‘casual’, ‘non-critical’ readers) that hold their audience in a kind of a thrall.

Another Guardian correspondent, Peter Cole, a professor of journalism at the University of Sheffield, (who otherwise does a good job of looking at the vision of the Daily Mail) summarizes the picture in this way:

Why middle England gets the Mail | Media | MediaGuardian.co.uk
most of their readers restrict themselves to one paper a day, and find references there to what other papers are saying of little relevance. These readers tend to regard their chosen paper as objective and unbiased and have prejudices against other papers based frequently on never having read them.

Here are two quotes from Teun van Dijk’s 1991 Racism in the Press:

“the manufacture of consent, also through the Dutch Press, is such that the people have the illusion of freedom of opinion, but they do not realize how strongly ideological constraints set the latitude of attitude formation and the terms of the public debate.” (p. 243)

“media as a whole define the internal structures, the points of relevance, and especially the ideological boundaries of social representations. They provide the ready-made [DL] models, that is, the facts and opinions, that people use partly in what to think, but more important which they also used in devising how to think about ethnic affairs.” (p. 244)

However, even van Dijk would admit (and his research shows) that there is a lot of variety of opinion and a significant level of autonomy readers are able to exhibit. The problem is that this autonomy often takes forms that are not very palatable to the liberal elites (of which I am one) or other arbiters of thought and action. Students who don’t take assignments seriously, prisoners who run their institution, patients who seek alternative remedies, job or asylum seekers making the most (gaming) the system, etc. All of these are instances of autonomy that find disfavor with one holder of collective prestige or another.

Indeed, there is a case to be made that some of the less appealing forms of political expression (like the British National Party in the UK) are actually instances of conceptual and intellectual autonomy. The Daily Mail (as well as whatever party publication and the ‘boys down the pub’) notwithstanding, all these people have been exposed since an early age to a concerted inclusionist, secular humanist message. How come they are not the good middle-class liberals we would like everyone to be? Why hasn’t this taken hold? The assumption is that there must be something wrong with them: either they are not smart enough to understand or they were seduced by ‘racist’ propaganda. (This was wonderfully satirized by Woody Allen’s ‘Everybody says I love you’ where a Republican son of a liberal NY family turned out to have a brain tumor, after the removal of which he went back to being a good left-wind Democrat.) But we could also look at them as people who were able to withstand the barrage of liberal propaganda and form their own opinion more suitable to their situation. This is certainly how the right wing in America thinks of themselves (sometimes paradoxically - such as Rush Limbaugh’s supporters calling themselves ‘dittoheads’).

This is how Howard Becker and his collaborators described the student culture in 1961:

“Student culture consists of collective responses to problems posed for students by the environment.” …

“the students collectively set the level and direction of their efforts to learn. […] these levels and directions are not the result of some conscious cabal, but […] they are the working-out in practice of the perspectives from which the students view their day-to-day problems in relation to their long-term goals. The perspectives, themselves collectively developed, are organizations of ideas and actions. The actions derive their rationale from the ideas; the ideas are sustained by success in action. The whole becomes a complex of mutual expectations.” (p. 435)

I suspect that we should look for something similar behind the formation of political opinion and the source of political action. In a way, the above quoted Peter Cole summarizes The Daily Mail in a way that is almost celebratory of its ‘autonomy’:

The Mail is ruthlessly edited and always quick off the mark. Its topical features are always on the day rather than tomorrow, and it commissions much more than it uses, an expensive strategy. It has never followed the youth obsession that has so often preoccupied rivals. It regularly serialises books by or about film or pop stars of another age. It seems not to care that the 60s generation is now in its 60s. Is this because more than 40% of its readers are over 55, and 60% over 45?

The story of the ‘idea diet’ is very compelling but clearly insufficient unless we tell some other stories to help us determine its limits. That is not to say that some aspects of the metaphor of ‘consuming’ are not useful as a way of viewing the media (van Dijk’s results and ‘common experience’ indicate that it is consonant with some parts of our social reality). However, if we shouldn’t loose sight of the limits of this metaphor and most importantly we should actively seek to investigate its limits (and with that the limits of our prejudices) rather than remain within the comfort zone of its prototypical validity (both in research and casual conversation).

[A quick note on research as casual conversation. Its purpose is more often than not that of confirming identity and belonging (not unlike two modems making noises at each other). So the challenging of stereotypes there might not be all that feasible (ie. the minute we start doing it, the conversation ceases to be casual). But it is interesting how much academic research and general discussion is also of this nature.]

Virtual Economics: Why newspapers are not screwed
…newspapers’ core value is not their content but their validation. Sure it’s expensive to create content. In the long run this probably doesn’t really matter. There’s plenty of content. The value that newspapers add to the picture is verifying which of it is true.

The problem with many of the assumptions about the democratizing power of the internets, has been exactly this. The fact that anybody can post something online still doesn’t obviate the social needs for establishing networks of trust. That goes for art, as well as music. Often, people are not sure whether it is appropriate to like something until an appropriate trusted sources has given it a seal of approval. The problem is that there is privilege and power associated with being in a center of a network of trust. So a lot of people will vie for that position thus disturbing the supposedly egalitarian nature of the environment. Social networking can replicate some of this by automating trust (such as Digg’s algorithms) but it can’t completely do away with it. That’s why it’s likely that something newspaper-like will persist long after the last printed copy of the New York Times has been sold. (Of course, hopefully, it will have been replaced by ereaders with proper eink.)

‘Bourne’ flick is ultimately un-American - Opinion & Editorial - BostonHerald.com
I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews. Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car-chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does.

…

As the casualty count rose, I kept thinking about all those disability payments we taxpayers would have to pick up.

Now, all of this is harmless nonsense to those of us who understand the hero and villain business, and realize the simplistic bias that permeates Hollywood. But to impressionable audiences, the anti-American theme could resonate.

Apart from the fact that Bill O’Reilly is a half-witted bully and quite probably insane, he resonates strangely with some people doing critical discourse analysis. At the very start of the movement, Hodge and Kress (1979) wrote the following about a mildly right-wind editorial:

“As readers of this editorial we should have to be alert and willing to engage in mental exercise to get beyond the seductive simplicity of the final form, with just three entities, and seemingly precise relations, where everything seems to be there on the surface.” … “few commuters on the 8.05 from Brighton would have the energy to perform the mentail gymnastics required. Especially as they would have to perform them not once, but just about a dozen times on every full line of newsprint that they scan. After all, the crossword is there for mental exercise.” (p. 22)

This brings up a crucial question of our individual and collective autonomy of our cognitive system. Only the initiated, one folk theory goes, can truly overcome propaganda (be it political or contained in advertising) while others are completely under the spell of whatever their social and psychological cognition serves up.  But this unwitting agreement of these two forces (mutually recognized as evil) should be enough for us to doubt the ease with which such a theory should be promulgated. There is enough evidence for both easy suggestibility (see Lakoff’s ‘don’t think of an elephant’) and remarkable independence (Becker, Gamson). Further investigation is clearly needed.

Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online
There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy.

This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC staff. Can you imagine a BBC staff member slanting a programme towards the case for a stricter penal policy?

There’s a more generic case for agreement or disagreement with the general point of Antony Jay’s argument about the nature of the BBC’s liberal bias but he also presents arguments that point to the dual nature of many of the schematic narrative frames applied to judgments about public policy and its administration.
First, his use of ‘reasonable case’ reveals an interesting duality behind the folk theory of rationality. On the one hand, ‘reasonable’ is that that conforms to strictures of Aristotelian logic (such, as the excluded middle). By this account, a ‘reasonable case’ can be made for only one of the penal policies. However, there is another use of reasonable, i.e. such that can be agreed upon in a polite society. ‘Reasonable people’ are those who do not go to extremes at the expense of local  collective harmony. What is important for the study of framing is that this polysemy is underdetermined.

There is another case of framing: imaging a BBC employee to support conservative penal policy. This, in many ways, is the nature of the liberal media bias in the UK and US. It is difficult to observe it in fact but on the other hand it is difficult to imagine a member of the media supporting a conservative position. (Stephen Colbert unwittingly if wittily summarized this with his “truth has a well-known liberal bias” jibe. He in many ways reflected the impossibility of the liberal media imagining themselves in the wrong.)

So how did we get from there to here? Unless we understand that, we shall never get inside the media liberal mind. And the starting point is the realisation that there have always been two principal ways of misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above and by looking up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by identifying with individuals.

To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart – the individual components shooting off in different directions until everything dissolves into anarchy.

To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.

… The reason for the popularity of these misunderstandings is that both views are correct as far as they go and both sets of dangers are real, but there is no “rightâ€? point of view.

The most you can ever say is that sometimes society is in danger from too much authority and uniformity and sometimes from too much freedom and variety.

Here’s another case of a discourse participant intuitively reflecting on the contrasting nature of two seemingly contradictory frames that are both available in the framing inventory to the speaker/conceptualizer. The last two paragraphs outline a view of public rationality that is strangely reminiscent of Lakoff’s in Moral Politics. Perhaps, neither places enough emphasis on the negotiated nature of these ‘framings’ but both describe the same conceptual phenomena that individuals have to deal with when they enter public (high-stakes) discourse (whether as observers - who rarely remain passive, anyway - or participants).

The second factor that shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.

What he says here has broader consequence for the understanding of the discourse nature of group identity. Quite obviously this example of exegetic framing (a rather common trope) is explicating some of the principles underlying the social psychology but also the social discursivity of group cohesion and group identity.

[A personal note: As an occasional journalist-commentator who has been asked to critique administrations and an educational-administrator who has perpetrated organizational structure upon others, I can definitely relate to this description of a situation. However, it doesn’t apply to exclusively to journalism but rather to any public discourse dealing with organizational configuration. Even those who ‘know’ how institutions work are only too keen to criticize other institutions on ‘rationalistic’ grounds.]

Media Matters - “Media Matters”; by Jamison Foser
“I believe in the usefulness and validity of the telling anecdote — the seemingly small story that reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject,” Carney wrote. And who can blame him? For the reader, an anecdote — a “short account of an interesting or humorous incident” — is often more accessible and enjoyable than a dry recitation of statistics and facts. Similarly, it isn’t hard to imagine that relating an anecdote is more enjoyable for the reporter, as well. So if a journalist stumbles upon an anecdote that “reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject,” who can blame him or her for using it?

But there is a danger or three in reporting by anecdote.

This interchange between two columnists prompted an insightful analysis of the dangers of anecdote in reporting by J. Foser. He points out that 1. people in the media are forced into creating or avoiding the creation of anecdotes; 2. the ‘anecdote’ reporting perpetuates the repeated recounting of metaphors that aren’t true; 3. many anecdotes that are true are “not telling” in the sense suggested by Carney above. He illustrates this by the following example:

Pretend for a moment that Naomi Wolf had told Al Gore he should wear earth tones. What would that have told us?

It could have told us, as countless journalists have claimed, that Gore wasn’t “comfortable in his own skin.” That he didn’t know who he was. That he was a big phony who would do anything to win.

But, just as plausibly, it could have told us that Al Gore — like the vast majority of Americans — occasionally asks for a second opinion when assembling an outfit.

Quite obviously, there are many interpretations in a given story that is being used metaphorically to “understand” a point (i.e. blended with another story) that can be activated not only based upon the internal structure of the two frames but also given the formal context of social negotiation of narrative veracity. This can be done both subconsciously and consciously (although with a strong automatic element) and both locally and globally. Strangely enough, there usually seem to be roughly two opposing interpretations that play a role (but there can be many more).

Clearly, the negotiation of “truth” and “understanding” is a matter of situationally-embedded ethical action both on the part of the speaker and the recipient. It is not a question of transcendental epistemology providing heuristics for determining what’s true. Foser offers a useful guide for action for the negotiation of the metaphorical meaning:

When news consumers encounter “telling anecdotes,” they should think about what the anecdote really means:

1) Is the anecdote verifiably true?

2) Is the anecdote illustrative rather than anomalous?

3) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is verifiably true, or is it merely a convenient vehicle for suggesting something the reporter believes but cannot prove?

4) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is not only verifiably true, but is also important to understanding how the candidate would govern or how the issue would affect people? Or is it just pointless snark?

Funnily enough, I saw a similar list recently in a draft of a paper on philosophy of education. Foser implies two seemingly incompatible things (but not in a bad way): 1. that his list could be seen as somehow revealing of a new strategy that both journalist and readers should employ 2. his list is somehow a common sense approach that both readers and journalists fail (through lack of X) to employ regularly.

Both of these are both ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. 1. Reading this list just before reading/writing an anecdote-laden story (and what stories aren’t) could certainly make readers/writers more aware of its conceptual complexity and its blending mechanisms. But on the other hand, this is clearly something speakers and readers already do in many surprising and complex (but not systematic) ways. (Gamson’s work on working class politics discussions was particularly revealing.) 2. Even though (as pointed out above) Foser’s list described strategies language speakers commonly employ on text, their common sense value depends on a variety of folk theories of meaning and truth. One such is illustrated immediately following the list in a conclusion to his treatise:

Ideally, of course, journalists would think about these things before repeating the “telling anecdote” in the first place. Doing so shouldn’t be hard. It merely requires a commitment to telling the truth, to reporting rather than guessing.

Quite obviously we can’t quite have negotiated (illustrative) truth and transcendental objective truth at the same time. Of course, there is the situational configurational truth (Naomi Wolf said “X Y Z” to Al Gore on occasion “Q”) but that is relatively infrequent. And factual inaccuracy doesn’t necessarily disqualify the point (although it does undermine the credibility of the speaker). Also, there is no guarantee that a reader / writer following Foser’s algorithm will arrive at an interpretation that is acceptable to us or to an independent observer. Fulfilling point 1 often difficult and sometimes impossible (but by far the easiest to accomplish). 2-4 are entirely up for negotiation and are subject to the same misinterpretations Foser criticizes. That’s not to say they’re not useful reminders but they are not the panacea often sought in this context.

Now for the real kicker. The mother’s question to a littering child: “What would happen if everyone did that?”. What would happen if everyone followed Foser’s rules? My contention is almost nothing. Precisely because of the difficulties and the necessity to negotiate the metaphorical application of anecdotes. True, some egregious nonsense wouldn’t be promulgated by the media. But the larger truth negotiation “climate” would probably remain the same. Here’s a “configurationally largely true” (largely because of possible memory lapses on my part). A friend of mine who grew up in Austria was trying to convince me that the Austrian’s were better media consumers than Czechs because in secondary school they read speeches by Hitler and analyzed them for manipulation (among other things). Not too long after that (less than a year, I recall) Jörg Haider’s party posted a major success in the Austrian elections. Clearly, exposing everyone to these strictures did not “help”.

Participants in public discourse exhibit a strange mix of autonomy* of and enthrallment by the prevailing frames (narrative, image schematic, folk theoretical). This tug of war is what makes social science so difficult but also so important.

*Howard Becker et al.’s thoughts on autonomy in prisons, schools and other restrictive institutions needs to be mentioned in this context (and a lot of other contexts).

Analysis: Military Shows Gains in Iraq
Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists—rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act.

Commanders are encouraged by signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence. They are also counting on improvements in the Iraqi army and police, which are burdened by religious rivalries and are not ready to take over national defense duties from U.S. troops this year.

Three phrases stand out in this excerpt: 1. “local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists”, 2. “signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence” and 3. “[Iraqi army and policy] are not ready to take over national defense duties”.

ad 1. This phrase relies on two key frames in the discourse of democratism. A: local government: the very act of invoking a local group gives the effort additional legitimacy in an abstract sense but also provides imagery derived from the Western vision of ‘local groups’ as chambers of commerce and Rotary clubs. As such it is highly euphemistic because, of course, the imagery on the ground is quite different. Also, local groups are used to evoke the notion of local wisdom and common sense in opposition to political bickering. B: extremism: here, again, extremism is set in opposition to the imagery of A, whereas the ‘local’s’ imagery and its oppositions may be quite different.

ad 2. On reflection, this is a rather bizarre phrase. It seems to presuppose an initial welcoming of violence by the Iraqi people who are now growing weary of it. Particularly some of the underlying schematic dynamicity of the verb ‘grow’ seems oddly incongruous with what must be a rather different state on the ground. Nevertheless, this kind of description buttresses the notion of change necessary for the success of the whole argument that the ’surge is working’. What is interesting about it, is that the choice of phrases like these is probably in equal measure a function of the genre (which limits the inventory of available constructions) and the conceptual pattern underlying the text.

ad 3. Again the level of schematicity of this phrase is extremely high. “National defense duties” really means almost nothing and its greatest impact is imagistic. First, it introduces the notion of an external enemy (the alternative to ‘national defense’ would have been ‘public order’), and second, it positions the US troops in the role of protector and mentor.
Use of schematic devices such as these allows for brevity of expression and conceptual unity of texts. Now, the real question is to what extent can the casual reader (not an ‘average’ reader!!!) benefit from a closer look at any text full of schematized euphemistic framing. Surely, any text is full of framings with the exact same cognitive properties. The temptation to introduce a critical (CDA) element is great. Should we require (politically) that different standard is applied to ‘high stakes’ discourse?  Or do we simply observe the way the schematicity and other ‘covert’ features of discourse are brought to the fore through frame negotiation? If the former, we become participants in the debate. If the latter, we run the risk of self-deluding objectivity. Clearly, the role of the “meta” perspective needs itself to be negotiated.

Congress must end U.S. role in a civil war nobody voted for That is why we propose to end the authorization for the war in Iraq. The civil war we have on our hands in Iraq is not our fight and it is not the fight Congress authorized. Iraq is at war with itself and American troops are caught in the middle.

This is as clear a statement of collective avoidance of causal responsibility. “We removed a vicious dictator, now the rest is up to the Iraqis” seems to be the theme of the Iraq war opposition in the US. What I have yet to see is an admission of responsibility for the current state and a clear statement of how the US proposes to clean up the mess. Keeping troops in Iraq probably won’t do that but long-term financial assistance with no strings attached might. But for some reason troop withdrawal seems to be an end in itself. This an interesting example of what symbolic interactionists called collective action. Group values and patterns of behavior are confirmed through every discursive act and an individual’s collective belonging is defined through replicating these acts - whether consciously or subconsciously. It is, of course, possible that taking actual responsibility for the chaos in Iraq is not an obvious thing and I’m not being realistic, but it seems to me that somebody would come up with it, at least as a “bad” option, and collective values negotiation is my only explanation for why that hasn’t happened.

On The Media: Transcript of “Secrets & Lies” (May 4, 2007)
BOB GARFIELD: The issue in question was Saddam’s aluminum tubes and whether they were meant for centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel. If, as you say, the administration briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee that it was uncertain about those tubes but then hid that uncertainty in public statements to the American people and to the world, then the President and the Vice President and the Secretary of State Colin Powell are liars, and their lies led us to war. Have I overstated this?

DICK DURBIN: You may have overstated it, but not by much. I remember the debate on the aluminum tubes. I would sit there and listen – this has all been declassified, now I can talk about it – I would sit there and listen to the Department of Energy in full-throated debate with the Department of Defense over whether these aluminum tubes were going to be used for nuclear weapons.

When Eve Sweetser published her seminal work on ‘lie’ she uncovered a complex conceptual structure. However, she was silent on the process through which determination of what can be labeled ‘lie’ in public discourse. This entire discussion (not just the above excerpt) is an vivid illustration of it. It dances around the taboo of calling politicians liars and debating acceptable social action in the face of a lie. Evoking analogies is another common strategy:

BOB GARFIELD: I take a risk of overstating the case, but I’m thinking of a situation on the ground in the military where an officer tells a subordinate to do something that the subordinate knows is actually illegal, against Army regulations and against the Geneva Convention, and immoral and wrong, and the soldier may not obey that order. Just following orders is not a sufficient excuse.

Imus’s last outrage? - The Boston Globe
Imus apologized for his latest remark and was suspended for two weeks. But this time, his job could be on the line, said John DePetro, a radio talk show host who was fired by WRKO after calling gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross a “fat lesbian.”

“As much as mine was mean-spirited, it was factually accurate,” said DePetro, who now works at WPRO in Providence. The problem with the Imus comment, he said, is “there’s no way to defend it. These girls are not whores. They are not prostitutes.”

This is an illuminating reflection on the folk theory of figurative meaning. No matter what trope a reference is, it is more powerful if a simple lexical reference (with a truth value) can be established. Of course, Imus’s comment never implied that the basketball players were prostitutes. He was referencing the term “ho” as used in contemporary popular culture rather than as its source meaning of ‘whore’. It wasn’t even “mean-spirited” - in the most basic sense. The problem in terms of racial discrimination was the unthinking use of a term like this by a public figure (this was well-discussed on one of the more recent editions of News and Notes Roundtable.