News Media and the Language of the Political Left

by Mark Rhoads

One surefire way for the Left to dominate any topical debate with conservatives is to get the news media to adopt their language first. They are extremely successful at this much of the time because large media organizations are wholly owned subsidiaries of the ultra Left Wing that is so cozy with the Establishmentarian pretensions of the East and West Coast. A classic case study before the nation now is the so-called need for a “deficit-reduction plan.” America does not need a deficit-reduction plan. What America really needs most is a “spending-reduction plan.”

The former can be simply addressed by raising taxes, but not the latter. The former leads to monster-size government that is less free for citizens and the latter leads to more limited government that is more free for citizens. This shows that the choice of a single word can have enormous consequences.

Suppose that all Democrats in the nation and many career Republican office holders could be forced to never use the word “revenue” and could only honestly describe their plans for “taxes.” How far would they get with their plans? A government that spends $11 billion every day of every week in every year does not have a deficit problem, it has a spending addiction problem that is out of control.