Bombarding readers with the language of the battleground is hyperbolic, fatuous and insensitive
A week or so before Remembrance Sunday, I was struck by a jarring headline in the Guardian: "Decision time for Obama: compromise or go to war?"
Who on earth was it this time? Iran? North Korea? Venezuela?
The answer was no one, of course - the subheading revealed that it was not really a conflagration after all. The "war" was used as a metaphor on a US politics piece analysing the acute difficulties facing the president after a hammering in the midterm elections. And the deadly foe was, naturally, the Republican party.
What I'd found was yet another example of the gratuitous use of martial metaphors in news stories, the sort of bombardment that can pummel even the most battle-hardened reader into surrendering owing to acute war-weariness.
Political reporting is a "key battleground" in this debate, of course. It is where the most egregious cases often crop up, but it is not solely a journalistic endeavour: politicians readily engage in the dramatisation of their roles, with various reference to "bunkers" from where "embattled" leaders launch "campaigns" to "defend their territory" or "mount offensives" to raid opponents' policies aided by backbench "troops".
All too often debates on complex, nuanced ideological differences and campaigns for votes in a multi-candidate democratic contest are summarily reduced to a straight fight to the death between two sworn enemies with the overuse of phrases such as the declaration of "war", the launch of "battles", "fights", "offensives" or "rearguard actions", and a fire of "warning shots" or "opening salvoes".
While some uses can be justified as examples of what Fowler called "live" metaphors – when the terms are readily accepted substitutes for their literal equivalents – on many occasions, not only in political reporting, overuse is the killer. In the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Fowler defines a "dead" metaphor as one that, when deployed, leaves the readers or listeners unaware that they should not take the words literally. The "essential merit" of a real or live metaphor, he says, is to "add vividness to what is to be conveyed".
Every use of these terms incrementally blunts the impact of such phrases when required in their proper context: real wars with equally real and deadly enemies trying to kill, maim and conquer their foes.
In the runup to this year's general election, the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, took care to remind all staff to avoid overusing military terms in political reporting. These sentiments carried particular resonance given the proliferation of epoch-marking wars, incursions, rebellions and uprisings in a decade of bloodletting in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Middle East, Darfur and South Ossetia.
Then there's the question of juxtaposition: sometimes the reader can be left unsure whether we're in "live" or "dead" metaphor mode when both examples sit side by side, as in the following example in a recent Guardian piece about the fears of an exodus of Christians from Iraq after they were targeted by bombers.
Iraqi politicians, it said, "are fighting a losing battle to convince the Christian community, which remains without militias after eight years of war, that they will safeguard them". The metaphorical "battle" for hearts and minds here would have been acceptable had it not been in the same sentence as the mention of a real war.
So why do we do it? From a reporter's point of view, a martial metaphor instantly simplifies the subject – but do readers really appreciate such a blunt reduction of complexity applied so frequently, and with so little divergence from the norm? Many a subeditor would be lost without "war", "battle" and "fight" – all appealingly pithy and loaded headline words – but again, where's the elegant variation?
A glance at the Guardian's news and comment pieces over the last year reveals a staggering number of different uses for wars and battles.
Mike Marqusee wrote a trenchant comment piece in the Guardian bemoaning the use of martial metaphors when referring to cancer patients and their attempts to survive the disease. Reducing it to a "battle" requiring bravery and stoicism to survive, he suggested, infuses the issue with the ideology of "the bootstrap individualism of the neoliberal order, in which the poor are poor because of their own weaknesses".
We've also had wars on drugs, obesity, idleness, poverty, oil-price speculators, science, saturated fat (part of the "battle of the spreads"), and Waitrose (the aggressor was M&S).
In case you missed them, a "phoney war" has been launched on Brussels, an "all-out" (as opposed to gently half-hearted) war on drink and, my personal favourite, a war on the cane toad in Australia.
Elsewhere in newsland, the Sunday Times ran a piece in August with Francis Maude declaring war on some public sector workers. At the same time, the Sun – presumably in a pincer movement dreamed up by Wapping generals – joyously declared "war on feckless benefits scroungers".
Then, of course, there's the "war on terror", George W Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Bush certainly had no metaphorical intent, but its persistent use – in the Guardian on average about once every two days in the last year alone – seems to have somehow lent extra legitimacy to the widespread use of the "war on ..." phrase.
It is left for me only to launch my very own war on hyperbolic, fatuous and insensitive martial metaphors. Let's save them for the real wars, with real victims and real enemies. All recruits welcome.