The Countryman: One little word

We can easily bemoan the decline in the quality of news reporting. There is lots to lament as real journalism has fallen victim to the twin terrors of technology and partisan “news” organizations.

Save those two for another day. Today, let’s look at what happens when news presenters, ever in a hurry to go public, leave out or change just one little word. The consequences can be enormous. Or “y-u-u-u-u-ge.”

Remembering just one little word might not have been enough to head off the immigration debate that is raging in the United States, but keeping one little word in the conversation might well have tempered the talk.

That one little word is “illegal.”

When the issue of illegal immigrants elbowed its way into our attention spans about 10 years ago, it was fairly simple, and the majority of Americans probably lined up on the same side. Now, the issue splits us down the middle.

For whatever reasons (space, time?), news presenters began dropping the word “illegal” from their reports. One day while the manager of my farm and I were packing meat and talking politics — we often used periods of mostly “brainless” work to talk politics — she asked why the media were sometimes dropping the word ”illegal” from their reports. I couldn’t give her an answer short of laziness. Or ignorance.

I added that if reporters and editors continued to confuse “illegal” and “legal” immigration, the public would pick up the confusion and then we would have a big mess. They did, it did, and we do.

“Illegal” immigration and “illegal” immigrant morphed into “immigration” and “immigrant” long before the orange guy started ranting about wall building.

In time, even careful people began dropping the word “illegal” and talked about just immigration, as if the family who came here legally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo was no different from the almond picker who came here illegally from Guatemala.

About 48 million immigrants live in the U.S.. Thirty-seven million are legal, 11 million are not.

Most of us carry a picture of illegal immigrants as people wading the Rio Grande or walking through the desert night into Arizona. That is one way to get here illegally.

The other and more common way is to come legally and overstay your welcome. The nationality that does that most often, according to Homeland Security, is Canadian. Come in on a student visa or a 90-day work visa and then simply disappear. Nearly 93,000 Canadians did just that last year. Enter at, say, Highgate Springs, Vt., then head to, say, Nashville, Tenn. No way the Immigration Enforcement people will find you unless you get busted for something unrelated to your illegal overstay. And maybe not even then.

As battle lines were drawn, conservatives generally lined up against immigration, liberals and moderates for. Neither side bothered any longer to distinguish between played-by-the-rules and broke-the-rules.

In time, the pro-immigration side even got the Associated Press, the arbiter of how news media use words, to throw out the term “illegal immigrant.” The AP instructed reporters to write “undocumented workers.” Since very few news organizations bother to change AP copy — it costs a few cents, after all for an editor to change a word or a producer to take a byte out of a digital signal — that term became the norm.

Two problems, at least. First, it glosses over, and intentionally, the fact that the people being referred to are here illegally. Second, it assumes all who are here illegally are working. Most probably are, and at jobs that most Americans shun. But the AP now assumes that all are.

Immigration is one lifeblood of our country. We, the UK and Canada may be the most polyglot countries in the world. All benefit from the contributions of immigrants and the children of immigrants. And for all but a million or so of us, you’ll find an immigrant out behind the woodpile. The other million have been opposing illegal immigration for 524 years.

Disclosure. My mother’s ancestors came from England — they had Scottish blood, too — on the Arabella, which was the flagship of John Winthrop’s fleet that docked in 1630 at Salem, Mass. My father’s side is a bit sketchier, but we know that Neilles came from Ireland nine generations ago to settle in North Carolina. Somewhere along the way they opted for the shorter spelling, and in time they found their way north so my father could find my mother. Descendants of immigrants all.

The consequences of omitting just one little word may be greatest in the case of the immigration debate, but look at these other places where one word omitted or used incorrectly changes the coverage.

Reporters on the scene where votes are tabulated on election night, talk of people voting “tonight.” The strong majority did not vote tonight. They voted today. The polls closed and the votes were counted tonight. The reporter is betraying her self-focused outlook because she is reporting on the counting she observed “tonight.” Not a huge deal, but in a time when folks look for ways to criticize news presenters, it is easy for a critic to say, “I didn’t vote tonight, I voted today.”

It may be more consequential when reporters confuse rich folks with high-income folks. Many people are rich because they receive high pay. But many more are rich because they chose their parents fortuitously. Wealth is the accumulation of material goods. High income is the getting of more (weekly, monthly, yearly) income. Many high-income people are not wealthy. Big farmers, for example, are often called “land rich, cash poor.” You don’t have to surf many click-bait sites to know the woods are full of former athletes and entertainers who were paid tons of money (high income) but now have nothing (wealth) to show for it.

This may have more consequence because the wealthy and the high-income often differ in their goals. The rich want lower taxes on their capital gains (dividends on stock, profit from selling real estate, etc.). High-income folks might prefer lower taxes on income, higher taxes on other things so they can spend more of their money as they wish.

And, incomes, high or low, come in two ways often confused by newshounds. Salary and wages. Salary is for folks who are paid a set amount of money to do a job. A college professor, say, might be paid $68,242 a year. No matter whether he teaches six or 60 students. No matter whether he attends all of his academic committee meetings. No matter whether he is available at least an hour or two a week to advise students. No matter whether he does the research that is part of an academic position and is the reason usually given as to why college professors need spend only 7.5 hours in the classroom every week when grade-school teachers spend more like 27.5 hours there.

Wages are hourly or daily rates of pay that require the wage-earner to show up each day and perform assigned tasks during a set number of hours, whether it is frying burgers or machining parts for large manufacturing equipment. Most wage workers are paid significantly less than most salaried people. That is evermore true as we race away from our industrial base toward something else: Service, welfare, take your pick. Industrial workers tend to be paid the highest wages, sometimes as much as some salaried people.

Wage earners may envy salary earners. After all, a wage earner who doesn’t show up and perform may lose pay. A salary earner may just mail it in on bad days. Not forever, of course, but at least on some bad days. In very general terms, salaried people often tell wage people what to do. That makes a clear distinction between them, a distinction that news people are blurring. Like so many others, it is a distinction news people should make. One little word can make a big difference.

Bob Neal lives in New Sharon. An editor for nearly 20 years, he still parses sentences on a regular basis.