Looking for scare quotes
A comment or attempted explanation on BBC jokes got my curiosity awake.
This still seems to need spelling out for some. In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam. Gibbons was convicted of this crime. Should it be a crime? No. Given that it is a crime, was Gibbons guilty? Again, no: she didn’t insult Islam. Nevertheless, she was convicted of insulting Islam. In saying so I quote no-one, but simply state a fact. Tim Evans was wrongly convicted of murder, not “murder”.
Which is to say that the BBC wasn’t doing anything risible or marked or noteworthy by reporting that
Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.
The claim seems to be that news organizations don’t use scare quotes on crimes if they are in fact crimes in the state that is in question. ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ so it is not normal practice to put scare quotes on ‘insult Islam’ with reference to Sudan. I thought about that, and it seemed to me that it wasn’t true; so I did a little looking and found something. Then I wished I hadn’t wasted any time looking, because I remembered Turkey’s Article 301 which outlaws ‘insulting Turkishness’ – I know the BBC uses scare quotes on that ‘crime,’ I knew that even before looking it up. ‘Insulting Turkishness’ is decidedly a real crime in Turkey: prosecutions for it are not rare, and the existence of the crime has been a major stumbling block for Turkey’s membership of the EU.
So – behold the Beeb putting scare quotes on a crime even though it is a crime to insult Turkishness in Turkey.
Turkey’s most internationally-acclaimed novelist will go on trial here charged with “insulting Turkishness”.
The fact that Article 301 exists does not prevent the BBC from putting scare quotes on the crime that Article 301 forbids. Therefore there is nothing automatically or necessarily or ethically or journalistically preventing the BBC from putting the same scare quotes on ‘insulting Islam’ when reporting on Gillian Gibbons. It chose not to; I chose to point that out; I fail to see that there’s anything obviously unreasonable about that. Why would it not be of interest to notice what an influential news medium chooses to hold at arm’s length and what it doesn’t? Why would it not be of interest to notice the ways the BBC frames various issues? It’s supposed to be a good thing to be media literate, isn’t it? Isn’t noticing things like subtle cues and unobtrusively coded language and careful wording part of the whole project of figuring out how media outlets shape the way we think?
Sure it is. It could still be the case that I did a crap job of it, of course, but I don’t think the ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ argument shows that.
It’s probably too demanding to expect strict editorial consistency across the board. I personally would have put scare quotes on, because I think it’s a stupid crime which deserves to be mocked, but I don’t think that the BBC necessarily should or shouldn’t have put it in scare quotes.
“Isn’t noticing things like subtle cues and unobtrusively coded language and careful wording part of the whole project of figuring out how media outlets shape the way we think?”
Yeah, but I think this is a little bit *too* subtle to really be meaningful (sorry, don’t know how to italicise).
I think I’ve pushed the point far enough now and I really should stop and get on with work, but I do think you are being a tad harsh. I have great affection for the Beeb and so will stick up for it in general. I do not think there’s anything unreasonable with you pointing it out, I just don’t agree with you that it is as significant as you and (particularly) others have implied.
No, granted; I don’t think it’s all that significant either. (Maybe a little significant, given the Beeb’s flaws in this area, especially its insistent elevation and normalization of the MCB at the expense of all other potential voices, which I think was genuinely bad journalism.)
And I love the Beeb too, actually – especially its habit of reporting from villages in Niger and Congo and Ghana and Pakistan and India to tell us about witch trials and girls given away to men against their will and many other obscure tragedies we would otherwise not know about.
But I just am interested in manipulation by language.
I think it’s important to note that in the second article the trial was pending. “Insulting turkishness” was an accusation, whereas Gillian Gibbons had already been found guilty of “insulting islam”. To me it seems like a semantic issue, to differentiate pre-trial charges from a conviction.
Not to labour the point, but is there a distinction between the single quotes marks and the double quotes, with the former being scare-quotes as I understand them, and the latter actually quoting something which has been said?
The so-called ‘insult’ against islam as opposed the crime of “insulting islam”?
Hmm. Interesting point. Now I’ll have to do some more looking, and find out if actual convictions still get the scare quotes.
I don’t think so, about single and double quote marks – I think they’re just arbitrary and a matter of house style.
Ophelia,
Manipulation by and of language by the BBC is nothing new:
http://www.bbcwatch.co.uk/current2.html
See 7. Use of Language: Terrorism
Nor does it take kindly to people who question its reporting:
http://tinyurl.com/yod9t9
ES
Thanks, Edmund; I know; terrorism was my first thought as a way to look for scare quotes, but then I decided it didn’t quite fit (I needed an ‘absurd’ crime, which terrorism isn’t) so I decided to stick with the Gibbons case.
But, but but…
“The children lay in their beds waiting for Santa Claus.”
This sentence doesn’t need quotes around “Santa Claus”. It’s implicit that it’s the children who believe in S.C., not the person writing the sentence, who may or may not.
The sentence in question is the same.
“She was in custody for insulting Islam.”
It’s implicit that the powers that put her in custody regarded what she did as insulting to Islam. The writer doesn’t tacitly agree or disagree. Adding scare quotes is editorializing, and shouldn’t that be done on the editorial page?
If it were consistent, maybe so, but it isn’t. If some crimes get scare quotes, then it’s reasonable to notice which crimes do and which don’t.
It’s not always exactly editorializing, though it’s often close. I for instance can’t bring myself to post an unmarked reference to honour killings – not because I want to editorialize via scare quotes but because I can’t stand seeming to take the word at face value.
Scare quotes sometimes simply convey the information that the term is contested – it’s a short cut rather than an editorial. Nobody needs to know that Santa Claus is (as it were) contested, but other things are less obvious.
I think journalists have less leeway to leave things implicit than other kinds of writers do. I think journalists are often more or less required to spell things out that for some people don’t need spelling out.
Also…the sentence isn’t the same. The structure is the same, but the wealth of implication around each is not the same at all. Santa Claus isn’t much of a political issue (unless he’s a soldier in the war over Xmas? I haven’t been keeping up with that particular skirmish) whereas insulting religion is. Hence perhaps all the more reason journalists shouldn’t editorialize – but given that scare quotes are often used, not using them is itself editorializing.
Paul may be right though – a couple of articles about Hrant Dink don’t use scare quotes – although one compromises by leaving them off [insult] but putting them on [Turkishness]. What it does do, however, is put scare quotes on [genocide].
Now the trick is to figure out which quotes are mocking and which are simply saying a word or phrase is contested.
For what it’s worth, the Guardian uses them for [insult] and for [insult Turkishness].
I’m boring even myself now.
Quote: ‘A British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her class name a teddy bear Muhammad has spoken of her “ordeal”, after…’
My reading is that it is just a bit of ambiguous writing. I think the use of the word “spoken” can be taken to indicate that “ordeal” is a quote.
The problem is really with the use of “scare” quotes themselves: what exactly are they supposed to mean? I can’t help thinking we would be better off without them.
BTW: There is (or should be) no distinction between single and double quotes.
Would it not be the custom to put quotes around words describing something that is strange to the readers, or that has a particular technical meaning different technical meaning in the context, or that generally requires further explanation?
Anyway, how can one insult a religion ? One can attack religion in general or one in particular, but since neither meaning of the word refers to something with feelings , where could the insult lie ?
Well quotes have a lot of functions, which is why there is so much room for ambiguity. We can’t possibly do without them as Keith suggests, because we do often need to be able to indicate ‘this is not my term but that of the person or institution I am reporting on.’ There’s no clear-cut distinction between scare quotes and purely neutral attribution quotes. The “ordeal” one is a classic example – it probably was intended as a neutral attribution, but because of the kind of word it is (and the context, etc) it is easily read as scare quotes.
Ophelia:
“There’s no clear-cut distinction between scare quotes and purely neutral attribution quotes.”
Ah, in the good old days that I remember from way back one put “quotes” in double quotation marks, and ‘scare’ quotes in single quotation marks (at least in the UK). It’s all so messy now that it’s difficult to distinguish the two – though I try to keep to my old habits.
Surely there’s a flaw in the argument that the expression “insulting Islam” can be compared to the use of the word “murder” in an equivalent context. Everyone knows what murder means – the unlawful killing of an individual – but who knows what constitutes “insulting Islam”?
No matter. You see, there is a crime on the books called ‘Insulting Islam.’ That is all you need to know. The fact that you don’t know what constitutes ‘insulting Islam’ and thus don’t know how to obey the law should you find yourself within its purview is neither here nor there.