The Passive Voice, Or Why I Quit the New York Times

Just when I think I can’t come up with another blog topic, something so egregious happens that all I’m reduced to is the typical Roy Kent response to insupportable and crazy bullshit, which amounts to standing in the middle of the floor and yelling F*ck.

As I’m sure anyone who follows the news at even a high level knows, OJ Simpson, once the darling of the football field and the Hertz rental car commercials, died recently. What irritates me deeply is how little attention was paid in the encomiums and eulogies to the fact that he murdered his wife and another young man. He was acquitted, yes, by a jury that seemed to be sending a message about race in America more than it was advocating for justice for the victims. But travesties like that are part and parcel of the judicial system—sometimes the guilty do go unpunished. But I can’t forgive the emphasis on his storied football career and the willingness to forget everything else. The official Heisman X account posted this sentiment: “The Heisman Trophy Trust mourns the passing of 1968 Heisman Trophy Winner OJ Simpson. We extend our sympathy to his family.” Not a nod or a word to the fact Simpson was found liable, civilly at least, for two murders.

I once had a technical writing manager who informed me that “The passive tense should be avoided.” Given that she had confused tense and voice, and in that sentence construction contradicted herself, the underlying sentiment was correct.

Good writers avoid the passive voice because it distances the subject of an action from the action itself, thereby weakening the power of the sentence. “Larry racked the shotgun” vs. “The shotgun was racked by Larry.” The former is cleaner, takes less time to say, and leaves no lingering doubt about what order things happened in.

On the other hand, politicians love the passive voice, for the very reasons I describe. It allows distance between the actor and the action. “Mistakes were made.” “Apologies have been offered to the injured parties.”

What set me off yesterday was not strictly speaking a passive construction, but along with the passive voice, our newspapers seem addicted to not saying anything straight or true. Specifically, in an AP article about the death of OJ Simpson, I learned that Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Simpson’s wife and her friend, “lost their lives.”

If that doesn’t soft soap with language what a bloody killing by knife looks like, I don’t know what does.

The whole thing brings to mind the reasons why I have, except for the games, canceled my subscription to the New York Times. The rampant both-siderism, the false equivalencies in the stories, especially political ones, the sloppy research—a recent article pegged the beginning of TV debates to 1968, which will no doubt surprise those of us who remember John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debating, to Nixon’s detriment. It’s a Google search away, for god’s sake.

I’m sure this sounds like an old Boomer rant, but what I have always believed, what writers have to believe, is that language counts. Words have meaning and specificity and weight, and we get sloppy with them to the detriment of our culture. Listen to some of what our news organs quote without comment from politicians of all stripes: the word salads, the meaningless thoughts and prayers, the self-distancing from anything like responsibility or truth. At least as writers, we can say what we mean and mean what we say, and what we say will not be obscure. That ought to be worth more than it seems to be.