Mouthing the GOP's Words
President Bush and his allies are probably going to lose his fight to privatize Social Security. But in the course of losing they have won an astonishing victory: They have established the precedent that a political party can unilaterally force the news media to change its terminology essentially. Push them hard enough, and the media will render verboten any previously agreed-upon phrase, no matter how widely accepted.
Up until very recently, the notion of allowing workers to divert their Social Security taxes into individual savings accounts was universally known as "privatization." Its most fervent advocates called it that. (The Cato Institute, one of the earliest champions of privatization, established a "Project on Social Security Privatization" in 1995.) Bush himself used the term. So did Karl Rove.
Late last year, though, Republican polls found that the public reacted far more favorably to "personal" accounts than to "private" accounts. So, overnight, they banished talk of "privatization" and "private accounts," accusing any journalist who dared use the phrase that they themselves had used mere weeks before of insidious bias. When a reporter asked about "privatization" earlier this year, Bush scolded: "You mean the personal savings accounts? We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions." A reporter told PR Week magazine that the White House staff informed him that if he wrote "privatization," "you have signaled you're against the White House."
Under this sustained barrage, the media have slowly retreated. In the first stage, news reports began alternating the two terms. (NBC's Tim Russert went a step further, adopting his own phrase, "private personal accounts.") This exquisite show of evenhandedness ignored the fact that one phrase was commonly used by both sides for years on end, while the other had been cooked up weeks before by a partisan pollster.
In the weeks that have passed, "personal" seems to be overtaking "private," like untreated weeds creeping over a garden. Politicians who dare use "oldspeak" risk censure, not just from Republicans but from the media themselves.
When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attacked what she called Bush's "misleading privatization plan," a Washington Post news story immediately noted that "Bush has never advocated privatizing the entire program." This is the formulation that newspapers use when they want to alert readers that a politician is lying.
