Mea Culpa: was it wrong to say it or wrong to apologise?

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Fiona Lamdin, a BBC journalist, used the n-word in reported speech during a news report about a racist attack last month (BBC screengrab)

We had an ambiguous headline on an article by a former BBC executive about the corporation’s policy on language: “I made a BBC presenter apologise for using the N-Word in 2014. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.” I had to read the article to find out what the author thought was wrong. He thought the presenter should not have quoted someone else who used the n-word (which should be lower case in our style, I think); not that he was wrong to make the presenter apologise for it.

That may seem obvious to some readers, but there is an important debate, which splits the nation down the middle, about whether it is right to spell out or say offensive words when quoting someone else. However, all the headline needed to say was: “It was wrong to use it then, and it’s wrong now.”

Footwear to the pedal: We recently described Lewis Hamilton as “a shoe-in” for the Formula 1 championship. It’s “shoo-in”, taken from corrupt horse racing, when a winner was shooed across the finish line, as Mick O’Hare pointed out.

Around and amid: In our coverage of the green version of motor racing, Formula E (for electric), we said “the racing will take place amid the backdrop of a global conversation around tackling racial inequality”. That is quite a tangle. So strong is the temptation for journalists to use “amid” that we have inserted it into the familiar phrase, “against the backdrop”; then this backdrop, a cloth behind a stage, is actually an abstract global conversation, which sounds like corporate jargon, but it is “around” a difficult subject, so it sounds as if people might be trying to avoid it. It might have been simpler to say: “...against the backdrop of a global debate about racial inequality.”

Truth, latest: We carried an interesting article by Skylar Baker-Jordan arguing that, by removing Donald Trump’s posts, Facebook and Twitter were actually helping the president. When a tech company labels something Trump said as “untrue”, he “can point to it and scream ‘bias!’ and people across the country nod in agreement”.

I agree with that as a matter of tactics: you are more likely to persuade people by presenting an alternative view; censorship risks reinforcing existing views.

But the case also raises an important question of principle: to what extent should Facebook and Twitter police the truth on their platforms? The posts that were taken down asserted that children are “almost immune from” Covid-19. Using “immune” in its medical sense, that is untrue, but if the president is using the word to mean “not affected by”, it would be a reasonable thing to say. Children seem to carry the disease, although there’s not much evidence that they spread it, and they rarely suffer badly from it. So I’m not sure it was right to remove the posts, as a matter either of tactics or principle.