When did reportage on politics adopt a sports analogy? Who knows, but we can see a visage of this approach at least 50 years ago:
Writing in 1968, Milton Rokeach, the social psychologist, articulated what would become a perennial complaint. “The kinds of data obtained by public-opinion research and disseminated in the mass media seem designed more to entertain than to inform,” he wrote. “The quality of the information conveyed seems not much different from that conveyed in the sports pages or, better yet, the daily racing form.” The press, especially during election years, frequently failed to exercise “journalistic conscience”; it had internalized a “racehorse philosophy.”
John Herrman, New York Times Magazine, 3/14/17
The Trump era personifies trends that have been steadily rising. Perhaps it has reached its apotheosis in “weaponizing” political dialogue. What does that mean for politicians, journalists, and citizens?
“Weaponization” works as a throwing up of the hands, and as a suggestion — or an admission, or a strategic claim — that the discourse has failed us. Or, more accurately, it suggests that the discourse has become something dangerous: no mere fight but a terminal conflict without decorum or limits. The language of sports had a maddening tendency to flatten and trivialize the serious consequences of politics, creating constant suspense but obscuring life-or-death stakes. Militarized language moves in a different direction: It intensifies the news it’s describing while simultaneously obscuring actual threats.
“Weaponization” is used to describe both rhetoric that might incite violence and criticism of violent rhetoric. It is lodged against the state, with its legal monopoly on violence, but also, incoherently, against those who challenge the state. It is a shortcut to false equivalence, and it manufactures excuses for those with a vested interest in drawing blood themselves.
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