BEWARE OF THE BIAS

So elec­tions are upon us once again in Cat­alo­nia, and with them comes in­tense scrutiny of the fig­ures hop­ing to win the sup­port of a ma­jor­ity of vot­ers and gain power. Of course, elec­tions in this part of the world are made all the more in­trigu­ing by the fact that a cer­tain po­lit­i­cal fig­ure who will be run­ning for Pres­i­dent ac­tu­ally made a de­c­la­ra­tion of in­de­pen­dence for Cat­alo­nia seven years ago and has since been per­se­cuted by the Span­ish courts, forc­ing him to live in exile ever since. I am re­fer­ring, of course, to Car­les Puigde­mont, a man whom the mag­a­zine Politico re­cently in­cluded as one of the top ten dis­rupters in Eu­rope due to the fact that the seven seats his party Junts per Catalunya hold in the Span­ish con­gress are piv­otal to Prime Min­is­ter Pedro Sanchez’s quest to re­tain power, award­ing Mr. Puigde­mont the role of king­maker in Span­ish pol­i­tics.

How­ever, what has caught my par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est in re­la­tion to these elec­tions is that, given Mr Puigde­mont’s promi­nent role in the im­me­di­ate fu­ture of Span­ish pol­i­tics, he has been in­ter­viewed by in­ter­na­tional news agen­cies in an at­tempt to de­ter­mine his in­ten­tions should he win the up­com­ing elec­tion and be re-elected Pres­i­dent of Cat­alo­nia. The fact is that so many of such ar­ti­cles writ­ten about Mr Puigde­mont and the Cata­lan sit­u­a­tion ap­pear to be in­flu­enced by Madrid, since that is where the in­ter­na­tional press agen­cies and jour­nal­ists are based, and many ap­pear to rely on Madrid’s ob­vi­ously bi­ased cov­er­age of the Cata­lan sit­u­a­tion to keep them in­formed. It is for this rea­son that the lan­guage used to de­scribe what has hap­pened and is hap­pen­ing in Cat­alo­nia with re­gard to in­de­pen­dence is to my mind clearly in­tended to dis­credit Mr. Puigde­mont and those in­volved in the in­de­pen­dence bid back in 2017.

Just take this ex­cerpt from a re­cent ar­ti­cle on Mr Puigde­mont pub­lished by the press agency Reuters:

“Puigde­mont fled to Bel­gium in 2017 after his at­tempt to se­cure Cat­alo­nia’s in­de­pen­dence col­lapsed, with Spain’s then con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment send­ing po­lice to quash a ref­er­en­dum that courts had an­nulled and pros­e­cut­ing its lead­ers for sedi­tion and mis­use of pub­lic funds.”

This ar­ti­cle ap­pears to have been writ­ten by a Cata­lan jour­nal­ist, which made me won­der if it had un­der­gone some edit­ing be­fore it hit the In­ter­net. As I tell my clients in my work as a Lan­guage Coach for uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors, busi­ness­peo­ple and other pro­fes­sion­als, lan­guage is pow­er­ful. Note the in­flam­ma­tory neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions of the words “fled”, “col­lapsed”, “quash” and “an­ulled”. That, to my mind, is the lan­guage of the Span­ish state when re­fer­ring to Cat­alo­nia and Mr Puigde­mont’s sit­u­a­tion. Wouldn’t you ex­pect in­ter­na­tional jour­nal­ists and media to take a more un­bi­ased stance?

To put it into per­spec­tive and offer some con­trast, what im­pres­sion would the in­ter­na­tional reader get if the text read “Puigde­mont was forced into exile after his at­tempt to se­cure Cat­alo­nia’s in­de­pen­dence was sup­pressed”… and so on?

“What’s my point with all this?” you may ask. Well, I’m hop­ing this col­umn will serve to demon­strate how pow­er­ful lan­guage is, and how we can be ma­nip­u­lated into view­ing sit­u­a­tions in a cer­tain way by a skil­ful writer or ed­i­tor. In the end, it is vital that we take this into con­sid­er­a­tion when read­ing or lis­ten­ing to what­ever news out­let we choose to ob­tain our news from, and when we take de­ci­sions on how we want to vote.

OPIN­ION