Hyperbole Is DESTROYING Journalism!!!

Occasionally, perhaps in an effort to attract attention, certain opinion journalists use language that lacks understatement or subtlety. Or, as those same journalists might put it: all despicably craven attention-seeking columnists use ridiculously overwrought language constantly.

Take Christopher Hitchens. The Trotskyite turned neoconservative is widely reputed to be one of the most elegant stylists working in opinion journalism today. Booklist, for example, has marveled at “the brio of his superbly fashioned prose,” and the Village Voice has asserted that Hitchens is “America’s foremost literary pugilist.” He’s not lacking for exposure either: he enjoys perches at august organs like Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate, and appears often on television and radio programs.

But Hitchens’ well-documented love of Scotch Whisky is matched only by his love of hyperbole. Consider an edition of his Slate column which ran earlier this month, on the second of November. The article, which deals with the Afghan election kerfuffle, features the terms, shameful, humiliating, dreary, nasty, and craven. All this in the space of some 900 words! Moreover, last Monday’s missive was no exceptional case. A Hitchens column from early October, for example, which discussed the Roman Polanski affair, gave us vile, notorious, and hellish, among other terms of high dudgeon. Regular readers of the erstwhile Nation columnist will know that outrage is his specialty.

This isn’t just to pick on Hitchens, who has enough to answer for with his support for the disastrous war on Iraq. Furthermore, he has good company in his overuse of hyperbole, with Paul Krugman, Michelle Malkin, Andrew Sullivan, and other opinion leaders often employing overcooked rhetoric. The New York Times’ Krugman, for example, on November 10th wrote that an interview with Dick Armey was “seriously disgusting.” Conservative superstar Malkin has used her column to charge that the health care debate presages “the death of deliberative democracy,” and Sullivan, writing in his blog at the Atlantic, has called a Vatican spokesman “dumb as a post” and “pathetic.”

This all sounds very serious and grave. Here’s the rub though: the excessive use of hyperbole by some of the nation’s most influential commentators is actually robbing their columns of any meaning. After all, when everything is appalling, vile, or despicable, then nothing is. (One would think that Hitchens, of all people, who once wrote a book on language cop George Orwell, would be one to understand this.) The use of the superlative form of language only works if it is describing occurrences that are truly, legitimately, extraordinary. By definition, these events do not occur often. If you’ve heard various events or people described as “appalling” enough times, then “appalling” has lost its capacity to, well, appall. Thus, in a sort of Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf way, the overuse of hyperbole makes it harder to recognize events that are truly worthy of strong condemnatory language.

This distressing trend is partially a result of the rise of the Internet. As many have observed, with the advent of blogs, it has become increasingly difficult to have one’s voice heard over the general din. It is presumed by many, therefore, that shouting the loudest will generate attention. (Print columnists, now engaged in a fight to the death with the loudmouths of the Internet, may feel a particular pressure to heighten the shrillness.) Of course, paradoxically, with so much debate conducted on a hyperbolic level, it may be subtlety that stands out now.

But the temptation to reach for the superlative also speaks to a limitation embedded in opinion journalism, itself. After all, as their professional title indicates, opinion journalists opine for a living. Multiple times weekly, they aim to provoke their readers, working themselves into a froth regarding whatever the constitutes the latest “outrage.” (One particularly hilarious example: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently referred to President Obama’s Nobel Prize as a “travesty.”) After all, it is much easier to launch into a jeremiad against the latest “atrocity” than take a measured, reasonable tone. We see this attitude seeping outside of the media and into our political discourse now as well: ludicrous formulations like “Bushitler” or “Obama is a Communist” sap Nazism and Communism of the true horrors they represent.

In the end, all of this excessive use of hyperbole, rather than inform or engage the reader, simply leaves him exhausted.

Despicable, isn’t it?