I’m Begging the Media to Start Unpacking the Word “We”

Who's doing the action?

It’s crystal clear that Trump not only thinks of the world as “us versus them”: He also doesn’t have a clear sense of what, precisely, “us” and “them” mean. Trump thought that Mexico could be bullied into paying for a border wall because of their trade deficit, thinks we have to invade Greenland to “get” their resources (you can “get” things by buying them), and claims that it’s crucial that “we” get Venezuela’s oil. Individuals, companies, and governments get blended together under “we” and “they” labels that become fuzzy, amorphous, grey blobs in the fuzzy, amorphous, grey blob that is Trump’s brain.

Fox News indulges this idiocy. They frequently pee their pants over the “deals” Trump strikes with other countries, using language that makes it sound like the American people are about to receive a duffel bag filled with money, or possibly pirate treasure. The truth, of course, is that foreign governments and/or companies will make investments in the US, or, ya know…say they’re going to make investments and then not. But I don’t expect better from Fox News, which is a Pravda-type operation designed to: A) Trick the gullible, and B) Sell the gullible ergonomic pillows.

But I’d like to see news outlets that aspire to be more than rage fodder for the 75 percent deceased to push back against the collapsing of the word “we”. “We” should not mean “the United States government, or an American company, or an American person, but it’s unclear.” And the problem isn’t just the word “we” — it’s any word that blurs the reality of who, precisely, is performing the action. And I know that I’m declaring my candidacy for the Nobel Prize in Pedantry here, but this really bothers me.

Here’s a Washington Post op-ed about Greenland that fails to elucidate what it means to “have” resources. Here’s a New York Times article about Venezuelan oil that doesn’t dive into what it means for “The United States” to get 30-50 million barrels of oil. These are subtle shortcomings in otherwise well-done articles, but that’s why I’m picking on them: This point is only worth raising to serious journalists who care about the truth. I’m sure I could find more egregious examples on DailyPraxis.ru or ThePureBloodedPatriot.darkweb, but I also doubt those outlets would be persuaded by appeals to professionalism.

The context that’s often missing is that there’s a difference between a government doing something and a person or company from a country doing something. In the case of Venezuelan oil, the key point is that the US doesn’t have a state-run oil company. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Russia have state run oil companies, or, if you want to be more accurate: They have state-aligned mafia organizations whose main racket is oil. Importantly, when these companies sell oil, the government gets the revenue (after a 40-90 percent “convenience fee” is skimmed off the top by administration cronies, of course). The American government doesn’t have an oil company, so the American government won’t directly¹ profit from the sale of Venezuelan oil. Chevron — or, if the Trump administration wants to be really funny, Halliburton² — will get the profit.

With Greenland, there should be more talk about what it means to have “access” to rare earth minerals. Don’t you have “access” to a good if you can simply buy it? I feel like I have “access” to Taco Bell’s RedHot Diablo Crispy Chicken Taco — all I have to do is swallow my dignity, give them $3, and a Diarrhea Promise in a crispy tortilla is all mine. I don’t have to invade and annex Taco Bell. The main stumbling block to companies mining Greenland’s minerals and selling them to Americans isn’t jurisdiction; it’s that Greenland is an ice-covered Walrus Empire that makes Hoth look like Cancun. And we used to have good relations with Greenland and Denmark; we’ve probably reduced our access to their resources by making it good politics to tell America to go jump up our own ass. It’s not like this context is bespoke knowledge — it’s actually quite easy to find, including in The New York Times and The Washington Post. But the message doesn’t seem to have filtered through to the entire newsroom that words like “get” and “access” should be unpacked wherever possible.

I’m under no illusion that more precise wording at legacy publications will influence MAGA faithful. I lived through the absurd era in which people thought that the public would see Trump as racist if only the Times would tag each one of his statements with “he said, racistly.” I’m pressing this point because I think it’s key to understanding why the president often sounds like a Barbary pirate: It’s because he doesn’t understand that he’s running a government, not a company. And when he says “we” are going to get something, “we” often means “some company, not the American people”. What “we” have is a foreign policy crafted by an overmatched octogenarian, a Secretary of State who seems to have read the fable of the scorpion and the frog and thought “the frog could have changed him”, and a key adviser who appears to be a Prussian count teleported here through a time warp from 1872. And I simply think that news coverage should reflect that as accurately as possible.

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1. The word “directly” is doing some work here: In theory, Chevron will make profits and those profits will be taxed. But I relegated this consideration to a grudgingly-written footnote because we’re talking about a very small amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

2. Hat tip to reader JorgeGeorge for inspiring this joke!