Inverted Commas
Inverted facts
Posted on 22 Sep 24
by Mark Hodgson
It’s sad that the climate wars are now being fought out against the back-drop of personal tragedy, but the mainstream media are shameless about it. Distasteful as it may feel, the record has to be set straight.
There has been a lot of flooding around the world in recent days – central Europe, the south of England, and Japan. Certainly Japan has had a pretty torrid time of it, and the headline to a BBC article yesterday makes it clear that one person is known to have died and several are missing. Heavy rains have caused floods and landslides in the coastal region of Ishikawa in northern Japan, which suffered a deadly earthquake just nine months ago.
What the BBC has done, however, is to suggest that the rainfall is unprecedented, while giving itself wriggle room to escape claims of inaccurate news reporting, by putting the word in inverted commas. It did this in both the heading and the body of the article, presumably as the word can be taken to be a paraphrase of the actual words of Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) forecaster Sugimoto Satoshi, who told reporters: “This level of downpours has never been experienced in this region before.”
https://cliscep.com/2024/09/22/inverted-commas/
