An Epidemic of Media Doublespeak

By Becket Adams

Sunday, July 06, 2025

 

‘Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

 

That joke, made twelve years ago by an acquaintance of mine, David Burge, known to many as Iowahawk, is as fresh today as it was when he first told it.

 

Perhaps more than ever, certain members of the press appear determined to prove him right. This was especially the case last week, when a mountain of euphemistic slop and doublespeak was dumped on news consumers, all to promote narratives rather than simply telling the story.

 

When University of Pennsylvania administrators announced that the school was stripping Lia (formerly William) Thomas, a man who claims to be a woman, of his titles in women’s swimming and issued an apology to the female athletes he “defeated,” our esteemed press remained dedicated to the use of Thomas’s preferred pronouns, thereby confusing the reasons behind the university’s actions.

 

“UPenn will strip a trans swimmer, Lia Thomas, of her records and ban trans athletes in women’s sports,” Axios reported (emphasis added here and below).

 

The obvious drawback to the press’s partisan language-policing is never clearer than when it tries to cover trans issues. Sharp, concise, accurate news reporting goes out the window. Entire stories become undersold or hopelessly muddled. The whole controversy over Lia Thomas revolves around the fact that he is a man. He is a man competing against women. Without context, readers have no better understanding of Penn’s actions than they did before reading the Axios headline. All we know is that something happened involving women’s sports and women with qualifiers in their titles. We’ve reached a point where, to understand the news, one must at all times keep on one’s person a cheat sheet to determine whether a trans man is a woman to a “man” or a man to a “woman” and whether a trans woman is a woman to a “man” or a man to a “woman.”

 

Said Forbes, “The University of Pennsylvania came to an agreement with the Trump administration that will strip transgender swimmer Lia Thomas of her titles and recognitions and ban trans athletes from women’s sports.”

 

“The University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday modified a trio of school records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and said it would apologize to female athletes ‘disadvantaged’ by her participation on the women’s swimming team,” reported the Associated Press.

 

The scare quotes are a nice touch.

 

“Penn revokes Lia Thomas’ records, bans trans athletes under Trump administration deal,” the New York Times declared in a misleading headline. Only men are prohibited from participating in women’s sports. Women who identify as men are still permitted to compete and train in men’s sports, “assuming they meet all other NCAA eligibility requirements.”

 

The headline is not the worst of it; the body of the story is likewise a mess of confusing pronoun usage, all of it undercutting what should be clarity and consistency.

 

“Since its return to power, the Trump administration has maintained that transgender people should not be able to compete in sports alongside women,” the Times reports.

 

Men. The Trump administration maintains that men should not be able to compete in women’s sports.

 

The Trump White House “argues transgender people hold a biological advantage over cisgender women, and that their presence in locker rooms and other private facilities poses safety concerns,” the report reads, adding that “the state must forbid schools receiving federal funding from allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports, among other changes.”

 

Along with a cheat sheet, you’ll also need a decoder ring to understand stories that employ different tiers to refer to women and “women.”

 

Or we could speak plain, clear English and refer to people by the pronouns that reflect their sex, thus sidestepping the completely nonsensical and inherently inconstant Calvinball identity game. Clearly, this is asking too much.

 

The insistence on using preferred pronouns in a story about men being banned from competing in women’s sports benefits only radical fringe gender ideologues. It does nothing to clarify for the public what the issue is or why Thomas has been stripped of his titles. A news report that can’t even distinguish between the players in its own story is not just bad journalism, but also bad writing.

 

But what else should we expect except misleading wordplay from the same crowd that asserts, with a straight face, that a mayoral candidate who has proposed “seizing the means of production” is not even communist-lite, but something more nuanced than that? Smothering the story is often the entire point of the story!

 

It’s why we have headlines such as the one published last week by a Colorado CBS News affiliate, which read, “Colorado grandfather detained by ICE while walking his dog.”

 

As usual, the headline seems to downplay the seriousness of the situation significantly. ICE responded on social media to the CBS report, which is based entirely on the say-so of the detainee’s family, to allege that the so-called grandfather is “a CRIMINAL alien” with “a rap sheet including over 2 dozen arrests for theft, assault & battery, damaging property & shoplifting.”

 

Who’s telling the truth? Though the man’s family admits he has committed crimes in the past, they concede nothing as serious as what ICE alleges. Maybe ICE is wrong, maybe not. All we know is that we have to go to social media to hear ICE’s side of the story and its list of accusations because CBS didn’t wait to include it in a tearjerker of a story that’s roughly 90 percent sympathetic quotes from the man’s family.

 

That’s not reporting; it’s PR.

 

Between CBS soft-pedaling stories about illegal immigrants, major newsrooms intentionally obscuring the reality of the Lia Thomas situation over and over again, and journalists constantly telling us to doubt our own eyes and ears, one cannot help but conclude, as Burge did, that these people are not so much in the business of telling the truth as they are in the business of influencing public opinion.