Turnspeak

Turnspeak  involves taking an incident and then turning things around 180 degrees in order to justify the event.   A good case is the PLO attacks on Israel that they justify by  saying that Israel is occupying Palestinian land.  The PLO formed in 1964 and the land they refer to was not in Israeli hands until after the 1967 war.  The PLO could not have formed to fight Israeli occupation when the land was occupied by Jordan and Egypt at the time. Turnspeak can also be a case of taking the actions of self defense by one side and claiming them as the cause of the attack.  E.g. Imagine someone starts wildly punching at you in the street and you hit them back thus giving them a black eye.  If that person points to the black eye and claims that as the reason for the fight, then that too is turnspeak.  This form of bias then gets backed up by selective ommission and distortion of facts to create a picture that is very difficult to battle. Eg. Take our previous example of being attacked in the street.  You are asked the question, "did you give that person a black eye?"  The minute you answer that in the affirmative, you are already guilty in a medium that survives in quick sound bytes and punchy headlines.

Back to Spotting  Media Bias

Turnphrase

This form of bias is one of OZ Media Maccabee's discoveries and a favorite one of ours.  It involves the order of events in a phrase.  When people read a statement in a paper, they tend to take that as fact until they read some type of qualifying statement.  If that statement comes at the end of a sentence, then they have absorbed the claim as fact first.  If a qualifying statement comes at the begining of a sentence then they are forewarned and tend to treat what comes next with a sceptical mind.  Compare the two phrases below because these are typical of the reporting we have found in the Australian mainstream press. #1.  Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinian children who were innocently playing in their backyard, a Palestinian spokesman claimed. #2. According to Israeli sources, the children were killed while playing with a landmine planted by Hamas. The first statement is first absorbed as a fact before we read the qualifying statement and therefore has already been absorbed as such.  The second statement is qualified first and therefore treated as a claim when we read it.  Most people are aware that first impressions are the ones that tend to stick.