Here is the full transcript of journalist Isaac Saul’s talk titled “3 Ideas For Communicating Across the Political Divide” at TED Talks 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
So, I asked for a podium today and I’m going to read from some notes when I give this talk, because I care a great deal about language choices and I want to be absolutely precise in some of the words that I’m going to use today.
I’m going to start by telling you the same piece of information twice, but I’m going to say it in two different ways. Here’s the first way: “1,000 illegal aliens were arrested by U.S. Border Patrol after crossing the southern border on Monday.”
Here’s the second way: “1,000 undocumented immigrants turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol after crossing the southern border on Monday.”
You may be able to see the difference between these statements. The first one’s written to cater to a conservative audience in the United States and the second is meant to cater to a liberal audience. The difference in how straightforward news stories like this are conveyed underscores just how polarized our politics have become. Everyone knows that polarization is a big issue in the United States and across the globe, but what fewer people talk about is the language choices that the media and political partisans make that push people away who might have a different perspective than them.
The Impact of Language Choices
Despite the fact, there are often less alienating ways to communicate the same ideas. For media companies that thrive on engagement, those choices might be intentional. It doesn’t matter if a news outlet loses half the country calling migrants illegal aliens so long as it retains the other half. As individuals, however, we sometimes make those choices without even realizing it. I’d like to share some examples of language choices that I think signal what I call a political tribe.
I’m going to start with some on the left: equity, lived experience, oppression. Someone may be sharing their pronouns or talking about gender-affirming care or using the term Latinx. On the right, you might see words like snowflake or deep state, mainstream media, alpha, illegal alien, woke, social justice warrior. For over a decade, I’ve been obsessing over language choices like this.
Personal Background
I’m a politics reporter from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a bellwether county in a bellwether state. And in 2019, I started an independent nonpartisan news outlet called Tangle in response to the bias and partisanship that I saw flourishing in major newsrooms all across America.
In fact, I started Tangle to solve the problem of what I like to call news polarization. I wanted to create a place where all Americans, from the most hardcore MAGA Republicans, the most progressive blue-blooded liberal, could trust as a source of wide-ranging perspectives and balanced reporting, and a place where an international audience could read about U.S. news without the typical partisan slant.
Challenges in Neutral Reporting
Our approach is simple. It’s just to share perspectives from across the political spectrum in language that reaches as many people as possible. But as you might imagine, we ran into some problems. We found that while attempting to bring conservatives and liberals under one roof, we were often losing people before they even read the different ideas we were presenting.
Early on, I would get emails from liberal readers saying they were unsubscribing over things like my use of the term pro-life instead of anti-abortion or anti-choice. At the same time, I would get emails from conservative readers saying they were unsubscribing because I described abortion as women’s health care, which made them feel like I was in the tank for the pro-choice side.
We realized that if we wanted people to actually hear arguments from the other side, we had to make some changes to our language choices. So I’d like to talk about how I navigate this problem of polarizing language as a reporter seeking to communicate with an audience from across the political spectrum, but also how I do it in my personal life.
Strategies for Neutral Communication
First, we really want to avoid making language choices that signal to people, “You are not on my team.” That’s incredibly difficult. Immigration is one subject where news organizations most commonly signal tribe. Like in our first example, undocumented immigrant versus illegal immigrant. We know that a conservative might see undocumented immigrant and unsubscribe, suspecting that we’re soft on immigration, while a liberal might see illegal immigrant and write in to tell us that no person is illegal before canceling their account.
That leads us to our first solution. When possible, find a compromise. We settled on the term unauthorized migrant, a legal expression that seems not to offend the sensibilities of either side, instead allowing readers to take in the arguments we’re presenting, while also accurately portraying what we’re trying to communicate. Unfortunately, not every problem has a simple compromise.
Handling Controversial Topics
So let’s go to a classic example. Abortion is a big indicator of political tribe. Is a person pro-life for wanting to make the killing of a fetus illegal, or are they anti-choice? Is another person pro-choice for wanting a woman to be able to choose what happens to her body, or are they anti-life? Ardent supporters of one side of this debate or the other will insist on using their preferred terms.
So what do you do? Solution number two, we tend to use a group’s preferred term. That allows us to maintain a neutral tone in the discussion and treat everyone’s position with tolerance. Pro-life people say they’re pro-life, so we call them that. Pro-choice people say they’re pro-choice, so we say that too. We may use a term like anti-abortion to describe a pro-life group, but only if we’ve seen them use that language themselves, which by the way, many of them do.
Addressing Cultural Sensitivities
We ran into a similar issue with the term Latinx, a gender-neutral word invented to describe people of Hispanic descent.
In theory, it’s a decent idea, but it has a major problem. The people whom that word refers to, people of Hispanic or Latin descent, they don’t like it. I got emails and emails from Latino and Latina people telling me that when referring to the group, they preferred Hispanic or Latino, and that’s not just anecdotal.
Polling shows this too. 68% of people of Hispanic descent favor the term Hispanic, 21% favor Latina or Latino, and only 2% use the term Latinx. On top of that, a whopping 40% find the term Latinx offensive, so we stopped using it. I have another example of a way you can work to communicate more neutrally.
I’m going to warn you that this one’s a little bit of a doozy. This is one of the more controversial things that we do. The AP Stylebook, which most media outlets use, began calling for the capitalizing of the B in Black in 2020 when referring to a race, culture, or ethnicity. They also offered the guidance not to capitalize white, saying that Black communicated a wider shared cultural experience that white did not.
For a long time, we followed this guidance, but we don’t anymore. Believe it or not, there’s not actually good polling on this that I could find, but there are a lot of arguments for and against. And I found the arguments of Black writers who preferred the terms to be lowercase to be more persuasive, writers like Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and Minna Salami.
Loury put it like this: “But if all the disparate groups that constitute whites don’t comprise a single people, why should all the disparate groups that constitute blacks do so? To be honest, I don’t think they do. I would probably have a hard time seeing the sociological similarities, say, between a wealthy member of Lagos’s business class and a man on Chicago’s South Side working three part-time jobs just to pay his rent. Learning that both are black would tell me precisely nothing.”
I agree. And I find this reasoning much more compelling than the argument behind the AP Stylebook decision. And that is solution number three. Sometimes you have to follow your own thoughts, state them honestly, listen to the arguments, make a call as best you can, and communicate your choice when asked.
The Responsibility of Communication
Language choices designed to connect people on all sides of the political spectrum will never be perfect, but we can try our very best. I believe it is our responsibility to connect with people outside of our political tribes, but that responsibility doesn’t only belong to the people communicating the news. It also lies with you and with me, the consumers. And it requires that we all listen more neutrally, too.
If you disagree with my decision on not capitalizing the B in black, as I’m sure many people in this room do, that’s fine. I would hope that we can have an honest disagreement about it and be able to see each other as people who disagree instead of political enemies. But that takes work.
Understanding Political Signaling
And a lot of the time, a person you’re speaking with will use a phrase intended to signal their membership to a political tribe, but that doesn’t always mean the other person intended to pick a fight. You can make the decision not to take offense by someone’s tribal language choices, and rather hear their intended meaning. Progressives or more liberal media outlets, for example, may center lived experiences or share the pronouns of authors, while conservatives and conservative pundits might riff about the deep state or the mainstream media.
What’s fascinating to me about these signals is that they often give extra meaning to mostly apolitical ideas. Deep state is really just code for a kind of sinister federal bureaucracy run amuck, something plenty of progressives would be open to acknowledging if the wording were just a little bit different. Meanwhile, discussing lived experiences isn’t about being extra sensitive to every transgression you’ve ever experienced.
It’s just another way of saying, “These are the things that have happened to me,” something that conservatives center in their politics all the time. And lastly, I think it’s worth noting that sometimes a single word can mean totally different things to different groups. In recent months, one of the most controversial issues in the world has been Israel’s incursion in Gaza. That has set off a debate about Zionism, a word that I’ve heard used as both a political term and a slur, depending on the speaker.
I’d like to share three different definitions for the word Zionism that I could find. The first is a definition from Britannica, which broadly defines it as a Jewish nationalist movement. The second is from the ADL, which calls it a movement for self-determination and statehood. And the third is a definition from Al Jazeera’s website, which describes it as a colonial movement by any means necessary.
Conclusion
Same word, three different definitions. Zionism is one of many terms that people have completely different definitions for. If you’re talking with someone who’s using a term in a way that you wouldn’t, a really simple and effective tactic is to ask them how they would define that term. That can be a good pathway to gaining mutual understanding, whereas not doing so is often a serious impediment.
And if you’re in the media, defining these terms in your writing is almost always helpful. Disagreement between two people over an idea can never be productive if both people are imagining the other is saying something that they aren’t. So how can you connect with people who think differently than you? For both media organizations and individuals in their everyday life, you have to be sincere.
People know when they’re being pandered to. You don’t have to make everybody happy, and you don’t even have to like the people that you disagree with. But you ought to try communicating in ways that more than one political tribe can hear you. If another political tribe is communicating, you should try your best to be tolerant of their language choices.
That sometimes means calling a group something they prefer to be called, even if you disagree. And it often means really hearing the intentions of another person, even if they are using language that puts you off. The good news is that using more neutral language isn’t always difficult, and tolerance is a pretty easy bar to clear if you try. So please, if you have some better suggestions for how to communicate and connect across the political spectrum, I’m all ears. I’m always open to ideas and changing my mind, and I hope you are too. Thank you.
