"He Claimed", "She Touted": How the Media Uses Insinuation to Manipulate Hearts and Minds

Consider the following headlines:

Do you think the subsequent articles were neutral, favorable or critical towards their subject , the subject being the person who claims or touts in the headline. Okay: critical - so much, so obvious. But what’s the giveaway? Nothing is said directly. The intended meaning is implied yet remains plausibly deniable. (“You’re reading too much into it, I was just saying.”") Welcome to the art of insinuation.

Per dictionary.com, to insinuate is to “to suggest or hint slyly” or “to instill or infuse subtly or artfully, as into the mind”. To insinuate is to lead one’s target along a winding path – a sinuous path – that takes them to where the insinuator wants them to go. On the surface, all is a succession of neutral facts. But what one make of these facts is nudged in certain directions by choice of words, choice of facts, and how they are put together. Think Iago in Othello.

This is a huge subject, beyond the scope of a two-minute read (my goal). So I will limit myself to a few comments on how insinuators exploit ambiguities in word meaning to imply a specific interpretation of their words, yet deny they are doing any such thing. In other words: to have their cake and eat it too.

First a bit a personal history. I used to write a lot of reports, reports that had to appear neutral because I was an “expert”. As an expert, facts and logic were supposed to dictate my professional opinions - not emotion or inclination. So my mentor advised me to avoid words that betrayed bias in my reports, words such as “claim”. I remember the lesson well: to say someone “claimed” such-and-such is to cast suspicion on them, to convey doubt about their truthfulness. Not said, but implied: and if you betray bias, some attorneys won’t refer cases to you and there goes your beautiful career. But I digress.

According to dictionary.com, to claim is to assert something as true or factual. But meaning is much more than definition. And the meaning of “to claim” is not merely to assert something as true or factual. To say “the sky is cloudless today” is to assert something as true, but it would sound odd to say, “she claimed the sky was cloudless today”. Why? Because it implies the sky wasn’t really cloudless and the claimer was being less than honest about what was happening in the sky. In other words, to say someone claimed something is to cast doubt on their honesty.

As for “tout”, the dictionary meaning is “to state or praise with assurance, confidence, or force; state strongly.” However, the implied meaning is often “to state or praise with unwarranted assurance or confidence.” Hence, all the news stories about Trump touting this or that, with the clear message that such touting is shameful hucksterism or careless exaggeration. To get a better handle on whether the president has indeed been touting in the bad way, one often needs more information than what these stories provide, like what was said before or after the tout in question. For the motivated, I suggest going to Factbase, which provides complete transcripts of presidential utterances. Read the before and after, learn the context, then judge for yourselves.