A front-page New York Times article about deaths attributed to a General Motors ignition switch defect turns out to be a case study in using slanted language about drug and alcohol use. The Times writes that two accident victims "had experimented with various recreational drugs."
The words "experimented" and "recreational" make the drug use sound less serious, and make the victims seem more sympathetic to Times readers than they would if they had been hard-core drug users, addicts, or junkies. Why does the Times describe the drugs as "recreational" rather than "illegal"? Contrast this with the Times condemnatory attitude toward tobacco use (a recent editorial spoke of the need to "drive home the message that the availability of this lethal consumer product should be curtailed as much as possible and that tobacco use is socially unacceptable.") To the Times, tobacco use is lethal and socially unacceptable, while drug use is "recreational" or experimental or, for that matter, medicinal. The distinction seems driven less by science than by the cultural biases of the Times reporters and editors, or by the ancillary ideological goals of making cigarette companies and car manufacturers alike look evil.
Lower down in the same Times story comes this passage:
In fighting lawsuits and in its public statements, G.M. has pointed to other factors that could have been responsible for the deaths. "All of these crashes occurred off-road and at high speeds, where the probability of serious or fatal injuries was high regardless of air bag deployment," the company said in February, when it had acknowledged only six deaths tied to the defect. "In addition, failure to wear seatbelts and alcohol use were factors in some of these cases."
In fact, The Times found, alcohol was listed as a factor in just four of the 10 accidents that the newspaper identified — including one in which the drunken driver was actually driving another vehicle that crashed into the defective G.M. car.
The word "just" in the phrase "just four of the 10 accidents" is a biased word. Four of ten seems like a lot to me. But for whatever reason, the Times doesn't want to go after the alcohol manufacturers the way it is going after the tobacco companies and General Motors. Instead it runs article after article in the food and magazine sections glorifying the products — "Learning to Love Beer Cocktails," "20 Summer Wines for $20," and so on. Again, it seems driven less by science — alcohol related deaths amount to a much greater number each year than deaths resulting from faulty GM ignition switches — than by the cultural biases of Times reporters and editors.