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Learn how journalists use loaded language, selective quotes and misleading headlines to shape public opinion, using a controversial report about James and Joanna Howe as a case study.

It’s been a few weeks since the media declared all-out war on James and Joanna Howe.

The headlines have moved on, but the tactics journalists use to hoodwink the public are permanent fixtures of modern reporting.

Most Australians sense the spin, but few can put their finger on exactly how it’s done. If you want to understand the mechanics of journalistic skulduggery, read on.

The News Costume: Making Opinion Look Like Fact

The media had people believing that James is an advocate for marital rape, that Joanna is his hapless victim, and that the Howes are toxic, along with everything they stand for.

Cunningly, journalists did all of this under the banner of “news” — never making these claims directly, yet persuading readers they were true all the same.

There’s no way we could dissect all the hit jobs that employed these slimy tactics, so let’s pick on one.

Australia’s largest commercial news site, news.com.au, took the story national on 15 September with Naomi Kaplan’s oh-so subtly titled piece, “‘I don’t give a f***’: Husband’s wild consent claim sparks fury”.

Everything about this article signals to the reader that it’s a news report. It’s filed in a section called “News Life”, it carries no “opinion” tag, and it’s bylined by a writer with “reporter” in her title.

The bones of the article also sell it as news: it cites a source who “told news.com.au”; it follows the textbook shape of a news report, moving from incident to reaction to policy context; and the writer stays invisible, never clearly owning her views.

That’s the first trick: dressing the article in a costume of neutrality. It’s also the most important, because people are wary when reading an opinion piece, but they lower their guard when it’s “news”.

Loaded Language and the Art of Smuggling in Bias

The second trick — or rather, bag of tricks — is how a journalist smuggles their opinion into a news piece anyway. Kaplan does this in spades.

AllSides is a media watchdog that rates the political bias of hundreds of news outlets globally. The group has published a guide to the 16 techniques reporters most often deploy to tilt a news story while pretending to play a straight bat.

Here are some you probably already noticed in Kaplan’s piece:

Spin: Kaplan swaps “said” for a world of drama: James “declared”, “claim[ed]”, and “swiftly interrupted”, while the headline boils it all down to a “wild consent claim”.

Unsubstantiated claims: Kaplan reports “widespread fury” and says the Howes have “come under fire” — but she never names a critic, cites a post or offers a number to show that either is true. She also credits Contos with exposing “the alarming level of sexual assault” without providing any statistics to back it up.

Subjective qualifying adjectives: “Strong comments”, “controversial wife”, “incredibly detrimental”, “hugely irresponsible and even dangerous”. All of these phrases tell readers how to feel before telling them what even happened.

Word choice: Kaplan labels Joanna an “anti-abortion activist” when “pro-life” would have sufficed, and calls her “Mrs Howe” rather than “Dr” or “Professor” — titles she has earned.

These techniques are cheap shots, and they’re fairly easy to spot. The real con was in how Kaplan cobbled her article together, including what she left unsaid.

Look at what the article dwells on. Fury, mockery, marital rape, “fatal impacts”. Nowhere does it mention the point the Howes were actually making — that marriage, not a classroom consent script, is the safest place for sex. AllSides calls this negativity bias.

What Gets Left Out Can Be More Damaging Than What Gets Reported

Pay attention to what the Howes were debating when James made his comments. Kaplan says they “were discussing Australia’s new proposed consent laws”. They weren’t. They were critiquing Contos’s Teach Us Consent campaign and the scripts it wants taught in classrooms. The difference is huge. If James opposes consent education, he’s making an argument about schools. If he opposes consent laws, he’s challenging what counts as rape. AllSides calls this flawed logic.

Notice who gets to speak, and when. Kaplan sought comment from exactly one person: Sherele Moody, who is a known longtime critic of Joanna Howe. Moody’s opinion doesn’t arrive at the end of the article, as one view among several. It comes straight after the summary of the podcast, so it becomes the lens through which readers hear James.

And Moody’s quotes do all the heavy lifting. Kaplan never says James condones marital rape. She leaves that to Moody, who has James implying that “rape doesn’t exist in relationships” and holding views that set women “back 50 years”. Kaplan has outsourced the accusation, so she can lean on the oldest excuse in journalism: “I was just reporting what people said”. The Howes, meanwhile, get no right of reply. AllSides calls this slant and viewpoint placement.

Compare what James said with what made it into the article. Kaplan quotes him as saying, “consent is not even a freaking thing for me” and “I just don’t do consent”. But she leaves out the two lines where he explains what he means: “I do marriage, man”, and his description of marriage as “the only consent that works”. Leave those lines out, and James sounds like a man who’d force himself onto his wife. AllSides calls this bias by omission.

Now read the headline again: “‘I don’t give a f***’: Husband’s wild consent claim sparks fury.” It invites readers to assume James doesn’t care whether his wife consents to sex. But that’s not at all what he said. Moments earlier, Joanna had warned him on air that his words would be clipped and used against him. “I don’t give a f***” was his reply. In other words, he didn’t care how critics would misrepresent him. News.com.au stripped the line of its context and made it the headline. AllSides calls this sensationalism.

The Story They Chose Not to Tell

The subtlest technique of all — because it’s invisible on the page — is story choice. Joanna Howe has given news.com.au no shortage of newsworthy material, from helping draft pro-life legislation that passed South Australia’s upper house, to organising petitions that drew tens of thousands of signatures, to running one of the country’s largest social media advertising campaigns.

Indeed, on the very day Kaplan’s article went up, the Howes were preparing for a thousands-strong rally outside New South Wales Parliament, where MPs would vote the next day on banning sex-selective abortion. Why wasn’t that the story? Instead, James’s out-of-context podcast quotes were served up as the “news”.

It’s no wonder so many Australians hold the news in contempt.

But you now have something better than contempt. You know how the news sausage is made — and you have the tools and the vocabulary to see how journalists fool the public.

Now for your homework: spread the word and share this article.

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Republished with thanks to Flipped Media.