Finsbury Park terrorist becomes invisible in passive news headlines

A 48-year old man drove a van into a crowd of people in the Muslim neighborhood of Finsbury Park in London, but he’s mostly missing from the news headlines about the attack. Why? Is it journalists’ passive writing habit, bias in a case where Muslims were victims rather than attackers, or just a need for brevity?

Ruwayda Mustafah, a British-Kurdish blogger and Ph.D. candidate, shared a graphic of news headlines on Twitter. These headlines, which appeared soon after the attack, focus on the vehicle and not the driver.

This is how British media covers acts of terror targeting Muslims. We should be on the lookout for a van that appears to drive itself. pic.twitter.com/FWWmZ52c2C

— Ruwayda Mustafah (@RuwaydaMustafah) June 19, 2017

A survey of headlines reveals a passive media approach to terrorism

At the time Mustafah posted the headlines in the graphic, very little information was available about the driver. But let’s take a closer look at how media are describing the incident now, several hours later. Here are the top 15 Finsbury Park headlines from Google News (I searched in incognito mode to reduce bias from my previous search history):

Here are some stats about this group of 15 headlines and ledes, which, as near as I can tell, are representative of the headlines in most of the articles about this tragedy:

• Two of 15 headlines mention the driver. CBS news calls him “attacker,” while Business Insider identifies him as a “48-year-old white man.” In all the rest, the driver is missing; the main nouns are the attack, the neighborhood Finsbury Park, the victims, the van, and the mosque.
• Five more of the articles mention the attacker in the lede, but eight of the 15 headlines and ledes don’t mention the driver at all.

Headlines and ledes are short. In a tight space they must explain what happened, where, who got hurt, and who did it. But it’s notable that so many of these cases, the missing noun is the person who responsible for the attack.

While authorities have not revealed his identity, omitting him creates a strange narrative in which vehicles seem to autonomously ram into pedestrians. The reader, inevitably, wants to know “Who would do such a thing?” When radical Islamists attack, there’s a constant drumbeat of Arabic-sounding names to reinforce the narrative of dangerous terrorists, but in this case, with Muslims as the victim, the attacker is absent from most of the headlines and ledes.

These headlines and ledes are curiously passive

Attacks are active. People attack things or other people. But the coverage in these headlines and leads is rife with passive voice. For example (passive shown in bold):

• Pedestrians struck in terror attack.
• This is being treated as a terrorist attack.
• A van was rammed into a crowd of worshippers.
• One man was killed and another 10 have been injured.
• He was arrested after being detained by members of the public
• Our thoughts and prayers with those who got injured and [affected] by this cowardly attack.
• The van that ploughed into pedestrians near the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London is being treated as a “terrorist attack.”
• The 48-year-old driver of the van has been detained by bystanders and later arrested by police.

As always, these passive beg the question of who did things. Who struck the pedestrians? Who is treating it as a terrorist attack? Who rammed the crowd and killed a man? Who detained the driver and who arrested him?

Given the brevity of headlines and ledes, these passive constructions are a consequence of not having space to explain that the actors are missing. The writers have chosen to concentrate on the victims and the attack, rather than the unidentified driver, bystanders, and officers. But consider how differently these phrases read in the active voice:

• Terrorist strikes pedestrians
• Police are treating this as a terrorist attack.
• A man rammed a van into a crowd of worshippers.
• The attack killed one man and injured 10.
• The police arrested the man after members of the public had detained him.
• As for the people that this attack injured and affected, our thoughts and prayers are with them.
• Authorities are treating the van that ploughed into pedestrians near the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London as a “terrorist attack.”
• Bystanders detained the 48-year-old driver of the van and police later arrested him.

In an attack, focus on the people

Are these headlines a conscious effort to make this attack on Muslims seem less awful than similar attacks on other victims? I don’t think so. Failing to mention unidentified attackers and describing actions in the passive voice are just shortcuts that journalists use to get to the point quickly and put the emphasis on what they actually know.

But regardless of the intent, the effect is the same — to distance readers from the awful nature of what happened and who did it.

If you are a writer, make an effort to put the actors in the subjects of your sentences, even if you don’t know their names. Identify every passive voice sentence; rewrite them to reveal who’s doing stuff. It’s the honest way to identify whomever actually did what you’re writing about. The more awful the act, the more important it is to put the actor as the subject of your sentence.