Behind the Curtain: Do adjectives add to news bias?

What if we tried to produce a whole day's paper without using any adjectives?

A reader who used to write us regularly, the late Stan Zegel, put that challenge to us in response to my first column about our efforts to strive for objectivity. He was among the readers who express concern that stories we use from The Associated Press and The Washington Post can seem slanted simply by the adjectives their stories use. Need they point out that a president's vacation was "lengthy," for example, when they could simply report the number of days and let readers judge? Need a story point out that a proposal is "popular," rather than simply explaining the proposal? "How will you handle the wording issue? Words matter, as you know," one reader wrote.

It's such a great point. I remember thinking of this in 2017 after President Donald Trump's inauguration, when he disputed many media characterizations of the size of the public crowd. You may recall that the president tweeted about it several times, and his aides, starting with his press secretary, discussed it publicly. Then came some news articles saying things like, "The repeated comments underscore the extent to which the president is obsessed with his inauguration crowd size."

Obsessed? My thought was, how do we know what's going on in the president's head? Was it obsession? Or was his penchant for marketing at work? Or something else? We may suspect one thing or another, but we really don't know. What we did know was the number of times it came up in tweets or his administration's public comments; we could report that and let readers decide how to view them.

Four years later, we have President Joe Biden's spending packages - for COVID relief, for infrastructure, and being attempted now, for a variety of social issues. Variations of "big" have been used to describe them, like "huge" and "sprawling."

And why not? Each package has been expected to cost a trillion dollars or more. I think we can all agree a trillion dollars is huge.

But that may be the point. At a time when the size of the spending packages is a, um, big issue even among some in Biden's own party, need we point out that they're "huge?" What if we used "gigantic," "enormous," even "mind-blowing $2 trillion package?" Does it start to sound slanted?

We've considered this for local news, too. Is a $20 million development "huge" or not? It could be less obvious. Maybe it's not so big in, say, Chicago, but pretty big in St. Charles. We may say so in the beginning, but then we'll put it in context.

We may not create a whole day's paper without adjectives, but their use certainly is something we watch.