A sentence in Michael Slackman's 11/11/2005 NYT article on the Amman bombings took me aback:
As investigators searched for the identities of the three attackers - and for evidence that they hope will lead to those who helped plan the terrorist strike - Jordanians, especially those who survived the explosions, were struggling to deal with the sheer evil of what happened.
It surprised me to see the word evil used like that in a news story, rather than in an editorial or an opinion piece. Even in the news, it's common enough in quotations, or as an ironic modifier in expressions like "the evil Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", or in fixed expressions like "evil spirits". But Michael Slackman's own words, in this news story, refer to the bombing as a "terrorist strike", and presuppose that it is an instance of "sheer evil".
By comparison , Reuters refers as usual to "blasts" in "closely synchronized attacks" by "suspected suicide bombers". Similarly, BBC News wrote about "explosions" and "bombings" due to "attacks by radical Islamic militants". Use of terms such as "terrorist" or "terrorism" in stories from such sources was as usual limited to quotations, and (as far as I can tell by internet searching) the only other instance of the world evil being used in reference to the events in Amman was this quote:
"This is a worldwide evil," Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, visiting Jordan on his way to Iraq, told reporters at the devastated Hyatt hotel. "Jordan's determination to fight this terrorism is our determination too," he said.
In an interesting contrast, the BBC's Jon Leyne wrote a piece describing Jordanian reactions to the bombings that covers most of the same ground as Slackman's piece did, but with very different attitudes and words. Leyne does observe that people who are blown up generally don't like it much, so that "these attacks really do seem to have changed attitudes", but he describes the Jordanian protesters as
...enjoying themselves, gathering for candlelit vigils, driving around waving flags and hooting horns, sitting together singing patriotic songs.
Leyne does say that
They even chanted swear-words against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant apparently behind the attacks, who had a fair bit of sympathy here before they happened.
But that's still a long way from "struggling to deal with the sheer evil of what happened". Leyne manages to write 900 words about reactions among journalists and Jordanians without making or describing any moral evaluations at all, except to suggest that there is now somewhat less sympathy for Zarqawi in Jordan than there used to be.
On the internet at large, the word evil is more commonly used than it is in news stories. So on a whim, I looked at the frequency of terms in the frames "__ is evil" and "__ isn't evil", and sorted the results by the ratio. By this (statistically unstable as well as morally misguided) measure, Israel and France are the most evil entities I found, while China and North Korea are the least:
Google counts |
|||
| __ isn't evil | __ is evil | ratio (is/isn't) | |
| Israel | 35 |
14,300 |
409 |
| France | 4 |
949 |
237 |
| Wal-Mart | 194 |
12,500 |
64 |
| America | 370 |
22,200 |
60 |
| money | 479 |
26,000 |
54 |
| Islam | 508 |
26,700 |
53 |
269 |
12,200 |
45 |
|
| Christianity | 75 |
1,880 |
25 |
| nudity | 35 |
836 |
24 |
| Starbucks | 35 |
684 |
20 |
| Linux | 61 |
1,000 |
16 |
| Al Qaeda | 20 |
279 |
14 |
| Microsoft | 2,480 |
30,000 |
12 |
| China | 62 |
543 |
9 |
| North Korea | 42 |
259 |
6 |
So much for the wisdom of crowds.
Posted by Mark Liberman at November 12, 2005 09:49 AM