Seven Words Reporters Use to Tilt a Story Without Telling a Single Lie

Somewhere there is a newsroom with a very strict policy against lying. Every fact is checked, every name is spelled correctly, every date survives a second look. And the story that comes out the other end still manages to tell you exactly whom to cheer for. Folks, that is not a miracle. That is a vocabulary.

Here is the secret the profession would rather you not examine: you can mislead a reader of ordinary intelligence without a single false statement. You do it with verbs, adjectives and the order of the paragraphs. The facts are the cargo. The words are the steering wheel. And almost nobody checks the steering wheel.

So let me hand you the keys. Below are seven words and phrases that carry more editorial freight than their size suggests, an explanation of how each one works, a labelled made-up example for each, and at the end a test you can run on any article in about two minutes. You will not need a degree. You will need a pencil and a willingness to be slightly annoying at the breakfast table.

Why word choice is the real battleground

Start with a plain observation. A news story is a series of choices. Which event gets covered, which witness is quoted first, which paragraph holds the key fact and which one holds the rebuttal, which verb attaches to which speaker. Each choice is small. Nobody can write without making them. The question is whether the choices lean in a consistent direction, and whether the reader can see the lean.

The American press has never pretended to be neutral in the way a thermometer is neutral. In the 1790s the newspapers were openly partisan organs, tied to the Federalist and Republican camps, and the Founders traded barbs through them. The ideal of the straight-news report, the story with the opinion drained out, is a much later invention. It is a good ideal. It is also an ideal, which means it is something you work toward and sometimes miss. When the profession misses it, the miss rarely takes the form of a lie. It takes the form of a word.

The First Amendment protects the press from the government. It says Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Notice what it does not say. It does not promise that the press will be fair. That job belongs to the reader, which is the point of this column. A free press and a skeptical public are a matched set. Take away the skepticism and the freedom turns into a megaphone.

Now the seven words. For each one I will give you the mechanism, a hypothetical (labelled, because I am not going to pretend I am quoting a real article), and the neutral alternative.

The seven words, one at a time

One: "claimed"

Compare two sentences, both invented for this exercise.

Hypothetical A: "The mayor said the budget was balanced." Hypothetical B: "The mayor claimed the budget was balanced."

Same mayor, same budget, same statement. But "said" reports. "Claimed" insinuates. The word carries a small, built-in doubt, the sound of someone asserting something the reporter is not willing to vouch for. It is the verb of the courtroom skeptic.

Here is why it works so well: it is technically defensible every single time. The mayor did claim it. A claim is an assertion. No dictionary will convict the reporter. But watch the pattern across a whole article. If officials and organizations the writer likes say, explain, note and point out, while officials and organizations the writer dislikes claim, insist, allege and maintain, you are not reading two different facts. You are reading one writer's thumb on the scale.

Verbs of attribution are the quietest editorial tool in the trade, because they sit in the one place the reader's eye is trained to skip. You read "said" and "claimed" the way you read "the" and "a". Train yourself to stop.

Two: "controversial"

Nothing is more controversial than the word "controversial." It is applied to a judge, a bill, a book, a speaker, a policy, a tweet. Ask who is controversial to whom and the word falls apart.

Here is the trick. "Controversial" is a verdict dressed as a description. When the label is attached to a nominee, a statute or a speaker, it tells the reader: a reasonable person should be uneasy here. But a thing is controversial the moment a few people object loudly enough. By that standard the Bill of Rights was contested in 1789, with Federalists doubting it was needed and Anti-Federalists doubting it went far enough, and the Emancipation Proclamation drew fierce opposition in 1863, and a good many things that history has since vindicated were controversial in the very week they mattered most.

Hypothetical: a story on a new school-choice program that calls it "a controversial program" in the first sentence, and then never labels the existing system "controversial" even though parents have been arguing about it for decades. The label is applied to the challenger and withheld from the incumbent. That is not reporting. That is a status marker.

The honest alternative is specific. Instead of "controversial," say who objects and why. "Teachers' unions oppose the program because they say it diverts funding. Supporters say it gives families a way out of a failing school." That is longer. It is also information. "Controversial" is the empty calorie version.

Three: "far-right" (and its quieter cousins)

Ideological labels are where the tilt gets serious. The pattern many readers notice is that one end of the spectrum is labelled and the other is not. A group on the right gets "far-right" or "hard-right" or "right-wing" in the first line. A comparable group on the left gets "advocacy group," "activist," or "progressive," which sounds like a job description rather than a warning.

I am not saying labels are never fair. Some groups are extreme and say so. The test is symmetry. If a writer reaches for "far-left" at the same rate and with the same hair-trigger for the left-wing counterpart, fine, they are doing a job. If the label is a one-way street, then it is functioning as a warning sign for the reader, not a description of the organization.

Hypothetical: two think tanks release two reports on the same day. One, funded by business donors, is called "a conservative think tank." The other, funded by labor and foundation money, is called "a nonpartisan research group." The reader is handed a frame before reading a single finding. One report is to be discounted. The other is to be trusted. Neither designation had to be false. Both were chosen.

The rule I would offer is simple: either label everybody or label nobody, and describe what they actually advocate instead. "A group that favors lower taxes" and "a group that favors higher taxes" are both accurate, both short, and both leave the verdict to you.

Four: "critics say"

Here is my favourite, because it is the most efficient piece of rhetorical machinery in modern prose. "Critics say" lets a reporter state an opinion without owning it.

Watch the sentence do its work. Hypothetical: "The new rule will hurt small businesses, critics say." Who are the critics? How many? Are they the people who will actually be hit by the rule, or a group that opposes the whole administration on principle? The sentence does not tell you. It manufactures a vague, faceless chorus and then lets the chorus say whatever the writer wants said.

The same device runs the other way, of course: "experts say," "many believe," "some observers note." The pattern is identical. A claim without a named speaker is an opinion the author wants to smuggle past the editor. If an opinion deserves to be in the story, a name deserves to be attached to it. A person who will put their name to a statement can be asked follow-up questions, can be checked and can be held to it. A "critic" cannot.

And notice the asymmetry again. If the story is about a policy the writer likes, the critics are "opponents" or "detractors," a handful of them, usually quoted late. If the policy is one the writer dislikes, the critics become a rising tide of "experts," "economists" and "watchdogs," quoted early. The structure of the paragraph does the persuading. For a deeper look at how the sourcing game works, see Anonymous Sources, Who Gets Them and What a Reader Should Demand.

Five: "without evidence"

This one is a beautiful piece of work, because it sounds like fact-checking and functions as a verdict.

"Without evidence" is a perfectly fair phrase when it is true. If someone says the moon is made of cheese and has no support, the phrase fits. The problem is how it gets used. In practice it is often attached to a claim the writer has not examined, or one where evidence exists but the writer finds it unpersuasive, or one where the evidence is contested. The phrase collapses three very different situations into one: there is no evidence, there is evidence I reject, and there is evidence I did not look for.

Hypothetical: a politician says a program is wasteful and cites a government audit. A story reports that he "said, without evidence, that the program was wasteful." The audit existed. The reporter did not read it, or did read it and disagreed with the conclusion. Either way, the phrase tells the reader that the claim has no support, which is false, while the sentence remains technically cautious.

There is also a timing problem. Claims that were once described as "without evidence" have, on more than one occasion, later been treated as serious hypotheses by the same outlets. I have covered how that happened in one famous case in From Banned Claim to Live Hypothesis, How the Lab-Leak Debate Was Framed. The lesson is not that every claim is true. The lesson is that "without evidence" is a statement about the state of the reporter's knowledge on a given afternoon, not a statement about the world.

The better phrase is "the claim has not been substantiated," followed by what has and has not been checked. Longer, yes. Honest, yes.

Six: "sparked"

Headlines love fire metaphors. A remark "sparked" outrage. A vote "ignited" a firestorm. A decision "fueled" anger. Every one of these verbs does something sneaky: it removes human agency and makes reaction sound like physics.

Hypothetical: "The senator's remarks sparked backlash." Who was backlash? Three people on social media? A thousand? A coordinated campaign by an advocacy group that issues a press release every morning? The verb "sparked" suggests spontaneous, widespread outrage, a natural event like lightning. It sounds like the story is reporting a mood in the country rather than the reaction of a few people who were paid, or inclined, to be upset by it.

Here is the second trick. The verb assigns cause. The remark did it. Not the people who chose to be offended, not the outlets that amplified the offense, not the editors who decided it was newsworthy that someone was offended. A story that begins "sparked outrage" has quietly declared the remark guilty before any reader has seen it.

The test: replace "sparked outrage" with "drew criticism from" and name who. If you cannot name more than a handful, the story may be about a reaction that the story itself is creating. That is a loop a good reader should notice.

Seven: the passive voice and "mistakes were made"

The last entry is a grammatical construction, and it is the oldest dodge in public life. "Mistakes were made." By whom? The sentence does not say, which is the entire point of the sentence.

The passive voice has perfectly respectable uses. But in news writing it can function as a protective wrapper. Hypothetical: "Funds were misallocated" instead of "the department's director moved funds to a project she favoured." "A man was shot" instead of "a man shot him." "Policies were implemented" instead of "the governor signed an order." Each of these swaps a named actor for an unnamed event. The result is a world in which things happen and nobody did them.

Notice that the passive can also be used to shield a favourite. A story about a politician the writer admires reads in the active voice when the politician does something good ("she cut the ribbon") and in the passive when the politician does something bad ("an error was discovered"). A story about a politician the writer dislikes flips the pattern. This is the grammar of favourite-protecting, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The rule is that accountability needs a subject. When a story reports something done, ask who did it. If the sentence will not tell you, the sentence is hiding someone.

How the same event reads two ways

Let me run a full example, labelled as a hypothetical so nobody mistakes it for a real article. Picture a city council that votes to cut a program.

Tilted version: "In a controversial vote Tuesday, the council's conservative majority cut funding for a popular youth program, sparking outrage. Critics say the move, which the mayor claimed was necessary, was made without evidence that the program had failed. Cuts were announced late in the evening."

Neutral version: "The city council voted 5 to 4 on Tuesday to end funding for a youth program that cost the city a stated amount a year. Council members who voted yes said the program had not met its enrollment targets. Council members who voted no said it served children who had no other option. The mayor, who proposed the cut, said the budget required it."

Count what changed. "Controversial" is gone, replaced by a vote count. "Conservative majority" is gone, replaced by what they said. "Popular" is gone, since popularity is a claim that needs a number. "Sparking outrage" is gone. "Critics say" became named positions. "Claimed" became "said." "Without evidence" became the actual argument over enrollment. The passive "cuts were announced" became "the mayor proposed."

Not a single fact in the second version was added to improve the council's image. Everything in it is a restatement of what happened with the steering wheel put back where the reader can see it. That is the difference between reporting and tilting.

A substitution test you can run on any article

Here is the numbered method. Pick any story, on any topic, from any outlet, left, right or in between, and do the following.

1. Swap the target. Mentally replace the group or person at the center of the story with its ideological mirror image. If a story about a conservative group says "far-right," imagine the same story about a liberal group. Would the writer have written "far-left"? If not, you have found a one-way label.
2. Replace every attribution verb with "said." Every "claimed," "insisted," "admitted," "conceded" and "boasted" becomes plain "said." Read the story again. If it now feels different, the verbs were doing editorial work.
3. Delete every adjective that is not a fact. "Controversial," "embattled," "controversy-plagued," "popular," "sweeping," "shocking." If you remove it and no information is lost, it was a verdict.
4. Name every anonymous voice. Wherever you see "critics say," "experts say" or "many believe," ask who. If the story cannot answer in the next sentence, treat the claim as the writer's own opinion.
5. Find the actor in every passive sentence. Convert "was announced" to "[someone] announced." If you cannot find the someone, the sentence is hiding an agent.
6. Check the order. Which side's best argument appears in the first three paragraphs, and which side's is buried below the jump? Most readers stop reading by then.

If a story survives all six steps without changing its meaning, it is straight reporting, and you should say so, because good work deserves credit. If it falls apart, you have learned something about the outlet and about your own news diet.

The best objection, answered

The strongest objection goes like this. Language is never neutral. Any word choice is a choice. "Said" is as much a decision as "claimed." A story with no adjectives would be unreadable. And sometimes the facts really do point in one direction, so a story that describes both sides in the same flat tone commits the sin of false balance.

Every part of that is partly right. I grant that perfect neutrality does not exist and that writers must choose words. I grant that sometimes one side really does lack evidence, and a story should say so. A reporter who treats the claim that the earth is flat as one side of a two-sided debate is not being fair, he is being useless.

But the objection proves less than it thinks. The claim is not that bias can be eliminated. The claim is that it can be seen, and that a reader who can see it can discount it. The fix is symmetry and specificity. Apply the same label to both sides, or to neither. Attribute opinions to named people. Say what was done and who did it. If the evidence really does point one way, say so with the evidence, not with a loaded adjective. That standard is not impossible. Plenty of working reporters meet it every day, and they are the ones whose work is worth reading precisely because you cannot tell, from the vocabulary, which party they voted for.

For more on spotting patterns, read How to Read a News Story From the Bottom Up and Catch What the Lede Hides and The Corrections Page Is the Most Honest Part of the Paper, So Read It. For the harder cases where the problem is not word choice but invention, see Fabricated From the Byline Up, Four Scandals That Shamed Elite Newsrooms. And if you want to know why government should stay out of refereeing any of this, read Misinformation Is Not a Legal Category, and Government Should Stop Pretending.

What this means for your breakfast table

There is a reason I am not asking for a law, a regulator or a government board to fix any of this. The remedy for loaded language is a reader who notices it, and a market for outlets that earn trust by not using it. The Founders understood the press as a rowdy, partisan, sometimes unfair institution, and they protected it anyway, on the theory that a free people could sort the good from the bad. They were right. But sorting takes skills, and skills can be taught.

So teach them. Put a printed article on the table, hand your teenager a pencil, and have them circle every attribution verb and every adjective. It takes ten minutes. They will never read a headline the same way again, and honestly, neither will you. Think of it as a vaccine against being steered, administered with a pencil, and no needle required.

It also turns out to be a lot of fun. Once you notice "critics say," you will find it everywhere, like a song you cannot stop hearing. Your spouse will tire of it. Do it anyway.

The case in brief

1. A news story can be accurate in every fact and still tilt the reader, because word choice carries editorial judgment.
2. Seven words and constructions do most of the work: "claimed," "controversial," ideological labels, "critics say," "without evidence," "sparked," and the passive voice.
3. Each is defensible on its own. The tell is the pattern: one label for one side, a different verb for the other.
4. The substitution test, swapping the target, using "said," deleting verdict adjectives, naming the anonymous and restoring the actor, exposes the tilt in minutes.
5. The remedy is an alert reader and outlets that earn trust, not a government referee.

What you can do: take one article you read this week, run the six-step test with a pencil, and share the marked-up page with someone who reads the opposite outlets.