Every single thing we read is authored by somebody and is, ultimately, just one person’s opinion. It sounds obvious, but sometimes we forget. We click onto an official website or a respected newspaper and our critical faculties dim as we consume what we consider to be facts. They may indeed be facts, but the author arranges, boosts and obscures them to form his or her desired narrative.

That said, many journalists work hard to keep their own biases under wraps and report honestly. However, the truth is a lot more subjective than we might care to admit. Everyone has an opinion, so how can you tell whether the article you are reading is biased?

A couple of years ago, thanks to the Open University, I was introduced to something wonderful called systemic functional linguistics, which, among many other things, holds the key to uncovering an author’s conscious or unconscious biases, just from looking at the grammar. There are dozens of separate grammatical examinations involved in performing a critical discourse analysis, but let’s just take a look at one.

As a starting point, this branch of linguistics puts forward the idea that when we talk about anything, we normally do it in a straightforward manner by saying who is acting and what the action is… for example, if I was describing children playing I might say “The big kid kicked the ball to the little kid”. Subject, verb, object, indirect object. This chimes nicely with journalism, where active sentences are preferred, and where subs and headline writers know to eschew the passive where possible.

So, if in normal communication ‘an actor acts upon something’ and sentences are active, the use of a passive indicates a desire to put the person ‘acting’ in the background. There may be a perfectly good reason for this: “Kennedy shot” being a textbook example, where a US president is more important than his attacker, but in other circumstances it may indicate a bias.

To give you an example: “The company shut the factory in 2015.”  This is a straightforward sentence showing the actor, ‘the company’, carrying out the action of shutting down the factory.

“The factory was shut down by the company in 2015.” Here we see the actor being backgrounded somewhat by the use of the long passive.

“The factory was shut down in 2015.”  Here the actor has disappeared completely with the short passive construction.

“The factory shut down in 2015.” Here we have the ergative, where the actor has not only disappeared but the object of the sentence has become the subject, giving the impression that the factory shut itself.

So, if you are reading an article, check out when the author slips into the passive or ergative and ask why that might be. It could be for a perfectly good ‘Kennedy shot’ reason, or it could be that the author, consciously or otherwise, does not want to draw attention to ‘who’ is ‘doing the deed’.

Thanks to the tutors and authors of module E303, The Open University.