ALT Mike Abrams & 12:14 PM PASSIVE VOICE A colleague asked: How are editorial decisions made about using the passive vs active voice when covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? e.g. "More than 67 Palestinians, including 16 children, have died since the start of the conflict on Monday, Palestinian health officials said. The rockets fired by Hamas and its Islamist ally, Islamic Jihad, killed at least six Israeli civilians, including a 5-year-old boy and one soldier." (Taken from here.) Thank you for this question. We sometimes hear from staff members and readers when we use passive voice in headlines, summaries and articles - particularly in coverage of intense, fast-breaking news. Few lines of reporting draw as much scrutiny as our coverage of the Middle East. Individuals and organizations from all sides frequently weigh in with concerns both large and small. This is a historical geopolitical, religious and

ALT Few lines of reporting draw as much scrutiny as our coverage of the Middle East. Individuals and organizations from all sides frequently weigh in with concerns both large and small. This is a historical, geopolitical, religious and social struggle. Words clearly matter. The short answer is this: We make no grand editorial decisions to use passive voice. It's often a calculation made by a writer and an editor or a few colleagues who are working hard to be fair and independent in murky situations. The sentence you mentioned certainly seems to imply a point of view. But a bit earlier in the article, we reported this: "Israel said it assassinated 10 senior militants and continued to pound both military and residential areas across the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, while Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza, and its allies continued to fire rockets into civilian areas across central and southern Israel." That’s clear, crisp active voice I’d argue

ALT He continued: "We are not trying to obfuscate who's responsible. We are being clear about that. If we use passive voice to say how many died after we've just said Israeli airstrikes were hitting the area, it's because we didn't feel the need to repeat that information. That's a journalistic decision, not a plot to obscure who's killing whom." In fact, passive voice can occasionally be an effective tool. Though it might seem like an intentional effort to obscure the facts for one point of view, passive voice and other similar language techniques can be -- within reason -- a careful way of conveying both what we know and what we don't. As soon as we learn more, of course, we should report that clearly and directly. You've probably heard that journalism is the first rough draft of history. "Rough" and "draft" are important words there. If passive voice is part of that draft, it's generally in service of accuracy - - not an Agenda

ALT Here's more from him:This is a very contentious story with very strong opinions on each side, assiduous readers parsing every word, and everyone on both sides feeling very strongly that we are not sufficiently representing their narratives. I get that. But we are not a mouthpiece for Israel's right-wing government or for the Palestinian liberation struggle. We are trying to report the news as straight as we can, representing all sides as fairly as we can, as we always do. We are occasionally taken to task for using passive voice like the example you cite because each side wants to make sure we say in the headline or sentence who did it, which is fair. He continued:We are not trying to obfuscate who's responsible. We are being clear about that. If we use passive voice to say how many died after we've just said Israeli airstrikes were hitting the area, it's because we didn't feel the need to repeat that information. That's a journalistic decision, not a plot to obscure who's killing whom