This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 19th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When you read a news story about a police shooting,

you see phrases like officer involved,

as if the police played some less than clear role in the shooting,

or that the bullet that struck the victim was the ultimate culprit, or that the officer's

weapon discharged, as if it was the gun's decision to fire.

Washington Post columnist and Cato Institute Media Fellow Radley Balco calls it the exonerative

tense and for reporters trying to reasonably

present even basic facts about police shootings to the public, the twisty turns

of phrase presented by police agencies poses special but not insurmountable challenge.

There is this sort of way that reporters write about, and I'll just use the term they use, police involved shootings.

And it seems that there are mental gymnastics or linguistic gymnastics. that they go through in order to make it appear as if it wasn't a police

gymnastics that they go through in order to you know make it appear as if it wasn't a

police officer who shot someone, or at least present it in such a way that it would

be reasonable for your takeaway to be that what actually occurred is not actually what occur.

Right. I call it the exonerated tense and it's I think media in a lot of ways are just

sort of mimicking what they see in police reports and hear from police spokespeople, but it's this way of kind of deflecting responsibility for what you've done.

And so the way, you know, it's often phrased as you'll see you know after

confronting a you know 24 year act 24 year old black male the officers gun fired or you know the suspect was struck by a bullet fired

from an officer's gun the weapon You know, it reminds you of the kind of classic

trope about, you know, the politician has just been caught in a major scandal and

...