A Word Gone Mad

What is "the media"? Usually, a contumacious cliche. Often, a grammatical abomination. The word is eternally plural -- literally, more than one "medium." In the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review] University of Wisconsin Communication Professor George Bailey deplores the persistent and growing tendency to use the word with singular incorrectness. Echoing a TIME Essay (June 7, 1971), he attributes that offense to something more ominous than doubtful command of the mother tongue. "People who write or say 'The media is against Nixon' or 'The media exploits children' actually conceptualize the media as a singular, unitary entity -- a force, often sinister."

It may occasionally be appropriate to discuss what the nation's news organizations have in common, but they are as dissimilar as snowflakes in their size, influence, outlook, purpose, ownership and audience. That diversity is too of ten overlooked these days, as the editors of CJR proved convincingly in the same issue. Not counting Bailey's one-page lament, the word "media" is used at least 24 times as a monolithic collective, and two of those references are grammatically faulty.

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