Today’s article in the Wall Street Journal — ‘Latinos not the plague of society as previously believed‘ — is an excellent example of why I hammered away at my students year after year about their media deconstruction skills. It’s not even necessary to be aware of the retrograde politics of the Wall Street Journal to locate this article appropriately: it’s all there from word one of the headline. Beyond the basic shocked premise of the article and before we get to the ‘shoulda built that wall when ya had the chance’ quote, we know exactly where we stand with this paper.

The authors could have chosen any word to describe the burgeoning Latino/a population in the United States: growth, expansion, increase. There are myriad forward-looking pro-development progress-marches-on ways of describing the data, both neutral and positive. The Wall Street Journal chose ‘surge.’ Surge. In this way we are encouraged to link the normal event of people having children with the insurgency — a beaut of a connotation-laden reality-twisting label right there — we’re told nearly every day is a threat to our lives in the United States.

These types of linguistic sleights of hand are so pervasive that they’re easy to miss and tempting to ignore; yet, if you read the paper every day you might end up sounding like Polly-the-right-wing-parrot to those of us who actively don’t. I wish I could say that an education in media literacy created an army of deconstructionist lefties out of my students, but it generally did not. The two biggest points I would have likely heard in their analyses would have been: (1) The Wall Street Journal hates Latino/as, and (2) surge is a stupid word, don’t use it.

While I can’t say I disagree fundamentally on either point, I hold out hope for more nuanced understandings with each example I am compelled to point out. In the meantime, I combine both points into a rule of life that works well for me: The Wall Street Journal is a stupid paper, don’t read it.