The Doublespeak Awards (1975-2008)

2008 President George W. Bush

The term "aspirational goal”: George W. Bush has used the term "aspirational goal" in place of setting a deadline for withdrawal of troops in Iraq. Likewise, Bush, members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, and others have set "aspirational goals" for reducing carbon emissions and slowing global warming. In announcing the award, the NCTE Public Language Award Committee said, “As textbook Doublespeak, ‘aspirational goal’ is both a tautology and a paradox. Aspirations and goals are the same thing; and yet when the terms are combined, the effect is to undermine them both, producing a phrase that means, in effect, ‘a goal to which one does not aspire all that much.’ The goal of ‘aspirational goal,’ clearly, is to disguise inaction and thwart legitimate aspirations.”

2007 Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

In April 2007, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified to the U.S. Senate with regard to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by his office. "I'm here today to do my part to ensure that all facts about this matter are brought to light," Gonzales said. "These are not the actions of someone with something to hide."

However, the NCTE Public Language Award Committee states, "Gonzales's Senate testimony turned out to be a masterpiece of evasion and obfuscation: he insisted that the firings were not politically motivated, while professing not to recall very much about individual cases—or even the meetings or the conversations in which the firings were discussed. In response to questioning by Senator Edward Kennedy, Mr. Gonzales said, 'Senator, I have in my mind a recollection as to knowing as to some of these United States attorneys. There are two that I do not recall knowing in my mind what I understood to be the reasons for the removal.'"

2006 President George W. Bush

For his Jackson Square speech on Hurricane Katrina and disaster relief. During Bush’s September 15 address, he remarked,
 
“As all of us saw on television, there's also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality.” 

However, a week before the President’s speech, he signed an executive order suspending the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, thereby allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage. 

2005 Philip A. Cooney, White House Council on Environmental Quality

Philip A. Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is the recipient of the 2005 Doublespeak Award from NCTE. “In his editing of scientific reports, Philip Cooney exemplifies a commitment to doublespeak, the subtle art of massaging language to deflect the public’s attention from the truth,” says Dennis Baron, chair of the NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak. 

By using well-placed modifiers and hedges, the nomination says, Cooney supported the Bush administration’s inaction and undermined international attempts to improve global warming. Although extreme weather, glacier melting, and ecological changes serve to document the reality of global warming and have hindered his attempts to claim otherwise, Cooney “nonetheless has been effective in slowing down human corrective action.”

The nomination also notes that after Cooney resigned (“a day after his work was made public”), he was immediately hired by Exxon Mobil. 

2004 The Bush Administration

President George W. Bush, for the second year in a row, has set a high standard for his team by the inspired invention of the phrase "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" to describe what has yet to be seen.... Bush also won for his creative use of language in public statements regarding the reasons why the United States needed to pursue war against Iraq—for unsubstantiated statements, for the lack of evidentiary support, and for the purported manipulation of intelligence data.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s description of the widespread torture at Abu Ghraib as "the excesses of human nature that humanity suffers" (3) was brilliantly mind-befuddling. The Secretary is well served by a Pentagon that erased terms like the Vietnam era "body bag" which became "human remains pouches" during the Gulf War and is now known as "transfer tubes," (4) the transfer of which are to be kept from media sight."

2003 President George W. Bush

"Bush won for his creative use of language in public statements regarding the reasons why the United States needed to pursue war against Iraq—for unsubstantiated statements, for the lack of evidentiary support, and for the purported manipulation of intelligence data." For more, see: NCTE News Release

2002 New York State Board of Regents for its "politically correct" and silent editing of state tests.

2001 Department of Defense (for creatively reporting the Missile Defense Systems test failures as: "every flight is a success")

2000 The Tobacco Industry

1999 National Rifle Association

1998 Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

1997 President Bill Clinton, Trent Lott, and Newt Gingrich (for obfuscating language in the balanced budget agreement)

1996 Joe Klein, Primary Colors (about this journalist concealing his authorship )

1995 Newt Gingrich (about the euphemisms and omissions in the "Republican Contract with America")

1994 Rush Limbaugh (about his grossly deceptive language as a radio and TV commentator)

1993 Department of Defense (based on the GAO report about the DOD misrepresentations to mislead Congress)

1992 President George Bush (about his language related to the Gulf War, education, and taxes)

1991 Department of Defense (about the obfuscation, jargon, and euphemisms of the Gulf War)

1990 President George Bush (about wetlands, Panama invasion, Tiananmen Square, and "no new taxes")

1989 The Exxon Corporation (about the "Exxon Valdez" oil spill obfuscation )

1988 Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci (about the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes)

1987 Lt. Col. Oliver North (about the obfuscation and cover-up of the Iran-Contra affair)

1986 NASA (about the space shuttle Challenger explosion)

1985 CIA (about the Psychological Warfare Manual prepared for the Nicaraguan war)

1984 U.S. State Department (for its euphemisms in its Human Rights reports, and Grenada invasion)

1983 President Ronald Reagan (for the "Peacekeeper" missile, and Nicaraguan statements)

1982 Republican National Committee (for inaccurately crediting Reagan with Social Security reforms)

1981 Alexander Haig, Secretary of State (for obfuscation of the murder of three American nuns in El Salvador)

1980 President-Elect Ronald Reagan (for gross misrepresentations of his record during the campaign)

1979 The Nuclear Power Industry (for its euphemisms and jargon during the Three Mile Island accident)

1978 Earl Clinton Bolton (for CIA memo suggesting ways to use language to conceal and obfuscate)

1977 The Pentagon and the Energy Department (for language cover-up of the neutron bomb development)

1976 Yasar Arafat, PLO leader (for seemingly contradictory language about Israel)

1975 Colonel David Opfer, USAF Press Officer in Cambodia, to reporters, after a raid: "You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing. It's not bombing! It's air support!"

"The Quarterly Review of Doublespeak has a unique history and also a unique civic function of providing useful information to the wider body politic. Anyone could quibble over the value of any individual item in QRD; yet, collectively, the QRD has provided an extremely valuable record and a collection of examples of language manipulation for the past quarter century, 1972-1997. No other period of American history has such timely documentation of such language as that provided by the nearly-100 issues of the QRD.

Imagine how valuable such a collection of the quarter century from 1917-1941 would have been. That era between World War 1 and World War 2 also stirred some academic interest about advertising, propaganda, and political language: witness the NEA's 1920 statements and the 1937 "IPA List" ("Glittering Generalities...") by the short-lived Institute for Propaganda Analysis. But, no academic group then was as long sustained and as publicly known as the Doublespeak Committee, 1972-1997.

The Doublespeak Awards, for example, were often controversial within the NCTE each year; but, in retrospect, have proven to be remarkably on target identifying major episodes of language manipulation." --- Hugh Rank