News of the Bear: Media Language

[SleepyWitch]

hm, I hope this hasn't been done before....
i've got an example of weird media language that I'd like to share with you...
the other day, a stray bear caused some concern in Germany. he came down from the Alps and killed some chickens in Bavaria (state in Germany). on a public (i.e. highbrow) newschannel on the radio it said the following things about the bear:
- that he had immigrated from Austria (for the benefit of any native speakers in here: "der aus Österreich eingewanderte Bär")
- a chicken farm that he had raided ("überfallen") was described as the
scene of the crime ("Tatort"), also this raid was to be his doom/ he tripped himself over raiding the farm ("wurde ihm zum Verhängnis")....

i dunno about the English words, but the German ones normally don't go together with animals... especially not "immigrated" (eingewandert) and "scene of the crime" (Tatort)....
do you have any explanations for this weird usage???? (I do, but I'd like to see your ideas first)....
do you have any examples of strange language usage in the media?

[Logos]

It's all about movement from one point to another. In my English opinion ;) .. migrate would be better used in reference to animal movement which is often seasonal and/or transitory. Most common use is reference to birds migrating.

immigration usually suggests movement of people and the bureaucratic/legal process to settle within a political boundary they are not native to. For example people from Britain immigrated to North American colonies.

Less commonly used is emigrate: see above.

Well I would say they are anthropomorphising by ascribing human tendencies to the bear, that its "scene of the crime" for "raiding" a chicken coop is unnatural or something, when in reality we all know carnivores eat other animals, and don't happen to obey our laws of property. But it gives humans an excuse to kill it :(

I think it's also a case of sensationalising "news", which journos are wont to do in order to get attention. It must have been a slow news day or something :lol:

[SleepyWitch]

hehe, nope it wasn't a slow news day at all... there were lots of other things going on....
plus, as I said it's a highbrow public station.. they don't normally sensationalize, although I'm sure there's an element of this in there too...
what i was driving at, was that these days there's a growing fear of immigrants (human ones) down here in Bavaria, e.g. immigrants are (unjustly) associated with crime)... so i thought maybe some expressions from the immigration debate were transferred to the bear issue....
it was hilarious, in a way,... it really sounded as if they were talking about a foreign criminal and i half way expected them to say that the bear will be expelled from Germany or that he's an illegal alien and should be extradited to Austria or something :lol:

[mono]

I definitely agree with what Logos had to say - 'migrate' rather than 'immigrate' (though I never noticed how different those words seem from only two letters), and also the use of language as a way of rather over-relating animals with humans in such humanistic terms.
One thing among a lot of American newspapers, I have noticed the extensive use of passive verbs, such as "The criminal will be sentenced in court" rather than "An honorable judge will sentence the criminal to a local prison," which sounds much more thorough, in my opinion. A previous writing instructor of mine noticed this, too, and thought of it as a way of either never giving too much information, keeping the subject of the newspaper article on the "criminal" (for example), or just not doing the research. :p

[Themis]

As for the usage of "scene of crime" (Tatort) ... In German the word "Tatort" isn't only used in connection with crimes. The English translation is misleading.

[Als "Tatort" wird ein Ort bezeichnet, an dem sich etwas ereignet. Dieses Ereignis muss nicht zwangsläufig ein von Menschen getätigtes Vergehen oder Verbrechen sein. ]

By the way, chickens? I heard he killed sheep.

[SleepyWitch]

yep, he killed both sheep and chickens i think...

er.. as for the Tatort.. would you call the place where a festival takes place a Tatort then? like Der Tatort des Oktoberfests ist die Wiesen?
or would you say when to people meet this happens at a Tatort?
i admit the translation is a bit misleading.. but I'll look up the German collocations in a corpus later on to make sure

[Logos]

Hunter kills first Bavarian bear seen in 170 years (http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyid=2006-06-26T175005Z_01_L26518816_RTRUKOC_0_US-GERMANY-BEAR.xml&src=rss&rpc=22)

""If this is to be the yardstick for the right to life of brown bears then the outlook is bleak for European bears."

I guess this is the same bear? :(

[SleepyWitch]

yep, that's him, poor sod, he was shot yesterday... now he is going to be stuffed and exhibited at a museum...
they killed him from a distance of 120m because the didn't get close enough to him to stun him (30m)...
some people are very upset about this and think they should have waited a little longer and stunned him
there have even been death threads against the Bavarian government by environmetalists!!

hehe, the other day the newsanchor on ZDF (public TV channel) confirmed my hypothesis...
She said "The immigrant, initially seen as an enrichment to local culture has turned into a violent criminal in the public immagination" and only mentioned the bear after this opening line... so she was poking fun at the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric i mentioned

[Themis]

there have even been death threads against the Bavarian government by environmetalists!!

And against the hunters that shot the bear. That's why they are not saying who did it.

Edit: As for the crime scene ... what I meant was: for a location to be a "Tatort" (crime scene) there doesn't have to happen an actual crime. Crimes are committed by people nowadays. I may have put it wrong.

[SleepyWitch]

ok, i think i've got it now :)
(I've posted this msg before.. where did it go? stupid computer!)

sooooo, does anyone else have examples of weird language usage in the media?