Euphemistic labeling lets industries obscure the harm they do

Evidence

The television industry cloaks violence in innocuous language. The term violence rarely appears in the vocabularies of media personnel. Rather, sanitized labels such as “action and adventure” programming are used in its place. … This shifts the focus from the violent substance to generic program packaging devoid of humanity. Requests for more violence are camouflaged in inoffensive code words such as excitement. Here is the sanitized call for more violence: “Put in more excitement.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 839

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Illustrates euphemistic labeling, the mechanism where sanitized language drains conduct of its harmful meaning.
  • XREF: Euphemistic relabeling links to vault claims on how policy language sanitizes Islamophobic enforcement as ‘public safety’ or ‘security’ measures. — connects to: Rhetorical unmasking of euphemism is central to exposing industrial harm — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 8; Euphemistic names let dispersants double as biocides compounding harm — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 830
  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 839