Government agencies deliberately sanitize language to suppress public alarm about environmental hazards

Evidence

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sanitized its lexicon to neutralize public perception of environmental hazards (Rogers & Kincaid, 1981). In this linguistic cleansing operation, a senior official at the agency banished the word hazard because it is “a trigger word that excites the American public needlessly” (Stiff, 1982). The justification for keeping people uninformed about carcinogens and other toxic chemicals in their environment was to spare them unnecessary uneasiness. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2683

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader moral disengagement theme already established in earlier chapters on euphemistic labeling
• ADDENDUM: The EPA’s renaming of the Office of Hazardous Emergency Response connects to regulatory capture and how institutions soften risk communication, tangentially related to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s infrastructure theme.