Passive headline syntax downplays ingroup responsibility for harmful acts

Evidence

Also the syntax of headlines may thus be biased in favor of the ingroup, for instance, when passive constructions diminish their responsibility for negative actions. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1090

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete example of how syntactic choices (passive vs active voice) encode ideological bias at the micro-linguistic level.
• ADDENDUM: Could support a follow-up to the media framing discussion — how grammar itself, not just content, distributes blame and agency.
• XREF: connects to: Technocratic report genres enable megadam harm by masking intent in affectless language — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 472