Is the press finally wising up to the GOP’s word-game shenanigans? 

Perhaps so.

You’ll probably remember that it wasn’t long ago that Republican supporters of Social Security privatization called their program, logically enough, “privatization.” But that was before the focus-group reports came back with news that Americans didn’t support “privatizing” Social Security and didn’t much care for politicians who do.

Before long, even the staunchest supporter of the policy formerly known as “privatization” wouldn’t go near the word. The Cato Institute rechristened its privatization effort “The Project on Social Security Choice.” And for a brief, shining moment, anti-Social Security Republicans embraced “private accounts” as their new approved vocabulary and set out to hound any reporters who dared to claim they had ever supported anything so dastardly as “privatization.”

Only that didn’t pan out with the focus groups either.

It turned out the public didn’t like “private accounts” either. And so there was yet another change. The GOP word mavens announced that what Republicans really supported were “personal accounts.”

On a radio show in late January, GOP pollster Frank Luntz actually told me that, while Democrats were free to use the phrase “private accounts,” it would be inappropriate for members of the press to do so because using the derogatory phrase “private accounts” constituted prima facie evidence of liberal media bias. (Go figure!)

Before long, the ever-dutiful Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” was reduced to calling them “private personal accounts” in a hapless effort to keep everyone pleased.

In any case, watching these developments unfold, it isn’t too difficult to discern a pattern: at some point not too long after a GOP policy proposal starts to tank, specially trained GOP diction squads fan over Capitol Hill and the prestige newsrooms, banning some words and introducing other new ones that come with an embossed Republican National Committee seal of approval.

And it’s not enough that card-carrying Republicans stop using the old vocabulary. Everything else is supposed to, too.

All of this was on my mind last Friday when I started getting reports from newsrooms of a crackdown on the term “nuclear option.” In memos that seemed to be circulating in multiple news organizations, the word was going out to reporters and producers that using the phrase “nuclear option” to refer to ending the judicial filibuster was in fact a Democratic slur and should by no means be used — unless it was to quote Democrats uttering the smear.

A blast e-mail I got from the conservative Center for Individual Freedom went so far as to say that the “constitutional option” had only been “dubbed ‘nuclear’ by the liberal media.”

By Saturday, no less a liberal media stalwart than The New York Times was dutifully noting that “Democrats call [ending the judicial filibuster] the nuclear option, while Republicans call this a constitutional option.” And by Monday, virtually the entire news media seemed to be falling in line behind the new Republican diction diktat.

And worse (or maybe just more hilarious) was yet to come. Some folks had apparently been spun so hard they forgot what “nuclear option” referred to. No less a worthy than NBC’s Chip Reid told Don Imus on Monday morning: “Democrats are saying, ‘If you’re going to [end the filibuster], then we are going to pull the trigger on what we call the nuclear option, meaning we are going to shut this place down. We’re going to turn the Senate into a legislative wasteland.’”

So, according to Reid, the “nuclear option” had morphed into what Democrats said they would do in response to the nuclear option.

Now, one thing I’ve always liked about writing for you denizens of Capitol Hill who read The Hill is that you have ears. And since you do, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, you and I both know that you’ve been hearing Bill Frist and Trent Lott and all the rest of them for months now talking about the “nuclear option.” So when Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman’s spin police send out the word that “nuclear option” is some sort of term of abuse cooked up by Democrats, you’re really not likely to be fooled. And that means I don’t have to cart out a long list of old quotes to set the record straight.

But, amazingly enough, the press now seems to have gotten wise too.

By Monday evening, NBC’s Reid was on the “Nightly News” correcting his “nuclear option” flub. And just yesterday, NPR — which had fallen for the “nuclear option” flimflam the previous day — was correcting itself too.

This time, it seems, a chorus of citizen Orwells around the country rose up and told members of the media not to roll over when the Republican newspeak mavens come calling. Or maybe the reporters themselves were just fed up.

Let’s see if it’s the beginning of a trend.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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