A media watchdog group will soon mark the fourth anniversary of its quixotic campaign to convince newspaper writers and editors to cease using the word “kerfuffle” in headlines and articles.
“It saddens me to admit that we have made little headway. ‘Kerfuffle’ is just as prevalent as ever in the print media,” said Marty Neederhosen, president of the Society to Curb Repugnant and Unctuous Erudition (SCRUE). “It’s as if all the headlines writers formed a cabal and agreed to ignore us. Every time you turn around the loathsome word is staring out at you from a newspaper page. It’s even in their online editions.”
On the brighter side, however, Neederhosen said SCRUE’s outreach program aimed at television and radio news directors and writers appears to be very successful.
“Our media monitoring staff has yet to find a single instance of the use of ‘kerfuffle’ in any local station or network or cable news broadcast.” he said. “Television journalists appear to be much more responsible about the use of ‘kerfuffle’ than their print colleagues.”
Neederhosen said SCRUE has encountered a few instances of “kerfuffle” in Sunday morning network television talk shows where guests discuss politics.
“However, our studies show that every single utterance of ‘kerfuffle’ came from the lips of a print journalist,” he said. “Either it’s in their genes and they can’t help themselves, or they just don’t give a flying you-know-what about proper usage of the English language.”
Neederhosen said the “vast majority” of the Sunday morning “kerfuffle” utterances came from reporters for The New York Tiimes or the Wall Street Journal.
“If Rupert Murdoch gets his hands on the Wall Street Journal, I think we might make some headway there with stamping out ‘kerfuffle’,” Neederhosen said. “You almost never see ‘kerfuffle’ used in the New York Post.”
SCRUE’s kerfuffle campaign first gained national attention in 2003 when the group protested with picket lines in New York City. Members would don bulky dictionary costumes and march to and fro on sidewalks carrying anti-kerfuffle signs.
An early protest targeted the Wall Street Journal’s use of “kerfuffle” to describe the budding controversy after someone in the Bush Administration leaked to the media the fact that Valarie Plame was an undercover CIA operative. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was ultimately convicted of lying to a grand jury and President Bush the commuted Libby’s prison sentence.
“You could hardly call that a ‘kerfuffle’,” Neederhosen crows. “Our studies show that virtually every time the print media uses ‘kerfuffle’ to describe something, you can bet it will balloon into a really big affair.
“One of these days when we get some time, SCRUE plans to go back and analyze newspaper coverage of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq,” he said. “We will find plenty of examples where reporters or editorial writers used ‘kerfuffle’ to describe the invasion of Iraq. You’d be hard pressed now to think of Iraq as a kerfuffle.”