It seems to happen every few years: someone notices something that feels off about an otherwise unremarkable news headline and shares their observations online. Then, millions of people on social media join them in condemning the publication in question, accusing it of bias and unethical practices. The sticking point? Passive voice.
For most people, active and passive voice are concepts they might not have heard since school English classes. In journalism, however, they can impact how a news story is presented. The passive voice will centre the object of the story — so it will focus on who or what something has been done to. The active voice will instead focus on the person or thing doing the action.
Knowing the difference is vital, says Greta Solomon, a freelance journalist with 15 years of experience: “Fully understanding the differences means that you can use each one deliberately as a tool. It means that you can be in control of exactly what you want to communicate.”
Knowing When To Use The Active And Passive Voice
Generally, writing advice advocates using the active voice as much as possible. Greta explains: “When you orient sentences around verbs and the people acting out the verbs, your writing has more life. It becomes more engaging and, depending on the other techniques you employ, it has the potential to jump off the page.”
Greta Solomon is an experienced freelance journalist (Image Credit: Supplied)
However, there are times when the passive voice could be the right grammatical choice. In longer, in-depth features, it could be used sparingly to create mystery.
Or, more practically, Greta cites “patterns, trends, or behaviours [where] you either don’t know the origin of them or are not at liberty to say [due to legal restrictions]”. For example, if writing about theft, you may have to say ‘classic cars were stolen’ as you don’t know who stole them. Sometimes, it’s easy to infer what’s happened; if someone was arrested, it was likely by police officers, so the passive headline captured the important information.
Centering victims can also explain some passive-voice headlines. For example, when people are killed in a natural disaster, a respectful focus on the victims could lead to a headline such as ‘1,000 dead in tsunami’ instead of ‘tsunami kills 1,000 people’. Stephen J. A. Ward, a journalism ethics expert and author of Objectively Engaged Journalism, says this practice is common. For him, it only becomes “ethically worrisome” when it minimises acts of aggression committed by people or organisations, pulling the focus away from the people responsible.
When The Passive Voice Becomes Problematic
It’s a practice that’s come into sharp focus during recent years, with accusations of pro-Israel bias levied at a number of British and American news outlets as the Gaza conflict has escalated — but this isn’t a new claim. Research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Holly Jackson in 2023 analysed more than 33,000 New York Times articles between 1987 and 2005. It found articles used negative language and the passive voice to refer to Palestinians twice as often as Israelis.
In the UK, a 2024 report by the Centre for Media Monitoring found that Israelis are 11 times more likely to be referred to as victims of attacks in TV headlines than Palestinians, with deaths of Palestinians sometimes qualified with phrases such as “what they say is a massacre.”
"When you orient sentences around verbs and the people acting out the verbs, your writing has more life. It becomes more engaging and, depending on the other techniques you employ, it has the potential to jump off the page.”
Greta Solomon
Passive voice has also led to criticism in other areas of reporting. Julie Hollar is a senior analyst at FAIR.org, an American non-profit media watchdog. She says the two main instances they see of passive-voice misuse are in international stories where the US and its allies are perpetrators of violence and in domestic stories about police violence.
For example, a post on X, formerly Twitter, from The Gothamist in September 2024 used the phrase “shot by New York Police Department bullets”, rather than saying they were shot by police. It attracted hundreds of comments, with one user asking: “How exactly does a bullet shoot someone?”
Media guidelines from domestic abuse charities Level Up and Zero Tolerance also caution against the use of passive voice in headlines. Using an example headline of ‘woman died of compression of the neck’, the Zero Tolerance guidelines explain: “Passive voice suggests that violence ‘just happened’, making the perpetrator invisible.
“[The] passive voice in this headline overlooks the fact that the perpetrator murdered the victim. Violence is always a conscious choice of the perpetrator.” Instead, it recommends headlines such as “man murdered a woman” or “the perpetrator killed the victim by strangling her.”
The Passive Voice Can Deflect Blame From Perpetrators
“We so often see headlines that shift the blame for abuse away from the perpetrator,” writes Hannah Storm, a journalist and the founder and former CEO of the Ethical Journalism Network. “We also see journalists defaulting to the use of the passive voice — ‘she was raped’, for instance, rather than ‘he raped her’ — which again deflects the blame from the perpetrator, implying the behaviour was not a result of a choice made. This means that those who experience abuse often find it very difficult to talk about their experiences and it may take them many years to do so.”
But, just how does this use of the passive voice creep in? For some, it might be a lack of explicit training. Greta explains: “This may be a bad habit carried over from academia, where you’re taught to write in the passive voice, to distance yourself from what you’re writing. You may even subconsciously do so, if you’re writing about something personal, that’s close to the bone.” This subconscious choice could also be influenced by your worldviews and lived experience.
At other times, it could be deliberate. “Journalists fear being accused by some readers of bias,” Stephen says. “[It’s often used] when journalists or their news organisations want to tippy-toe around a sensitive story, to avoid saying what is true.” Often, he says, journalists will end up in the passive voice to try and avoid taking a stance, in an effort to report objectively. However, this can make the truth harder to see by using a softer characterisation of events.
Hannah Storm (L) and Julie Hollar (R).
John Ransom is a former editor of the independent news website The Canary and agrees that fear is often at the heart of the problem. “The biggest fear for any journalist is that you bankrupt your organisation by saying the wrong thing and landing it in a massive lawsuit,” he says. John believes constant awareness of legal risks creates overly risk-averse journalists and editors. The danger then, he argues, is that those instincts will kick into a higher gear “when you’re dealing with entities you know to be either litigious or powerful, or normally both”. For individual journalists, John thinks this is largely subconscious. However, at an editorial level, he’s less sure.
Publishers in the UK are usually bound by a regulator’s code. The two biggest regulators are IPSO and Impress and, collectively, they cover thousands of newspapers and websites across the UK. The IMPRESS Standards Code states its member publications must “take reasonable steps to ensure accuracy” and not “misrepresent or distort facts”. IPSO also issues similar guidance, adding that publishers should avoid “headlines not supported by the text”.
However, passive headlines aren’t usually inaccurate. But this misses the point, Julie says: “Accuracy isn’t the only thing we need from journalism in order to be informed. These kinds of headlines obscure the facts rather than reveal them, and protect those in positions of power rather than hold them to account.”
"The passive voice is exactly that: passive. It's going out of its way to be well-behaved."
John Ransom, Editor
Impress confirmed to Journo Resources that while there is no specific guidance or clauses regarding passive voice in headlines, its Code states that “headlines have the potential to mislead in isolation”. So, if passive voice “creates a false impression for the reader”, this could be considered a breach. It adds that there are no current plans to add passive voice guidelines, but that its Code Committee will continue to monitor the issue.
Creating An Intentional Writing And Editing Process
So, what is the solution? For John, it comes down to editorial organisations making and enforcing their own rules. He says The Canary’s policy was always to use active voice; not because of the passive voice’s potential for misrepresentation, but because “the passive voice is exactly that: passive”. It says it’s less engaging and “going out of its way to be well-behaved”, which didn’t match the website’s tone.
However, he also says this worked in part because they weren’t trying to be apolitical. For editors, he suggests brushing up on their media law to have confidence when making editorial decisions. “Anyone who’s in editorial needs to get their copy of McNae’s Law for Journalists,” he urges.
Stephen agrees that more work should be done on developing explicit protocols and norms around passive voice, which journalists should be part of. He calls this a “legitimate and timely development of journalism ethics in a global world”, which would allow for a better understanding and awareness of when it’s controversial. He adds: “We need to redefine its aims and principles as a democratically engaged practice of global import which is both engaged and devoted to reporting as much of the truth as we can determine.”
For Julie, it’s also about being aware of when this is most likely to happen; often, she says, when there’s a “reason to obfuscate a powerful person, government, or company’s responsibility for something”. So, when reporting on such areas, it’s always worth a check-in with yourself. She also thinks it’s important to keep flagging when it happens. “ Drawing attention to it can help the broader public to become more critical media consumers,” she adds.
For Greta, good, engaging writing comes down to making conscious choices. “The best thing to do is to go through your article and ask yourself: do the words jump off the page? Do they ask to be read? If not, then it’s likely that the passive voice has crept in. If you’re not sure how or where it has, look for the verbs in each sentence, and if you can’t find them — put them in. Start to train yourself to be intentional.”
Lucy Jolliff
Lucy Jolliff is a recent graduate of the University of Hull with a first-class degree in American Studies. She is part of the 2024/25 Journo Resources Fellowship.
Alongside her studies, Lucy has written entertainment news for CBR.com and been involved with student journalism on both sides of the Atlantic: for the University of Hull’s The Hullfire and, while studying abroad in the US, Washington College’s The Elm.
Passionate about the arts and culture, Lucy is also a proud former intern of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Hull-based theatre company Middle Child.
