Last week I was watching ABC’s World News Tonight when anchor David Muir reported that a comatose woman in an Arizona facility gave birth to a boy. The woman had been in a vegetative state for 14 years so it was easy to conclude that she had been raped. Oddly, Muir continued to report that “local police are determined to find the father, gathering DNA from male workers at the facility”
“The father?” What a strange and inaccurate appellation to use for the man who raped an unconscious woman.
Newscasts are planned, discussed, written, then edited. They are not spontaneous utterances by an anchor. Writers and producers must approve the ‘scripts’ before they go up on the monitor for the news anchor to read. A bevy of smart, savvy professionals at ABC saw ‘the father’ in writing and no one thought to edit it out. No one thought to change ‘the father’ to the correct appellation: ‘the rapist.’
ABC World News Tonight is a mainstream 30 minute news program with nearly 8 million nightly viewers. It is not a niche cable station. ABC wants to appeal to as many viewers as possible.
I can’t help but wonder, did ABC intentionally choose to characterize the woman’s assailant as ‘the father’ over ‘the rapist’ so that the story would appeal to a mainstream audience? Does calling a rapist a rapist offend a mainstream audience? Or, despite reading from a script, perhaps David Muir made a mistake? He misspoke. It could happen to anyone, right? Okay, but if it was a slip of the tongue, why land in this particular way, turning a rapist into ‘the father’ as opposed to landing another way, like calling the rapist ‘the attacker’ or ‘the assaulter?’
There’s another possibility which I believe is more likely. We live enmeshed in a rape culture and aren’t conscious of how words are used to hide this reality.
World News Tonight’s staff’s use of ‘father’ vs ‘rapist’ was probably unconscious. Their mistake simply mirrors the culture’s inability to take violence against women seriously. By using a word that possesses positive associations (i.e. father), the crime’s brutality gets softened in our collective imagination. It’s an unconscious cover up of sorts, an attempt to re-characterize sexual violence into something more palatable. It makes us more receptive to accepting rape as just something that on occasion happens to women instead of the urgent public safety issue that it is. Words matter.
DarkSexism 
I never fail to be amazed at the power of language. Words are power. Powerful words create an effect. Father is powerful. Rapist is powerful. The question is what effect does the writer want to create.
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Here is a news story: a Baby came out of a comatose woman. “Who’s the father?” was the first question that came to my mind. Non-consensual sex, that is, rape, was a given. I agree with Ms. Turley: what effect does the writer want to create? The baby does have a mystery father, who is also a rapist. Is the story about rape? About an extraordinary labor/delivery? Or about oblivious caregivers who overlooked a pregnancy? The emphasis is arbitrary.
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Once again Gay you enlightendly pointed out something I didn’t even notice. When I read the story, the article probably used the word father and it didn’t seem inappropriate to me. But I can see how it could feel that way to you, as it now does to me on some levels. However, probably on a subconscious level, the reporters are trying to respect the honor of the baby by acknowledging that s/he has a father, no matter how heinous the act was. That the baby is not just born of a rapist. He or she will probably look up articles about how s/he was conceived and in this situation words do matter as well.
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Apparently, from what I have read, there are other people who felt that the language should have been stronger, calling the incident “sexual assault” and emphasizing that aspect with regard to the attacker. Most of the news articles I’ve read refer to the rapist/father as “the suspect”, which I think speaks to the criminality of the act. Interesting that the CEO of the facility promptly stepped down. I’ve wondered whether the rape could have been committed by a visitor even. Vulnerable patients will be safer with the new measures that will go into effect, so good will come out of this.
I know that this is not directly related to the subject of the blog, but the baby has been on my mind: starting life with a comatose mother and an absent rapist father. I was happy to learn that the woman’s family wants to give this little one a loving home.
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