The media get their due

The semester is winding down, and the grading is heating up. I'm almost through with my second group of papers of the day. I've run across many errors, of course, but two stand out because they are so common.

The first is the misuse of the word "media." It's an important word for us journalists, and when students mess it up we tend to get angry. "No, no," you say. "The Cranky Copy Editor gets angry?" It's a fact. I do. On with our post.

The word media is plural. This seems to be a difficult concept for students to grasp, but it's true. Contrary to popular belief, the following is grammatically correct:

The media are quite influential.

Media is the plural form of "medium." So this is also correct:

My favorite medium is newspapers.

This is confusing because most English words are made plural by adding "s," and this is an exception. But it's one journalism and mass communications students should know.

The second error I've encountered a lot today is noun-pronoun disagreement. In English, pronouns must agree with the nouns they follow. For instance, in the following sentence, the pronoun does not agree with its noun:

A reporter needs to keep their opinions out of the stories they write.

We're only talking about one reporter, so the word is singular. Therefore, the pronoun that follows should be "his or her," not "their." An easy way to fix this is to change "reporter" to "reporters," as in the following:

Reporters need to keep their opinions out of the stories they write.

I tend to suggest this change to avoid the cumbersome use of "his or her," as in the following:

A reporter needs to keep his or her opinions out of the stories he or she writes.

I tell my students to avoid the use of "he" when gender is not known because it's sexist. But that's a topic for another post. ...