The Passive Sentence and Vague Attribution: Ian Thomsen

Wages of Wins directed my attention to a statement by SI's Ian Thomsen about the NBA Finals:

"I'm not going to say that the Cavaliers are incapable of upsetting the Spurs--not after watching them put down the supposedly unbeatable Pistons."

It's an odd statement: were the Pistons "supposedly unbeatable"? Who was calling the Pistons "unbeatable"? While the majority of people may have predicted the Pistons to win (I'm not sure), I don't recall seeing anybody claiming the Pistons were actually unbeatable. That's a vague attribution.

But wait: let's see what Thomsen wrote about the Pistons on April 25th:

“No team with a better chance of winning the championship is more ignored or less appreciated than the Pistons.”

“Now his Pistons are being written off for their failure to pummel Orlando in their current first-round series. […] Such is the evidence that Detroit is headed down the same ambivalent alley as last year. Speculation has it that Chicago, Miami, Cleveland or New Jersey will be able to exploit the Pistons’ telltale failure to finish games early and often.”

“A year ago they were everybody’s favorite; now they’re an afterthought.”

Hmm. A month ago, Thomsen wrote about how the Pistons were underrated, overlooked, written off, and underestimated. The general perception, according to Thomsen, is that the Pistons aren't that good, or at the very least, that they're not getting attention for being good.

And then on June 5th, after the Pistons have been defeated, Thomsen calls the Pistons "supposedly unbeatable."

Which is it? Were most people overlooking the Pistons and expecting them to lose, or were most people viewing Detroit as "unbeatable"?

Thomsen is presenting a supposedly widely held idea without actually attributing it to anybody. Writers will often do this with the use of passive sentences. A passive sentence puts the verb in front of the subject ("The game was won by me"), or removes the subject entirely ("The team was thought to be bad"). When the subject is removed, there is a vague attribution to nobody in particular, and this often implies a large or universal subject. For example, if I say "John thinks Bill is a thief," that is very direct: John thinks Bill is a thief. However, if I say "Bill is perceived to be a thief," that is vague. Since there is no specific subject noted, the subject could be anybody...or everybody. When I say "Bill is perceived to be a thief," I'm implying that there might be a large number of people that believe Bill is a thief.

Thomsen uses at least two such passive sentences in the April 25th column: "his Pistons are being written off," which is clearly passive (written off by whom?), and "Speculation has it that...," which turns "speculation" itself into a subject so that no person doing the speculating is identified. Since no specific subject is listed, you are free to assume that everybody, or a majority, or at least a large group of people is writing off the Pistons or speculating their demise.

The presentation of a supposedly widely held idea without actual attribution is bothersome enough. But over the course of a little over a month, Thomsen reverses his vague attribution. He had written about a vague entity that supposedly underrated the Pistons; now he writes about a vague entity that supposedly believed the Pistons were unbeatable.

Not only does Thomsen use passive sentences and other vague syntax to make a claim that he doesn't verify, but he actually switches from one vaguely attributed perception to a completely opposite vaguely attributed perception.