words: Media

Media

YOU probably thought media was a noun, and so did I till I read the press accounts of Stephen Dorrell's Green Paper on cross-media ownership. Among some 50 mentions of the word,in all but half-a-dozen it was a rather graceless little adjective. An indignant Times leader spoke of media companies, media holdings and media portfolios, media proprietors and "creative media business". The Telegraph was among the few that gave us the straight noun ("the media"), as was the Independent, which also carried the grand phrase "global on-line multi-media information service".

Hang on, though. Shouldn't that have been "multi-medium", as in multigrade (not "multigrades") oil? A medium, from the Latin for "middle", is an agent of transmission, and media implies more than one of them; and surely you shouldn't say "the media is"? There is some sad confusion here, as the Independent itself showed when it reported Mr Dorrell's paper as saying that "a free and diverse media are an indispensable part of the democratic process". More and more people are coming to think that an "-a" ending must be singular, as in spatula and anathema (plural anathemas), so they talk about a criteria, a strata and so on. (They also talk, conversely, about stadiums and curriculums.)

But let us avoid pedantry. Whether we like it or not, the media, like the press, has become one of those collective nouns which can be either singular or plural. English is constantly losing its old inflexions; no one says "it be" now, and in a few decades from now hardly anyone will be writing "whom". People already ask journalists "which media is it they work for?" It can't be long before medias is accepted in polite society.

Nicholas Bagnall