IT should come as no surprise to readers that I read a lot of news. There are days when I dive in first thing and lose a whole day to backstroking through it until it’s time for bed. This, I can assure you, is not good for your mental health. Given our collective predilection for reporting on misery, with little that is positive or delightful making the cut, spending an inordinate amount of time in the wake of a grim headline can leave you feeling equally rotten.

On days when the news is both grim and unavoidable, once the basic facts have been digested, I try to put on the wide-angle lens. I find it helps to look at how a story is being reported, as a means of staying with it but not being consumed by it. I credit this coping mechanism to George Orwell. When he wrote Politics and the English Language, I’m not sure he would have thought of the future comfort of news-weary journalists, but I find the essay a salve all the same.

In it, he argued that the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts and that we can stop them from being transmitted if we take the necessary care in how we talk. Substitute the word “foolish” for the milder “unhelpful” and you have a crude but effective means of analysing how the news is told.

Whenever something gruesome happens, we rely on the media to report it. While it’s certainly the case that the newspapers cover stories, it’s not the case that they merely dictate a series of facts for general consumption. At every step of the reporting journey, from incident to print, broadcast or tweet, a story becomes imbued with more than the facts themselves. The words used to recreate a picture in the mind of the reader are always subject to choice, regardless of the constraints of reporting ethics and a publication’s house style. They are conscious choices of a writer and an editor. In essence, the news is constructed, the criminals and the victims too. As a reader, you’ll already have preferences for how those pictures are created – that’s why you’re reading this here and not in the Daily Mail, why you might value the credibility of say The Guardian, but would never dream of clicking on to Breitbart.

Two stories this week stand out as a perfect example of a constructed narrative. Both shock the conscience of law-abiding citizens, and so are subject to being conveyed with emotive language: the grooming gangs in England and the alleged murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It’s likely the mention of either story already conjures up a whole lexicon of words you might use. “Evil”, “butcher”, “beasts” etc.

These are the sorts of words we use when we talk to one another. They do a brilliantly economical job of telegraphing our values, our beliefs, our identities and more. In everyday speech, these words offer us a means of connecting, in conveying our shared horror at the events being discussed. When we use highly emotional language, the stories stick in our minds and are more likely to pass on from one person to another. Emotional language is more contagious, more prone to pulsing through communities. There’s a reason tabloids are so popular: they know that sensationalism is a quick and efficient form of propagation.

Tuning into the radio this week has meant both stories were inescapable, with well-meaning commentary from the pundits and public alike. In my own discussions with my friends and my partner, I’ve too found myself drawing on that easily accessed pool of emotional words. Though, after years of reporting on sensitive subjects like violence against women and suicides, I’m far more aware of the care needed in choosing what comes out of my mouth and what ends up in print. Words, though we don’t often think of it when we speak them, can carry much unintended freight. This is why I try not to use words like “monster” when referring to child abusers, and why I swiftly deleted a reflexive tweet where I called Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud “a butcher”.

It’s not that I don’t think the behaviour of an abuser is monstrous or that the alleged actions taken by the Saudi prince are not tantamount to butchery. I absolutely hold fast to both of those positions. Anyone who behaves in such a way towards a child is behaving monstrously, and anyone who would send a squad of 15 hitmen and a bone saw to deal with a dissident is unequivocally engaging in butchery. But I don’t think it’s helpful to imbue either group with some unique, subhuman quality in the way “monster”, “butcher” and the like imply. Aside from the small number of people with severe personality disorders, neither is anything other than a human being choosing to act in a particular way. Neither was born with an evil streak or a quality that predestined them to commit atrocities. They are men, ordinary human men, who have chosen to behave in a manner beyond our basic comprehension as human beings. That, I’d argue, is far more frightening a concept for us to reckon with.

The freight our natural, emotional, linguistic shorthand carries is exoneration. It treats the people who behave in ways that are so anathema to our own values and beliefs as exceptions, and not the product of the same ordinary world we all live in. That is not to homogenise the human experience down to one narrow set of commonalities, more that the things that corrupt and curdle the character of a person are all products of this same world. Power, poverty, money, religion, ideology and more. All these corrupting forces are the product of human enterprise. Surely it benefits us all more to go beyond “he is a monster” to think instead, “why has he chosen to behave like a monster, and how can we stop something like this happening again?”.

I’m sure some of this might seem as unnecessary worry or even as an unhelpful distraction from the realities of the breaking news, but I think Orwell was on to something. He points out that no-one can fight meaningfully against fascism if they can’t adequately describe what it is. I think the same goes in this instance: how can we stop more people from committing atrocities if we think of them as the product of a subhuman quality beyond all control?

Though he’d baulk at the worn-out phrase “Achilles heel”, the point remains: calling someone a monster is a weakness in our reporting and a gap in our understanding of what it means to choose to be one.