media analysis framework

When engaging in media analysis, there are certain principles one should keep in mind during the process, principles that, taken together, form a sort of compass to help guide one through the turbulent, convoluted waters of the ocean of media that we are engulfed in.

Elements of the framework (in progress):

• Legitimacy vs. effectiveness - When looking at questions of perspective (i.e., "left" and "right"), consider that those on the left rarely question the legitimacy of the government's actions/policies. More commonly, the left will engage in critical discussions on the effectiveness of those policies, not the nature of the policies themselves.
  
• The portrayal of dissidents - When a dissident from an "enemy state" criticizes or takes action against it, the media will tend to portray him or her in a positive light. Reason? It gives us legitimacy. However, when a dissident from our own society criticizes or takes action to try and change the status quo (for reasons that are legitimate from the standpoint of basic human decency), he/she will be discredited, vilified, or simply ignored.
• Role-reversal - Role-reversal is an exercise that reveals the assumptions that are woven into the stories we tell about "us" and "them" and it also reveals the active double-standards at work in U.S. foreign policy. Changing the roles of the players reveals the underlying structures, characterizations, mythos, ideology, assumptions, and biases that serve to legitimize one side at the expense of the other. Role-reversal reveals the absurdity and hypocrisy that are woven into the framing of those stories as well. Below is a list of situtations where applying this technique might be enlightening:
• almost any covert/overt foreign policy act of the U.S. government
• the Vietnam War
• the Iraq War
• the recent implication by the U.S. of Iran supplying arms to Shi'a militias in Iraq, which are being used against American troops. Reasons for this implication? 1) Larger reason: to continue on the path of American hegemony in the Middle East, with Iran being the U.S.'s next target 2) The Bush administration needs a scapegoat in the current political environment to take public attention off of its failures
  
• Israel/Palestine
• the nuclear technology issue, especially as applied to "rogue states" (e.g. North Korea, Iran)
  
• The nature of terrorism - The distinction between the terrorism of "us" and "them" requires the creation of a double-standard in the public mind, one that justifies our terrorism and that simultaneously demonizes their terrorism. An important function of the mass media is the active creation of that double-standard. (Link here for a model of how the media do this...)
• The nature of "special interest" groups (such as labor, women, farmers, the environmental movement, gay/lesbian, handicapped, ethnic minorities, etc.) vs. the "national interest" (i.e. corporations, major financial institutions, the business elite). How did these terms get turned on their head in the public mind? It seems more fitting to reverse the nomenclature here, because "special interest" groups more accurately reflect the national interest than the supposed "national interests" do....
• The Milton principle, namely that "They who put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness" (1642). This principle applies to many aspects of U.S. foreign policy, wherein our government criticizes the very forces it has unleashed in a client state, particularly when those forces step outside of the acceptable boundaries of action deemed appropriate for them by their masters (e.g. Central America, death squads, paramilitary, coup de tat...)
• The anti-democratic bias in media coverage of labor and community. See the domino effect. Essentially the same rhetoric as the 'domino effect', but applied nationally. If the citizenry of this country were to gain the awareness that they have the power to stand up to and change the institutions that control them, there would be much more 'democratic' involvement. But such activity is a threat to the institutions that exert so much control over our lives (capitalist, profit-driven corporations, big business). As a result, we can expect that portrayals of the successes of labor and community will be given minimal coverage, because to do so would highlight the power of the people to change their circumstances in a democratic way, which threatens the existing power structure in this country, (i.e., the status quo). Thus, anti-democractic bias is yet another filter to be added to an already thick layering that shapes the content of the news produced by mainstream media (ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, ideology; see Chomsky and Herman, "Manufacturing Consent")
  
• The relationship between U.S. foreign aid and human rights violations. (e.g. Israel, Nicaragua...Iraq,)
• worthy and unworthy topics - similar to the Chomsky/Herman idea of worthy/unworthy victims, this idea suggests that there are topics which will be considered (even internalized) as worthy/unworthy in the realms of professional and commercial journalism of the modern era...thus topics with a pro-business slant will be more readily reported than the opposite...likewise, critiques of corporate behavior will be minimized, as the corporate role in mainstrea media becomes more and more prominent...(it is unwise to slap the hand that feeds you...)
  
• That media practices establish 'normative behaviors' that over time become self-legitimating...e.g. portrayal of the 'other'
  
• The nature of the language used itself - What words, phrases and descriptions are used and what feelings, emotions, attitudes, stereotypes, images do they evoke in the public mind? To what effect are such emotions, attitudes, stereotypes, etc. used? (To legitimize one point of view at the expense of another...?)

lecture with John Ross

This week John Ross was our guest in class. Who is this man? A dissident, rebel journalist whose approach lies well outside of the norms associated with the profession, John Ross is a unique voice who calls his own shots. What is his approach? Ross sums it up with these three questions:

1) Who is getting screwed?
2) Who is doing the screwing?
3) What can be done to change the situation?

Ross lives by his own ethos that guides what he does and how he does it. He believes in going to the place where it happens, though they may not want you, because that's where what really matters is happening. He believes that the best stories are those that happen away from power because those places in fact have everything to do with power. He believes in reporting from the bottom-up, not the top-down. He believes that as a rebel journalist, one should be a direct participant in the story being told and that one should both advocate and incite rebellion in what you do. As such, a rebel journalist has a responsibility to serve the community at the expense of the notion of a "career".

His stories are like murals; they try to breathe life into the fabric of the story itself; imagery has its role. There is more of a context to be shared than just who said what when (and maybe why if you're lucky). For Ross, history is like a boomerang, destined to come back to hit you over the head if you forget about it, as we too often do in our culture of short-term memory...

He says that he no longer does interviews, preferring instead to talk with those that are there, where the story is. He has several reasons for this; he prefers not to rely much on technology, not wanting to cede power to it. Using a recording device introduces a power structure into the relationship, one of interviewer (who wields the power) and interviewee (who is subject to it). A recording device also introduces an element of artificiality as well, such that the interviewee may become self-conscious of his/her words, may start to think too much about what s/he is or is not saying, trying to mold him/herself to an image that lies outside of who they really are. Instead, by talking with the people, they having no idea that he is a reporter, a different kind of story emerges. And when he writes it down, he is very cognizant of the uniqueness, the idiosyncrasies, the inflection, phrases used, body language, etc., of those he speaks to, all to produce a story that is closer to the truth, to his truth, than a j-schooler would be able to.

As such, Ross answers to no one; he doesn't have to and that defines who he is. And that is why one must respect him, for having the courage to not only have created his own ethos, his own epistemology, as it were, but to be able to use that ethos to further social change, fighting against the status quo to the end...

thoughts on capitalism

Understanding the influence of capitalism on our political and social institutions is key to understanding how our society works. What is that influence?

Some thoughts...

-Capitalism is a way of organizing a society based on differences in the accumulation of wealth, such that the more wealth one accumulates, the more one seeks to protect it, as is reflected in our political and social institutions.

-A secular government is one in which religious institutions are kept out of the government arena, the seperation of church and state. What would one call a government in which business interests were kept seperate from those of the government?

land mines in Pakistan

Pakistan has recently proposed fencing and placing landmines on its 1,500 mile shared border with Afghanistan. Purpose? To deter Taliban terrorists from spilling over the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan...

Is this an effective strategy to deal with the problem, or the path of least resistance which will use military resources and manpower to put razor blades in the pants of its own people (the analogy being, if you don't move, you won't get hurt...)?

The proposed strategy seems ineffective because it creates a humanitarian threat that does little to solve the fundamental problem while creating more serious ones in its wake...

-Landmines along the border are ineffective because they do not effectively target the sources of terrorism. If you want to use landmines, why not place land mines around the terrorist sanctuaries and training grounds themselves? That seems more effective...(And you can't tell me that we don't have the technology to find those areas...after all, if we've been able to find portable chemical/bio labs in Iraq, surely we can find those terrorist training grounds; on the contrary, it would be an insult to the power and capability of our military intelligence to say that we don't know where such camps lie...)

-Rather than deter terrorists, landmines along the border will divide. Divide who? Those tribes, communities and peoples who share a common culture and heritage in the area. Thus, these landmines are not only a physical threat, but also a cultural one to the peoples who live in the border regions, threatening to isolate them from one another and diminish their sense of community. (Community, I would argue, is one the most valuable resources a group of people can have, especially in the modern age, where there exist many forces that are actively hostile to it...) Is it not the "terrorists" who should be isolated instead? And do we not have the capability to do so?

-Landmines are a superficial solution to a much more deep-seated problem. Addressing it is no easy task, but the role of community seems critical here. What steps could be taken? According to Said T. Jawad, who wrote an opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal entitled "The Taliban in Pakistan", there are several things which need to be addressed at the community level, which can counter the extremism that is growing there:

• strengthen the traditional leadership in tribal areas
• lift the ban on political parties
• provide more resources to local tribal elders and civic institutions

Wait a minute, though. What is this beginning to sound like? Something akin to democracy perhaps? Not the diluted pseudo-democracy we live in today, but democracy in a truer form, one that is closer to what we have been led to believe that our founding fathers would have upheld. Instead, what are we left with? The military putting razor blades in the pants of its own people...

lecture with Phil Hutchings

This week, we had a special guest, Phil Hutchings, visit our class and talk about his experiences in the civil rights movement. Here are some points from his talk:

-that the Nixon of the 60's was more 'left' than the Clinton of the 90's...

-that people see news as fact, and tend to act on it (example...the media portrayal of racial tensions between Koreans and Blacks around the time of the Rodney King beating, and how both groups acted on that portrayal, e.g. spread of racial violence to other cities)

-that there was a fundamental shift in the civil rights movement in the mid-60's. Up until the early 60's, both the government and the press were viewed as part of the solution in bringing about change. But this changed in the mid-60's, when the government and the press became seen as more part of the problem than the solution. It's important to note that the government and the press are linked here, not seperate, which says something important about their relationship...

-that black acceptance/inclusion into the Democratic party (1964 campaign) came with certain conditions, or pre-requisites (e.g. that blacks be college educated, light-skinned, middle-class, express upward mobility, loyal to party policy (e.g. pro-Vietnam))

-early SNCC received a lot of funding from white liberals, which necessarliy placed constraints on what they could and could not do; this produced a kind of schizophrenic relationship between the politics and the fund-raising base of the movement

-in its later years, SNCC was put into the position of having to use the white corporate media to reach the black community, an inherently ironic and flawed endeavor

-that regarding social movements, there has been a shift away from mass organizing, grassroots/community style, to more of an event-driven s.m. environment (linked to the rise of NGO/NPO's, the labor-intensive nature of g-r approach (hard work, no pay), increased negativity and apathy in populace ?)

-that today's problem is how to create a sense of 'community' in an urban setting

-that an important goal of a social movement is to bring people out of isolation and into a community (Tom Haden)

letters from iwo jima

I saw the movie "Letters from Iwo Jima" today, and was struck by a couple of things. The first was the name of a Japanese soldier who was the movie's thread, it's underdog, so to speak, which was "Saigo". Saigo means 'last' in Japanese, and lo and behold, he was the one Japanese soldier who made it to the end. Hmm...

The other, which has more serious undertones I believe, is the portrayal of the two top Japanese officers. In the story, both of them had been to America, and they both seemed to express a certain fondness for the country throughout the movie. But what was the purpose of portraying them in such light? This situation brings something to mind, a useful exercise, as it were, that Chomsky has used to illustrate the absurdity or hypocrisy of a certain situation. In the night, when there was a lull in the fighting, we see the top Japanese officer drawing pictures of time he spent in America, drinking Johnny Walker whisky, writing letters to his family. During the day, we see him have occasional reminisces of his time in America, one theme being how he was surprised at the number of cars there. The other Japanese officer gives the last vile of morphine in his unit to a wounded American soldier against the objections of his men, then chats with him as best he can in his broken English, and after the American soldier dies, he reads a letter that his mother had written to him (in cursive) to his unit, translating perfectly from English to Japanese with no hesitation. I guess the Americans aren't really so bad after all...

But wait, let's try that exericse I mentioned above. What is the exercise? Basically, it's one of reversal, taking the same situation, but reversing the roles of the players. So, let's try this...let's say for instance, that a group of American soldiers was holding an island, soon to be attacked by Russians. The Americans are sure to outnumbered, obscenely so. After the fighting has begun, after so many American soldiers have died that only a handful remain, let's try and imagine the leader of those soldiers drawing pictures in his dairy of those special times he had when he was in Russia, maybe drinking some special Russian vodka that he had managed to save from his trip. Or let's imagine them taking in a wounded Russian soldier, giving him the last vile of morphine, chatting amicably with him, and after he dies, reading a letter that his mother wrote him to everyone in the unit (and don't forget that the soldiers, as they hear the letter being read to them, begin to stand up, one by one, apparently touched by its contents...). Do you really see this happening? Come on...

Or what about if in the exercise, we change the Russians to Shiite insurgents? Is that even thinkable in today's terrorist-charged political and social climate? Hold on now...

The point? Portraying such scenarios through the eyes of the "enemy" makes us look like the moral victors, because the "enemy" has a soft spot in their heart for us and what we represent, and their acceptance and expression of their pro-American sentiments makes them look like reasonable men to the audience. There's a word for this, and it's called "propaganda", pure and simple. The effect of such characterization seems to be that it's ok if the enemy comes to think of us as not so bad because it makes us look good. But are we capable of doing the same?...