New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology » August 28th: Media & American Culture

August 28th: Media & American Culture

Plan for the Day

  • Last bit of Asimov
  • Assignments (Canvas)
  • Ways of assessing the truth…
    • Tastes and Convictions
    • Opinions
    • Theories/Laws
    • Facts
  • Monday’s Readings
  • Today’s Readings

Our Public Sphere

What is our public sphere? In other words, where is public opinion formed and what mediates that communication? This is a perfect time to consider our class’s definition of rhetoric: how meaning is communicated through discourse, texts, media, etc.

But isn’t reality reality?

Thomas Jefferson et. al.

I included this reading in order to have us revisit the formal document that establishes (sure, not totally) the United States of America.

  • People should be able to govern based on the consent of those governed (in fact, they are guaranteed this right by nature).
  • After the preamble: notice the listing of abuses. There aren’t heavy details, but there are many abuses the writers point to for why the colonies ought to separate from Britain.
  • In essence, the listing is a group of sound bites that can be used to gather support for rebellion.
  • The Natives: notice the one group (besides the British) that the writers “call out” as particularly aggressive. They seem like…

David Mervin: “The News Media and Democracy in the United States”

I don’t post a set number of notes on each article. These notes are to guide your thinking but not replace your own reading of the material.

This article was published over 25 years ago and doesn’t consider Internet news, but the point to come away with is how powerful the American media are and the perceived impact on democracy. A new conversation didn’t just come about after online news…you’ll notice some things haven’t changed…

Values apparent in the article

  • Informed citizenry (p. 7): “A vigorous democracy cannot settle for a passive citizenry that merely chooses leaders and then forgets entirely about politics….Some kind of public deliberation is required that involves the citizenry as a whole” (Page, 1996).
    • Consider this in the context of Curran, Fenton, and Freedman’s discussion of slactivism and clicktivism, where users quickly like or donate and then leave the conversation.
    • You’ll be reading that in October…
  • Television as less intellectual effort (p. 9): “As Neil Postman has argued coming to grips with political news presented in print requires a far greater degree of intellectual effort than watching television” (1985).
    • I’m not sure this is so straightforward, but I have plenty of evidence that multitasking means you do “simultaneous” tasks worse than if you focused attention on a single task.
    • Yes, reading is an example.
  • (p. 9): “The primary purpose of television is for entertainment.”
  • infotainment: presenting “news” like entertainment not to be informative.
    • I use quotes around news because, in contrast to well-researched journalism, cable news appears to be factual and well-vetted.
    • Although journalists are a part of the overall media, I think we need to distinguish between journalism and infotainment that passes a news.
  • (p. 10): “Watching television newscasts clearly does not engage the mind in the same way as reading columns of newsprint.”
  • (p. 19): Ends on a reference to Adolph Hitler. He’s making an argument, and of all the wars he could have chosen, he chose WWII.
    Remember this from the Conniff reading?

Democracy and the Media

  • Role in politics (p. 7): The media play a more dominant role in selecting candidates.
  • Consider this along with Donald Trump’s rise to become the Republican candidate in 2016.
  • The media (including journalists) followed his every move and covered his every tweet…

Quality of Coverage

  • Brief and Superficial coverage of politics (p. 10): “the coverage of political news is brief and superficial: complexities have to be skimmed over and there is no opportunity to debate controversial matters in the sort of depth that informed decision-making requires and that newspapers, theoretically at least, can provide” (emphasis mine).
  • Cronkite on TV coverage (p. 10): “Hypercompression of facts, foreshortened arguments, the elimination of extenuating explanation all are dictated by television’s restrictive time frame and all distort to some degree the news available on television” (his biography, 1996).
  • Pictures distort reality (p. 11): “Pictures, rather than illuminating complex situations, often distort the reality—oversimplifying and exaggerating, emphasizing the ephemeral and the trivial at the expense of the truly consequential” (emphasis mine).
  • Question: Do *we* want in-depth coverage, though? Doesn’t the media give us what we want? If we keep watching, why would they change?
    • *By “we” I mean the collective, possibly prevailing mass of citizens—I do not mean a universal exists.
  • Political coverage as ‘horse race journalism’: “[TV producers] have relatively little interest in issues, or policy alternatives, instead presenting politics as yet another form of sporting contest with individuals competing against one another for political advantage.” (p. 16)
    • Maybe we should make a distinction between “the media,” “journalism,” and “the news.”

Cultural Norms

  • American leeway in criticizing public officials (p. 13): “the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution gave citizens and the press an absolute, unconditional right to criticise official conduct.” (“criticise” is the British spelling)
  • UK willingness to tolerate secrecy (p. 12): “In the United Kingdom…reporters have to operate in a culture marked by restrictive libel laws and a willingness to tolerate secrecy in government.”
  • Secrecy of government officials in US is less (p. 14): “Populism and a degree of openness, rather than hierarchy and secrecy, prevail in the American political culture. There is a widespread belief that the people have a right to know what is being done in their name.”
    • Question: What ideologies, prevailing cultural attitudes, support Mervin’s observation?
    • Do we need to revisit Asimov’s “Cult of Ignorance?”

Celebrity Status and Power of Media Talking Heads

  • Cronkite and the Vietnam War (p. 18): “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”—LBJ’s statement to an aide after Walter Cronkite said the Vietnam War was un-winnable in 1968.
  • Christiane Amanpour’s “‘nose for death and destruction'” (p. 18): news deliverers as celebrities who can influence policy.
  • Question: Who do you trust for news? In fact, what do you consider “news” vs., say, “information”?

Mervin wrote this in the late-1990s, so the proliferation of online news wasn’t what it is today. Twenty-four hour news channels were quite popular in the 1990s. Do they allow for more in-depth as opposed to superficial coverage of stories?

The events of 2020 have shown the superficiality of news or what passes as news. Some news is really opinion (conviction, in fact). If you want to read an “article” to practice finding an obvious bias, check out the one below:

  • “Socialists, with George Floyd, Get Their Anti-Police Wedge” Cheryl K. Chumley
  • I went to her page at The Washington Times and saw a series of brief (around 100 words) pieces–not articles–that read like long tweets. In one rant about the protests on police brutality, she claims, “[George Floyd]’s become the tool by which socialists, communists, anarchists can topple our nation’s police forces.”
  • But then consider this: She wrote a 2014 book Police State USA, which is about how bad it is to militarize police forces. Here’s a quote from her book blurb:
    • “The acquisition by police departments of major battlefield equipment emboldens officials to strong-arm those they should be protecting. The failure of the news media to uphold the rights of citizens sets the stage for this slippery slope.”
    • Obviously, she’s for police when they attack those she’s against, but she’s against the police if they affect her sense of “freedom.”

Have a good Labor Day Weekend!!!

We’ll be back in class Wednesday, 9/04, so follow the syllabus for the readings we’ll discuss. Also, don’t forget to do your Weekly Discussion Post before Friday, 8/30, 11:00pm.