Of late, there’s been something of an upsurge of bad news about the news, prompted probably by the coincidence in the acceleration in the decline of newspaper business models under the pressure of the global financial crisis and the upsurge in the online mediascape. Similarly, the spectacular focus on trivia characteristic of American journalism in a momentous year has given a push to already racy debates. But, as I’ve argued for yonks, far too many of these debates are themselves stuck in the past and premised on false dichotomies.
One of those is probably the image of the informed citizen, dutifully reading “all the news that’s fit to print” which underlies so many journalistic ideologies. I had something to say about that recently, along with the related theme that the world will come to an end if people only read stuff that fits particular niches of interest to them. As I was suggesting, that ignores the work of editorial categorisation and selection which has (always) already filtered “news” through a set of presumptions (incidentally, highly gendered ones) about the ideal type of the reader.
We can see a comparable level of forgetting – a key to the distortion inherent in any sort of ideological “thinking” – in the claim that if the newspaper declines, political discourse will decline along with it. Yet it was as long ago as 1962 that the American social scientists Peter Bachratz and Morton S. Baratz pointed to the importance of “non-decisions” in the exercise of power. Now a standard analytical approach in the public policy literature, Bachratz and Baratz observed that many interests and issues are sifted off the table before they even make the agenda.
Something similar operates in the definition of what constitutes “news” and in the sphere of political reporting and commentary, “the legitimate sphere of public debate”. Jay Rosen has a great post on this process at PressThink. It’s well worth keeping in mind next time one of these tired debates that haunt too much of the debate over the media rears its head.
The New York Times is dead – so – long live all the news that’s fit to print without fear or favor. Long live the new Net Times.
NYT dead? Or just using “copy”, “highlight” and “replace …. with …” functions on old stories from a certain national Australian tabloid quality newspaper printed as a broadsheet?
Or perhaps Groundhog Day’s been shifted forwards?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ NYT Reporter Warns Of One-Term Obama
Although
From Jay Rosen’s post I went to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Which states: “The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it, and adding new ideas that can push the old ideas towards acceptance merely by making the limits more extreme.”
In other words you can, or the media can, make an unacceptable idea seem ok by comparing it to something even more outrageous.
It occurred to me that that is exactly what the post about Bushco switching off a proposed Israeli attack on Iran by saying that they were already taking ‘covert action’.
The unacceptable [covert action] appears reasonable by comparison to the outrageous [Israeli bombing whatever].
Something similar has just happened to me ,I have been given a choice between totally unacceptable and completely inappropriate options.
At the risk of length and perhaps irrelevancy here goes.
I have just been officially informed today that my River Murray lagoon may get water in it after being dry for more than two years.
Sound good?
Well yes but….
It would be as a result of the proposed building of a weir to stop fresh Murray water entering the Murray lakes [Alexandrina nad Albert] and then flooding them with [poisonous] sea water.
Not so good. In fact, near total disaster for the lakes.
[Incidentally please don't try to tell me that this has happened in the past-some people do say this- it hasn't ever, not on this scale]
There is of course a third option.
Fresh water for both.
But that is ‘off the agenda’. can’t upset the irrigators.
And there is an example of the Overton effect operating here too.
A few years ago an engineering firm was touting for a 300 million dollar plus plan to build an internal earth dam within the circumference of Lake Alexandrina several metres high and many more wide, a hundred or more kms in length, to divert the fresh water around the lake and thus save fresh water from evaporating over the area of the lake. The lake itself would be converted to sea water which was touted as a wonderful idea even though it would completely replace the ecosystem of the lake.
It was given the you beaut name “Twin Lakes Proposal’ and was seriously proposed at meetings with the SA govt., local councils along the river and relevant Murray River authorities.
I thought it was ‘outrageous’, not everybody else did however.
Anyway here we are with the essence of it actually about to happen, the Lakes to be poisoned with sea water, they have to be ‘killed’ to be ‘saved’.
Sometimes I despair.