: What Dukakis should have said…Journalists and language…
What role do the news media play in politics? You’re likely to hear some journalists claim they play only the role of neutral observer. This is utter nonsense, but it is mythically powerful nonsense.
One of the reasons its possible for some journalists to believe they are merely neutral observers is that they are, in my opinion, woefully under-schooled in the disciplines of rhetoric and linguistics (which seems odd to me considering the central role of language in the profession). In other words, journalists are writers who know dangerously too little about language and the role their profession plays in the cultural formation of knowledge.
Those affected by news coverage, however, often have a good handle on the situation: From the Boston Globe:
For much of his campaign, Kucinich has complained that news outlets arbitrarily and prematurely winnow the field into front-runners and Don Quixotes. That effort then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the lack of media attention hampers the lesser-known candidates.
Among other things, this winnowing and assigning of roles is a function of narrative bias, one of the structural biases of journalism.
Humans are story-telling creatures. There is simply no way I can see that journalism will ever be able to avoid this bias unless it returns to the early days of the business, when papers were filled with public documents and the texts of speeches rather than what we understand as reporting (a rather recent development). Journalists, however, could become more self-aware of this bias.
Yes, they are aware of it on a certain level–thus the hand-wringing we occasionally see over such things as master narratives and memes. But without a deeper understanding of language use, such hand-wringing never becomes positive action for change and growth. The reason: journalism’s objectivist epistemology teaches journalists that language can be used in politically neutral ways and that they can be neutral observers of a socio-political scene that they have little hand in creating.
Consider this quote from Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy:
“I’m not terribly sympathetic [to Kucinich's claims]…I think it’s been demonstrated you can be an obscure guy [and attract headlines], but you’ve got to catch fire…It’s easy for the candidate to blame the media for not giving them attention.”
Considering that most Americans experience politics through the news media rather than directly, one wonders how it is that a candidate “catches fire” in the absence of media attention. And who determines what “catches fire” means? What are the qualities of this metaphoric understanding of political efficacy? Why are these qualities important? What relationship do these qualities have to governance and the eventual affect of policy on the lives of citizens?
Kucinich’s remedies would wear like dirty bandaids–ineffective and harmful. My remedy is far more basic and begins with the education of journalists. To my way of thinking, no journalism student in this country should graduate without a thorough grounding in the important theories of language use.
For more on the role of the press in politics, you should be reading Jay Rosen’s weblog PressThink. Of particular interest: Psst…The Press is a Player.
