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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (19554)	12/12/2003 9:07:14 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793575

InstaPundit Susanna Cornett offers some thoughts on the protest coverage that seem applicable here: I think you're correct to a degree that the lack of coverage has to do with the media's conscious or unconscious preference on how the reconstruction goes in Iraq. However, I also think the media reflexively thinks that anti-establishment protest is more "honest" and newsworthy than anything supporting the establishment - and in their view, anything conservative or associated with a conservative administration is by definition "establishment". I also think they're suspicious of demonstrations supporting the US or at least tracking a parallel position because they assume the US had some role in setting it up. So it's what you said, but it's also part process as well as ideology because they're lazily activating their frames rather than critically assessing the situation. I'm reading up on research on media framing right now, which is why this leapt to my mind. Essentially, for the most efficient production of news the media as a whole has developed frames, pigeonholes for news, that quickly organize raw information that comes in. They assess a situation, associate it with an established theme, and file it away there. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but what happens is that journalists either become lazy and mentally assign a situation to a theme or frame without critical assessment of it, or they don't examine the ideological foundations of their themes and assume the theme/frame is based on some objective reality when in fact it's a subjective categorization. Like any categorization method, this means that some aspects of the situation are ignored and others emphasized in the process of making the decision. A CNN reporter hearing about this may see "support for US interests" and mentally file it under "administration hype" (shorthand: ignore) rather than seeing "Iraqis freely demonstrating" and "Iraqis rising up against terrorists" and filing it under "Important changes" (shorthand: cover). Frames are passed along as part of the culture of journalism. Not always bad, but like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, when they're bad they're horrid. Just some thoughts on what's going on. I think the media is in part ideologically hostile to the administration, but I also think some of this is just lazy pigeonholing. Which doesn't diminish the harm, just shifts the bias from a wholly thoughted partisanship to lazy perpetuation of faulty themes. I think this is largely right, though it's interesting how often "mere laziness" conveniently leads to the same result as "outright bias," isn't it? instapundit.com