PSIR423 – Media, Politics & Society

Lecture 6

Media Methods of Misrepresentation (pp.191-210)

 

The Media

•  Media power is not distant and impersonal; it reaches

into every home, and it works its will during nearly every waking hour. It is the power that shapes and molds the mind of virtually every citizen.

•  The power of lies, deceptions and disinformation as

people pay the price of collective stupidity.

•  By permitting a group to control our news and entertainment media, we are doing more than merely giving them a decisive influence on our political system and virtual control of our government.

•  Essentially everything we know -- or think we know -- about events comes to us via our daily newspaper, weekly news magazine, radio, or television.

•  Newspapers are full of heavy-handed suppression of certain news stories that blatantly propagandize the history (e.g. documentaries, dramas). The media masters employ opinion-manipulating techniques. They exercise thoroughness in their management of the news and the entertainment that they present to us.

written with great care and completeness

The Media (cont.)

•  They let us know exactly what our attitudes should be toward various types of people and behavior by placing those people or that behavior in the context of a TV drama or situation comedy and having the other TV characters react to them in the Politically Correct way.

The Media (cont.)

•  Political correctness is a term that refers to language, ideas, or policies that address perceived or actual discrimination against politically, socially or economically disadvantaged groups.

•  The term usually implies that these social considerations are excessive or of a purely "political" nature.

•  These groups most prominently include those defined by gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability.

The Media (cont.)

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred (Jacques Barzun)

 

The Media Institution

•  This is who makes the Media texts. The institution can be a large company like Warner Bros, or a small company like Working Title.

The Media Audience

•  People who listen, watch, read or use media texts are called the audience.

•  Audiences are grouped together by gender, age, how much money they earn and what they like.

•  Institutions work hard to make their media texts appeal to the right audience.

Representation The way real life is presented on television, on the radio, in newspapers and magazines is known as Representation. Groups of people are represented in a certain light so that people begin to believe all people in that group are like that. This is called stereotyping. Places, gender, social class can also be represented.

Misrepresentation, p.192  

•  The single most common form of media representation is OMMISSION.

•  Many omissions involve deliberate decisions.

The action of excluding or leaving out someone or something

•  Lies often hide in the things left unmentioned. •  Sometimes omissions are not enough and the press lends

itself to the dissemination of outright lies. All lies involve some degree of omission but they also contain deliberate embellishment (a decorative detail or feature added to something to make it more attractive). (p.194)

Misrepresentation, p.194-195  

•  Lies not only suppress information, they create disinformation.

•  Untruth that are repeated again and again in the major media soon star to be taken for granted, to be passed on with little conscious awareness that a deliberate fabrication has been propagated.

•  One way to lie is to accept at face value what are known to be lies, passing them on to the public without adequate confirmation.

Misrepresentation, p.195-196  

•  Without saying a particular story is true or not, the press engages in the propagation of misinformation.

•  What is needed is more content and broader context, the inclusion of facts that do not fit the prevailing ideology.

•  Operating in the dominant ideological mode, the media have no reason to disbelieve the lies handed out by the government.

•  It becomes evidence that the media have been lying when, by force of circumstances, they suddenly are forced to tell the truth.

Misrepresentation, p.196  

•  For example, for 25 years the US media portrayed the shah of Iran just as the State Department and the big oil companies wanted: a benevolent ruler and modernizer of his nation – with no words about the thousands of people his security police had tortured and murdered.

Misrepresentation  

•  How News Media Manipulate Data? A Fox News Example: http://thevisualcommunicationguy.com/2013/08/05/how-news-media-manipulate-data-a-fox-news-example/

False Balancing, p.198

•  Those  who  have  posi,on  and  wealth  are  more  likely  to  be  accorded  adequate  space  in  media.  

By  contrast,  •  Those  represen,ng  the  labor  

leaders,  environmentalists,  feminists,  peace  advocates,  communists,  civil  right  supporters,  Black  or  La,no  protestors,  the  poor,  and  the  oppressed  are  less  likely  to  appear  in  media.      

False Balancing, p.199  

What the press lacks in balance?

•  The press tries to create an impression of neutrality and objectivity by placing equal blame on parties that are not equally guilty.

•  E.g. For years the news media ascribed the killings in Guatemala and El Salvador to “extremists of both the left and right” when in fact almost all the killings were done by rightist death squads linked to the military and the military itself.

False Balancing, p.199  

•  The false balancing create a false impression: A massive state terrorism against popular organizations was reduced to a gang war between leftist and rightist outlaws.

•  Another way to stack the deck with false balancing is to employ a double standard in interviews.

•  The media claim to give us balanced opinion by offering a diversity of sources, but such diversity is usually not true.

•  This balance through diversity allowed for no critical questioning of the White House’s foreign policy. In the major media, “both sides” of an issue sometimes are nothing more than two variations of what is essentially one side.

False Balancing, p.200  

Framing and Labeling, p.200

•  The most effective propaganda is that which relies on framing.

•  By bending the truth, using emphasis, and nuance, communicators can create a desired impression, without departing too far from the appearance of objectivity.

•  Framing is achieved in the way the news is packaged, the amount of exposure, the placement (front page or back page), the tone of presentation (sympathetic), the accompanying headlines and visual effects, and the labeling and vocabulary.

•  The media can mislead us in variety of ways, telling us what to think about a story before we have had a chance to think about it for ourselves.

Framing and Labeling, p.201