How to deconstruct our lying media
Media criticism comes in many forms – the approaches of meta-journalism, propaganda model and frame semantics work well together, but the semantics method is relatively new and urgently needs investing with time, effort and funding. Meanwhile, dogmatic applications of the propaganda model lead to intolerance and closed beliefs.
By Robert Shone on Monday, July 12th, 2010 - 1,193 words.
Frame semantics or propaganda model?
There are several approaches to media criticism, but I’ll contrast just three: meta-journalism, propaganda model and frame semantics. Before I do, I need to define my terms: since I dislike nominalisations such as “elite power” and “corporate power”, I’ll substitute George Carlin’s terms, “Lying Bastards” (LBs) and “Business Criminals” (BCs), respectively. For “state-corporate”, I’ll merge the two: LBBCs.
First, frame semantics. This is a relatively new field based on the work of cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff. It has huge potential, but few people outside academia seem to fully appreciate its implications. It’s not, as many think, merely about deconstructing headlines or countering one form of spin with another. Many left-leaning reviewers of Lakoff’s books seem hung-up on the fact that Lakoff has advised the US Democratic Party. Isn’t the problem, they argue, that the Democrats (like New Labour in the UK) already use “progressive” rhetoric while following a cynical “business as usual” LBBC agenda? For example, a SpinWatch review of Lakoff’s ‘The Political Mind’, concludes by asking, “is Lakoff interested in strengthening progressive politics or in just the political rhetoric of the Democratic Party”.
In fact, Lakoff’s areas of emphasis are the domains of “mainstream” thinking which have shifted to the right as a result of decades of relentless (and well-funded) “conservative” media. It’s not just about rhetoric, but about the way people think at the level of “common sense”. There’s an urgency to Lakoff’s writings, as research in the field indicates that long-term “conservative” saturation-messaging has physically altered people’s brains at the synaptic level, to the extent that they’re unreceptive to “progressive” frames in many contexts. So, frame semantics, as applied to media criticism, has largely been about increasing public awareness of the effects of certain types of metaphor which, when repeated over and over, viscerally “anchor” a particular set of worldviews that favour radical-right politics.
Much more established than frame semantics are the meta-journalism and propaganda model approaches to media criticism. There’s nothing mutually exclusive about these, and they’re often combined. Meta-journalism refers to journalism about journalism, and I have in mind the critical, analytical coverage one sees in, say, Private Eye magazine or Nick Davies’s book, ‘Flat Earth News’, etc. At its simplest it boils down to factual disputes, investigation, correction, mostly nitty-gritty without overarching theories – but it needn’t be limited to low-level material.
A propaganda model, from ‘Manufacturing Consent’ by Herman and Chomsky, has been very influential, and seems to have indirectly spawned hundreds of “alternative media” websites devoted to exposing LBBC media output for what it “really” is – ie a result of social “filters” such as ownership, advertising and fearmongering (originally anti-communism). I generally find this model a good thing, particularly when I see the likes of Alastair Campbell parading around, making piles of money from media appearances (anyone would think the LB had won a Nobel prize, the way the media fawn over him). Among other things, the Herman/Chomsky model helps us to realise (if we need help) that the problem is much bigger than individuals such as Campbell. It’s “systemic” – an obvious, but important, point.
So far, so good. But what about the future? I’d favour a meta-journalism that’s informed by frame semantics (among other things), and which of course never forgets LBBC evil. The effects of propaganda model filters, in terms of “mainstream” conceptual metaphor – ie *how* we think – have been examined in depth in recent works on frame semantics by Lakoff et al. A major new scientific field has opened up, and its pioneers are going to great lengths to put this work in the service of progressive politics, yet relatively few media campaigners and activists seem to be putting this to use. Meanwhile, the Herman/Chomsky approach remains the favourite, judging from the popular campaigning websites such as ZNet.
Unfortunately, some notable (and popular) interpretations of the Herman/Chomsky model appear dogmatic, almost fundamentalist. I see no future for this sub-branch, which is typically characterised by the belief that corporate media content “serves power” even where it contains dramatic anti-establishment dissent. Media Lens provided an example of this type of reasoning after George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian that Blair was a “mass murderer”, “contemptuous of democracy” – they responded by writing that “This type of dissent is one of the bars on our prison cell”. (Media Lens may not subscribe to every single aspect of the Herman/Chomsky model, but they strongly adhere to its central points concerning the “societal purpose” of the media).
There have been some interesting disputes between dogmatic Propaganda Modelists and meta-journalists. In 2008, after ‘Flat Earth News’ was published, Media Lens emailed its author, Nick Davies, to ask him: “Why didn’t you mention Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model? I would think this is the key argument you’d want to accept or challenge in discussing media propaganda.”
Davies replied that he’d read and admired Chomsky, but “wouldn’t look to him on a project of this kind”. Media Lens apparently weren’t happy with this – they issued a two-part alert in which they attempted to portray Davies as a “company man” whose analysis is “flawed”, “naïve” and “old”, with “nothing serious to offer” (in solutions). A year later, the Media Lens editors had another outburst, writing that Davies’s book was “very superficial”, “simply ignores everything that really matters about the corporate media”, and that “It’s this stuff that finally kills people”. I’m sure Davies appreciates the suggestion that his book-writing efforts “finally” result in people being killed. Should we adopt book-burning to keep body-counts down?
Perhaps the moral for meta-journalists is that it’s a good idea to give a favourable mention to the Herman/Chomsky model every so often – assuming you wish to avoid unpleasant attacks from PM fundamentalists (or mentalists). The last word on Media Lens should probably go to George Monbiot, who wrote the following to them in 2002:
“Rather than offering a clear, objective analysis of why the media works the way it does, who pulls the strings, how journalists are manipulated, knowingly or otherwise, you appear to have decided instead to use your platform merely to attack those who do not accept your narrow and particular doctrine. [...] You appear to me to be confronting one form of bias and intolerance with another.”
Whatever form media criticism takes in the future, it will probably need to be funded in some way in order for it to have non-trivial effects. Original, useful research (as opposed to copy-n-paste jobs) takes time and effort. Even small alternative media sites tend to need funding (eg donations), and the larger sites such as ZNet seem to require big money (ZNet recently had a campaign to raise $150,000). Lakoff’s own modest non-profit “think-tank” (the Rockridge Institute) closed in 2008, after only five years, due to lack of funds. It was originally set up to combat its better-funded conservative counterparts. Radical-right groups, it seems, know where to put money for maximum effect. They don’t seem to squander it on finger-pointing and time-wasting – they pour it into ways of framing future public debate. It’s not too late for leftists/progressives to do the same, but why waste any more time?
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Robert Shone
UK
UK-based media activist. Has written for Media Hell (mediahell.org) and ZNet. Runs the Dissident 93 blog (http://dissident93.wordpress.com/), whose main purpose is to "uncover facts and research which has been overlooked or ignored by alternative and mainstream media – with particular emphasis on Iraq mortality studies".
http://dissident93.wordpress.com/Articles by this author
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Why is the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry ignoring the spilt blood?
Iraq Body Count (IBC) has successfully drawn media attention to the failure of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry to take account of Iraqi casualties. The media coverage has, for once, been fairly prominent on the "official" failure to take responsibility for Iraqi bloodshed.
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How to deconstruct our lying media
Media criticism comes in many forms - the approaches of meta-journalism, propaganda model and frame semantics work well together, but the semantics method is relatively new and urgently needs investing with time, effort and funding. Meanwhile, dogmatic applications of the propaganda model lead to intolerance and closed beliefs.
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Dubious polls: How accurate are Iraq's death counts?
The 2006 Lancet study on Iraqi deaths has received a 2010 "Top Ten Dubious Polling" award, following criticism of the study's lead author by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). Are these merely agenda-driven attacks on credible research, or do they represent accurate and justified criticisms?
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The logic of collective punishment
Is all collective punishment unjust? There are logical arguments for and against punishing people collectively in the cases of the BP oil-spill, the Israeli attack on the Gaza-bound convoy, etc. Is it ever justified to punish people who are "innocent" of the wrongdoing?
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"Passive" death-counts in Iraq have merit
A media-based count of war dead may be incomplete; a survey estimate may be erroneous due to sampling bias – such things have nothing to do with relative passivity/activity. So why is the phrase “passive surveillance” used? In fact, it's misleading
Note: The title chosen by the editor is much better than the one I suggested. I would've gone for something like that myself if I'd thought my article lived up to the "how to" boast. As it is, it's more a modest look at possible future approaches to media criticism…
I'd be interested to hear other cost figures for running alternative media sites. $150,000 sounds very high (ZNet is a big site, but they don't pay their contributors do they?). The New Standard raised about $185,000 from readers, but is no more. What chance do smaller fry have, assuming anything more ambitious than copy-n-pasting or repackaging (or commenting on) existing reporting is attempted? The meta-journalism approach surely requires an investigative reporting type of work, which is time consuming.
(Should have been threaded under first). The New Standard, in its "obituary" said:
"The most surprising lesson of TNS (at least to us) is that as much as people complain about the corporate media and acknowledge the need for an alternative, most were not actually interested in reading or promoting our kind of journalism. Even after three years of publication and numerous attempts to garner attention, we still only had a few thousand visitors coming to our website each day. This – not financial problems per se – was the main factor in our decision to shutter TNS.
Considering our tiny readership, TNS was wildly successful at raising money. In 2006, we raised about $185,000 solely from our readership. But even though this budget supported a staff of six as well as numerous freelancers, the cost of publishing a full-fledged, daily news website like ours is much higher. From the very beginning, TNS staff members subsidized the publication by working unspeakable hours, often at well below minimum wage.
It's an interesting point, and I don't get The New Standard. What did they spend that money on?
The Comment Factory has never earned more than 20 bucks. And we have to pay for the hosting etc. Everything we have done has been from volunteering — i.e. Me (and Leah more recently) editing commissioning, Mog doing the technology, and Patrick Fry doing this design.
And I think it kicks the asses of loads of other monied sites.
A good one to look at is this Periscope Post thing I read about. It's got thousands of dollars and tonnes of people behind it, and yet I can't find anything worth reading on it.
I think if you take people's work seriously, like being rigorous over detail etc, most want to be read, so it's not a question of money… It's more just having the time to put aside.
Yeah, it works very well. The quality of the content is high, and the quantity is about right. I know another unfunded, well-designed site that tried the same thing, but nobody contributed (despite it having a good size audience). I think the expectation had been that they would drown in spam, but the opposite happened – they had a few excellent pieces submitted, and then it ran dry.
I think people will contribute stuff if they know it's reaching a decent-sized audience, and if it has good presentation. But then if you're too successful, you might start attracting the junk. The New Standard was aiming at "proper" reporting, I think, rather than mostly opinion pieces – although sometimes the line is hard to draw. Getting at facts in remote locations, etc, might require greater funding, possibly. There seems to be a dependence on main media for a certain body of "core facts" about the world, even among alternative sites, which just recycle the mainstream news (the factual part) as a starting point for their commentaries, however critical. The New Standard seemed to be complaining that their audience (alt-media types) were still using the mainstream media for this core news, in preference to them.
Well I think it's hard to compete with the mainstream media for hard news, and I don't think you need to. The truth is in there always, it's just distorted by all the structural biases of corporate or elite media. The point is to analyse that. I would love to have a proper mainstream democratic socialist daily, but it ain't happening.
That's the thing, we get 1k hits a day most days, sometimes double that if something's popular. And our Google analytics are high for some reason beyond me. It's just a question of sustaining momentum I think, if you let it down for a bit, the flame can go out…
Good article by the way, I think Lakoff's approach is interesting intellectually, but kind of an impossible task to take on, we by definition have less money and resources than the Right.
Yeah, exactly – that's a perceptive take on it, as the people who are really into this stuff (the work on frame semantics & conceptual metaphor, etc) seem to agree among themselves that the success of the research itself isn't *nearly* enough – that there's a truly colossal task ahead, and the fact that 'Don't think of an Elephant!' was a bestseller is nothing but a scratch on a scratch of the accomplishments of the rightwing framing industry over the last two decades. But they're a bit more upbeat in their public blogs, etc.
And meanwhile, ZNet, etc, do great work (in a narrow conceptual way), and will continue to have a much bigger audience than Lakoff, etc, because they speak more directly to people's sense of outrage, frustration, anger. I'm reminded of John Major's phrase, "more condemnation, less understanding". And of course it's understandable and valid. But even in a world in which we get to imprison all the war criminals (Hoon, Straw, head of BBC news, that person next door with the wrong views, etc) we're going to have to start reframing everything at some point, because the problem isn't the "bad guys", it's systemic, but in a different and more deeply entrenched way than even Chomsky imagined. Okay, that's enough over-serious hyperbole for me today. Time for some food, drinky and telly.
The term ‘PR BS’ “hits the nail on the head” as an “ice-breaker” on how the Progressives and Democrats can respond to the Conservative’s, and maybe even the media’s modus-operandi of propaganda.
The Huffington Post ran a story by Linguist George Lakoff ‘Disaster Messaging’ i.e., how the Conservatives ‘frame messages’ to their advantage; as well as how Progressives and Democrats alike have been at a disadvantage regarding ‘message framing.’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/disaster-messaging_b_639040.html
Can the term ‘PR BS’ serve as “an Aikido of sorts” to counter the Conservative’s modus-operandi……….on message-framing?
The notion of ‘PR BS’ is easily memorable and repeatable; hence the Progressives and Democrats alike can gain advantages with PR; that is to put the notion of “Public” back into “Public Relations”. Such notions would not only resonate with Progressives and Democrats, but the very people who need that that “extra nudge” to feel that the conservatives are that party of PR BS, an ample number of new voters who would be swayed to the Democrats.
It seems that the Progressives and Democrats have not advanced on framing-messages because they are too quick to lump most PR into ‘PR BS’ (that PR might as well be an acronym for Politicized Relations.) Simply put, this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The objective here is PR MINUS the PR BS! If the Progressives “preach to the choir,” they must also include “sermons to sway their fence sitting neighbors” over to the progressive’s side!
It’s time for Progressive-media to broadcast specific memes that are ripe to be repeated; with memes which may be inspired by the notions of….. ‘PR BS.’
Yes, there's a lot of PR BS around. Often there's misunderstanding here wrt to frame semantics. The important thing for political communication (whether PR or other forms) is understanding how underlying metaphors express one's values (or not). Many New Labour politicians, "liberal" pundits (and even some Chomskyite media critics) use a metaphorical system which expresses values which are far from "progressive".
To give an example: the dominant media narrative on welfare is SELF-DISCIPLINE. That's the underlying moral metaphor. The language is of "dependency culture", "sponging", etc – and the cure according to this frame is "tightening our belts", "responsibility", etc. But "responsibility" here is a contested concept. What happened to the responsibility of empathy? Empathy is a core progressive value, but notice how the idea of empathy in this context almost seems criminal, as if it's about encouraging weakness, dependence, thievery, fraud. Of course, there's always some of that (just as everyone has a dark side), but the dominant metaphorical system has achieved a coup d'etat – most of us now put self-discipline, self-reliance (etc) as more *primary* (in this domain) than things like empathy, nurturance, etc. In other words, we're internalising the moral hierarchy of the right.
I see this going on in a lot of areas – even over the death-count issue in Iraq, where many so-called progressives seem to be forgetting core progressive values wrt war, eg protecting human rights, which means not allowing the "sacrifice" of a human being for someone's idea of the greater good. The pro-war logic that a relatively "small" number of deaths may be justified for some claimed cause has been given reinforcement by those antiwar campaigners who insist that any publicised death-count below a certain figure (eg a million, in the case of Iraq) is "providing propaganda" for those responsible for war crimes. Anyone who says that a death-count of "only" 100,000 (or 10,000, or whatever) constitutes propaganda for war is (perhaps inadvertently) strengthening pro-war framing to some degree.
(Sorry, Michael, I seem to have digressed from your original point)
Thanks for that very interesting piece. You salvage some of the real substance of Chomsky's analysis while remaining alert to the way in which it has become a framing mechanism itself. Meta-analysis is a tool, not an off-the-shelf ideology.
Yes, and it's no accident that ideology sometimes trumps empirical findings here. There's a set of 'a priori' Cartesian stances to Chomsky's linguistics which also informs his political worldview. Lakoff and Johnson, in their massive (in every sense) classic 1990s work, 'Philosophy in the Flesh', write that "The empirical findings of second-generation cognitive science are at odds with Chomsky's philosophical worldview on virtually every point" (p494). As far as the political side of things goes, it's the extent to which one sees Capitalism as ('a priori') a "perversion of universal human nature".
In Chomsky's philosophy, notions of rationality and free will take centre stage – matters of culture, aesthetics, pleasure (which includes ritual, forms of trade, sensuality, art, etc) play "no essential role in universal human nature". It's problematic when you consider some of the cultural associations capitalism has (say in Japanese or German society, where it's not just seen a profit machine). That said, when forgetting the a priori philosophical stances, and just looking at the empirical facts, I mostly agree with Chomsky's conclusions. But it's dangerous to put the cart before the horse – as Medialens does when it asserts that "professional rigour" in the Western media "does not exist". http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22309
(I'm disappointed, btw, that Medialens hasn't risen to the challenge of responding to the criticisms in my Comment Factory piece. Perhaps someone should post a link to it on their message board?)
Defining anything as a perversion of universal human nature is an a priori imposition of ideology. Human nature is what humans are and do and part of our human nature is the ability to subject experience to scrutiny and based on that to devise an ideological framework for human life – i.e. society.
It's an interesting point, and I don't get The New Standard. What did they spend that money on?
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shrurose45
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