Son's death ended normal life for protest mom
What should immediately leap out at you, is that the only non-advertisement pictures are concerned with the counter-protests (protesting the people who are protesting the government). This should jump out at you because it is the title of this blog entry.
For a moment forget about how you feel about the substance of the position, because that is not what this entry is about.
The adversarial definition of political events has also constructed TV's notion of 'balance' in their coverage. If political events are constituted by two opposing forces, then TV's role as neutral observer, reporter and interrogator would seem to lie in the centre: holding the balance between two sides. This is, indeed, how TV's role has been interpreted in the coverage of domestic affairs...[digression omitted]...This central position enables the TV institution to appear both unbiased (in the sense of representing a 'possible compromise' between two positions) and common-sensical (in the sense of representing a 'possible compromise' between the two positions). This is TV's balancing act with balance....
John Ellis, Visible Fictions, 231-32 (1992 ed.).
Actually, Ellis wrote the above quote in 1982 and he was thinking about England and not America, but the lesson sticks: How much controversy is real controversy? For all the bemoaning of the loss of intelligent (as in: issues aren't all black and white) and honest (as in: the other side might change their position in good faith) debate, maybe intelligent and honest debate isn't happening because journalists assume that this would make for bad television.
The reason the Sheehan broke so big is because for a moment it broke through the characterization of the "two sides" of the "war" issue. BTW, I use the finger quotes because I feel that there are a spectrum of opinions and that there is more than one issue at play, but again... bad television. Anyway, if you remember when this story broke it was "Hey there is someone protesting the war who is just a normal Mom, and look! some Christian church groups are out there too" tone that trouble some underlying conceits that existed prior to the story breaking.
The underlying conceits prior to the story breaking were:
*People who are against the war are educated and therefore out of touch with reality, just like the nerds who you hated in elementary school.
*All Christians support the government's position on the war.
There was a tone of suprise and incongruity akin to the pundits reaction to the "Yo quiero Taco Bell" dog. [WARNING WARNING: Rhetorical flourishes alert, start distrusting the author of this blog entry now] Early articles were along the lines of, "this story challenges our half-baked monochrome rendering of the world and now nothing makes sense"
Maybe, as a result of the protest movement started by this poor woman who lost her oldest son, these insulting [WARNING WARNING: Ironic warning telling you how to think in a blog entry critical of news outlets telling you how to think] characterizations that happened in the name of selling news would evolve into rich and more human portraits of the people involved. No way!
Queue the follow-up stories: Turns out Ms Sheehan is a "life-long Democrat from California" and there are legions of high-school drop-out mullet-sporting reactionary dupes bleating their conviction that the president is the government and that God is American.
Over the next few weeks I expect that the various media outlets will "fill in the blanks" by fitting the "two sides" back into traditional characterizations until we go back to the simplistic "left" vs "right" dicotomy. Listen for the undercurrent of "well gang, that solves that mystery" This will be the tone of articles from media outlets of all stripes.
Okay here is my point (actually its two points)
Don't journalists watch other Television besides the news? It turns out the people are capable of absorbing lots of "almost scientific information" or in the alternative "totally fake laws of nature." What's more, we are able to follow extremely convoluted (if contrived) moral connudrums and take sophisticated positions on them and have a deep understanding of all the worlds problems in a very hazardous world where appearances are deceiving. People who watch TV "get it" and we're not talking about high-brow television, either.
Point #1: Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm sticking with the notion that whenever a news article treats its audience like a bunch of simpletons its because a simpleton wrote the story. [RED ALERT! RED ALERT!]
Is there no good journalism out there? Actually there is: entertainment journalism.
Point #2: Put down (INSERT NAME OF VERY SERIOUS NEWS MAGAZINE HERE) and pick up "Entertainment weekly" [outrageous punchline phrase here]
Okay... I sabotagued my own points. Why did I do that? [I'll never tire of this rheotrical construct, I think its called anagnorsis, except that's a dramatic concept and I'm looking for the rhetorical equivalent construction] Because originally, I had put down "The Washington Post" when I stopped and realized "Hey, Libby Copeland, writes for the Washington Post and what she has to say is generally both highly accessible and deeply nuanced."
In fact, picking on Journalists is like picking on IT people: not fair because its often times a hopeless situation that wasn't their doing. Moreover, to characterize all journalists as being the same in their tendancy to create simple characterizations of peoples and issues would be deeply hypocrtical.
So what?
Well... My professor was characterizing the nature of television as creating simplistic dicotomies. I believe that his observation was asute but that he is wrong in his conviction that this is a necessary characterization of television because actual fictions managed to be complex.
So I went narrower and said that only journalists create simple dictomies as a result of their own inability to see their audience in non-simple ways. But I thought of someone who went to my High School who actually writes really great stuff and had to take it all back. Not just because of her, but because I then thought of about 25 journalists who I read on a regular basis who I would also write honestly and engagingly, but its tedious to have to write down their names and then find links to example articles by them and anyway it doesn't further the point to do so. Wow this paragraph is getting long.
Then I realized that I was engaging in the same sort of characterization that I was critizing and felt really bad.
So that leaves us with my favorite type of point: further proof of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (BTW, Wikipedia is really interesting)
Characterization is easy to do and is superfically persuasive. As such, it tends to pervade lots of texts both intentionally or not. Wow! That's a lot of writing for such a trite and facile point. Okay: Let me also add "Its nice to be important but its important to be nice" and "if you swallow a water melon seed, a watermelon vine will grow out of the top of your head". Great. Post.
