*
NPR, my picture window into the corporate media bordello, has been flogging the marathon bombing story all week despite the fact that one of the suspects is as dead as bacon and the other one is in tighter custody than The Joker (Chechnyan pun intended). You see, it's just desperately important that we find out how Tamerlan was radicalized as long as there's some way we can link it to his overseas travel a few years ago. Because if we find that out, then we have a genuine case of "international terror" by "Muslim radicals." And that would give authorities to deploy killer drones in US skies under a plan that even the libertarian Rand Paul can approve of (see paragraph 5).
Since it's still somewhat early in terms of crafting the official marathon bomber narrative, it's a good time to observe how the process works. News editing decisions help to create a bias toward an official narrative by highlighting certain facts (or rumors or unsourced assertions) that support it while ignoring other facts that don't fit the story line. And so this week the storytellers are busy composing a portrait of vicious, desperate international terrorists who had New York City in its sights next. The trouble with that story line is this and this. Have any of you heard, via mainstream news media, that there are good reasons to ask whether our present-day Saccho and Vanzetti really were planning to take their pressure cookers to Manhattan? I haven't. Yet mitigating facts are right out there in public, non-obscure reporting channels like The Boston Globe and Esquire.
And furthermore, how about this: despite initial media reports depicting a teenage Chechnyan desperado shooting it out with police from his bunker in a Watertown, MA, drydocked cabin cruiser, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not armed when he was captured. He was halfway shot to pieces, though. My point isn't to second-guess how police do their jobs in a situation like this, but to second-guess the editorial judgments being applied. Those judgments make sense to me only as intentional decisions to shape and burnish a narrative.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Dave's Delivery Door
Editor's note: Big Rock Head has resumed his visual art enterprise, entitled Dave's Delivery Door. It will be in syndication at most of these same blogs as long as he permits. Click it to enlarge it. All Delivery Doors are copyrighted by the artist sometimes known as Big Rock Head.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Speaking of The Narrative
*
Charlie Pierce made this contribution to the discussion the other day at his verbose and annoying, yet quite rightminded blog at Esquire:
Charlie Pierce made this contribution to the discussion the other day at his verbose and annoying, yet quite rightminded blog at Esquire:
We had the event. Then we had the mourning. Then we had "Indomitability Day." Then we had the healing of the interfaith service at which the president gave a fine speech, and the demonstrations of solidarity at the Bruins game. That is the pattern of these things in our public lives, until the next one of these things happens, and then we do it all over again. We did it for Tucson after Columbine. We did it for Aurora after Tucson. We did it for Sandy Hook after Aurora. And, this week, we did it for Boston after Sandy Hook. It's the modern Stations of the Cross, with theme music, and logos, and Wolf Blitzer. We were done. We were healed. And then the Tsarnaev brothers came home. And one of them got away.Pretty much so. In the editing racket, we refer to that kind of thing as "boilerplate." It's worth contemplating how this news media narrative---and all the others---emerge into our lives as the Official Account of Public Occurrences.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
The Narrative
*
I woke up this Saturday morning listening to NPR "correspondents" stitch together a narrative of Boston Marathon international intrigue with Scotch tape and John McCain's used dental floss. As far as I can tell, an NPR "correspondent" does no actual reporting, but spends his or her workdays gleaning bon mots from think-tank experts, corporate spokesmen, and politicians speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The two suspects immigrated to this country from Chechnya (when the youngest was 8 or 9), you see, so therefore they must have been Muslim sleeper agents. It doesn't matter to the liberal NPR that no verified fact in the public domain indicates any foreign connection other than the suspects' country of origin and one trip to Russia by the older brother to renew his passport. Or that no third-party financing or logistical sophistication is evident in the known facts. Or that evidence known to date link only the older suspect to radical Islamic thought (via YouTube content)... and only within the past 5 years or so.
Meanwhile, NPR dutifully informs us that even though Boston police say the public threat has ended, Federal officials are likely to use a "public safety" exception to the surviving suspect's Miranda rights in order to grill him for "intelligence" (not "evidence") without a lawyer present. Then, implicitly accepting that possible approach to American law enforcement as legitimate on its face, they inform us that Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham are demanding that the surviving suspect be tried as an "enemy combatant."
Watch how this unfolds. I think it is an excellent opportunity to observe how corporate media assemble a narrative for the public. It is a feat of rhetoric, not news reporting. Techniques for producing a mass-media news narrative include the unwarranted emphasis of some facts over others; the omission of certain facts that don't fit the emerging narrative; unsupportable extrapolation from known facts to serve as a sort of roadmap for fleshing out the consensus narrative; injection of purported facts from anonymous sources; and so on. Watch how the coverage plays out and pretend you're the front-page editor for the Fifty50 Daily Pap-Smear---ask yourself where each presented fact came from, whether there are conflicting facts on the record, whether the item presented is a sourced fact, an opinion, or a speculation.
Also, ask yourself why officials and corporate media were reluctant to call the Boston Marathon bombing an act of terrorism until the suspects could be publicly branded as foreigners.
I woke up this Saturday morning listening to NPR "correspondents" stitch together a narrative of Boston Marathon international intrigue with Scotch tape and John McCain's used dental floss. As far as I can tell, an NPR "correspondent" does no actual reporting, but spends his or her workdays gleaning bon mots from think-tank experts, corporate spokesmen, and politicians speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The two suspects immigrated to this country from Chechnya (when the youngest was 8 or 9), you see, so therefore they must have been Muslim sleeper agents. It doesn't matter to the liberal NPR that no verified fact in the public domain indicates any foreign connection other than the suspects' country of origin and one trip to Russia by the older brother to renew his passport. Or that no third-party financing or logistical sophistication is evident in the known facts. Or that evidence known to date link only the older suspect to radical Islamic thought (via YouTube content)... and only within the past 5 years or so.
Meanwhile, NPR dutifully informs us that even though Boston police say the public threat has ended, Federal officials are likely to use a "public safety" exception to the surviving suspect's Miranda rights in order to grill him for "intelligence" (not "evidence") without a lawyer present. Then, implicitly accepting that possible approach to American law enforcement as legitimate on its face, they inform us that Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham are demanding that the surviving suspect be tried as an "enemy combatant."
Watch how this unfolds. I think it is an excellent opportunity to observe how corporate media assemble a narrative for the public. It is a feat of rhetoric, not news reporting. Techniques for producing a mass-media news narrative include the unwarranted emphasis of some facts over others; the omission of certain facts that don't fit the emerging narrative; unsupportable extrapolation from known facts to serve as a sort of roadmap for fleshing out the consensus narrative; injection of purported facts from anonymous sources; and so on. Watch how the coverage plays out and pretend you're the front-page editor for the Fifty50 Daily Pap-Smear---ask yourself where each presented fact came from, whether there are conflicting facts on the record, whether the item presented is a sourced fact, an opinion, or a speculation.
Also, ask yourself why officials and corporate media were reluctant to call the Boston Marathon bombing an act of terrorism until the suspects could be publicly branded as foreigners.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Friday Night Fish Fry
*
Tonight, for some reason, I feel like offering something violent for our entertainment. But not cheaply topical with respect to certain national news events of the week. So put this in your pipe and smoke it:
In case you can't understand the words, this performance is a medley of perspectives on nonapproved drugs---namely, bassist Mark Sandman's musings on his own daily drug experimentation upon himself sandwiching a succinct description of US war-on-drugs policy. I selected this specific video to show this oddly instrumented power trio in action. If you like the feel of it, find a higher-resolution version of this song on YouTube and play it back at earbleed level through your little earbuds. You really need to hear their studio performances on CD-grade recordings to hear what this combo is all about.
There are half a dozen reasons why this is one of my favorite bands of all time, but I won't use the present space to tell you why, and it doesn't matter anyway. I'll just say that I can't think of any other band that sounds so unusual and accessible at the same time.
Test Tube Baby/Shoot 'em Down, Morphine (live at Nightstage, Cambridge, MA, 26 May 1992 [recording provenance unknown] ), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.
Tonight, for some reason, I feel like offering something violent for our entertainment. But not cheaply topical with respect to certain national news events of the week. So put this in your pipe and smoke it:
In case you can't understand the words, this performance is a medley of perspectives on nonapproved drugs---namely, bassist Mark Sandman's musings on his own daily drug experimentation upon himself sandwiching a succinct description of US war-on-drugs policy. I selected this specific video to show this oddly instrumented power trio in action. If you like the feel of it, find a higher-resolution version of this song on YouTube and play it back at earbleed level through your little earbuds. You really need to hear their studio performances on CD-grade recordings to hear what this combo is all about.
There are half a dozen reasons why this is one of my favorite bands of all time, but I won't use the present space to tell you why, and it doesn't matter anyway. I'll just say that I can't think of any other band that sounds so unusual and accessible at the same time.
Test Tube Baby/Shoot 'em Down, Morphine (live at Nightstage, Cambridge, MA, 26 May 1992 [recording provenance unknown] ), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.
Boston strangler marathon bombing tea party
*
I'll confine my contribution to the story of America's Bombing with a few stray notes about media coverage of it that I haven't seen in writing yet.
First, I'll look for some Beltway celebrity pundit to declare that during the "national tragedy" in Boston, the social media "came of age." Specifically, I expect someone to compare the Reddit crowdsourcing detective forums as well Facebook and Twitter sleuthing to how television news reporting "came of age" on the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. The contribution of Reddit editors is certainly significant and worth considering, but celebrity commentators are always compelled to turn one thing into another, well known thing that we all can relate to. I'll leave the topic (for the moment) by stating that any such comparison is shrinkwrapped horseshit.
Second, instead of regurgitating all the corporate media reporting failures this past week, not limited to CNN and Murdoch's New York Post, I'll point to a really competent aggregator of confusing and contradictory breaking news reports: Greg Mitchell's Pressing Matters blog. He has been way ahead of other aggregators I follow (such as TPM and Huffington Post), pulling together news from a wide variety of sources and commenting minimally to provide a professional, old-school journalist's interpretation. Most of his remarks are directed at helping the reader to avoid overinterpreting the reporting or to point out examples of bad journalistic practice. I only noticed one or two ham-handed quips in all his liveblogging over the past 2 or 3 days.
Third: Boston was not on "lockdown," as all media were breathlessly reporting this morning. I say this because the use of that term is nonsensical. You can't put a city on "lockdown"! As far as I can tell, no curfew was declared either: the police told people in Boston and environs to stay off the streets and to "shelter in place." Both seem to be sensible recommendations. And I'll add that the phrase shelter in place is a legitimate term of art for terrorism and hostage-type situations. The use of lockdown, though, is an example of what I see as a creeping compulsion by media and their slavish consumers to glamorize every aspect of life as if it were an action movie or made-for-TV drama. The news, you see, becomes much more thrilling to consume if described in terms of entertainment programming. I think of it as a social disease---an infection of real culture with the virus of mass media narrative. In my lifetime I've seen journalism migrate from (1) traditional news reporting, to (2) finding the "story" in the news to "help" the audience understand, to (3) intentionally communicating durable "story lines" to which facts are fit and cherrypicked against. This last stage is The Narrative. Many media and political scholars argue that the narrative long predates my perception of memory of it, and I wouldn't argue against that. But I think my basic point here remains intact.
Last: NPR's so-called counterterrorism correspondent on All Things Considered tonight, "Dina Temple-Raston," behaved like a colossal douchebag by repeatedly telling everyone how taking the suspect alive was a top priority in order to get "intelligence" from him about "the plotters," with thick implications that we already know that the bombing was a coordinated foreign terrorist operation. No verified fact reported so far remotely supports that kind of language; everything that I've read and heard up to this moment indicates that two guys created some crude antipersonnel IEDs out of household materials and may have had their getaway car in queue for work at a body shop as late as Wednesday morning. Some plot! It may actually turn out to be true, but even the liberal NPR should know that it's best to wait for some facts to emerge before extrapolating too far along The Narrative.
I'll confine my contribution to the story of America's Bombing with a few stray notes about media coverage of it that I haven't seen in writing yet.
First, I'll look for some Beltway celebrity pundit to declare that during the "national tragedy" in Boston, the social media "came of age." Specifically, I expect someone to compare the Reddit crowdsourcing detective forums as well Facebook and Twitter sleuthing to how television news reporting "came of age" on the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. The contribution of Reddit editors is certainly significant and worth considering, but celebrity commentators are always compelled to turn one thing into another, well known thing that we all can relate to. I'll leave the topic (for the moment) by stating that any such comparison is shrinkwrapped horseshit.
Second, instead of regurgitating all the corporate media reporting failures this past week, not limited to CNN and Murdoch's New York Post, I'll point to a really competent aggregator of confusing and contradictory breaking news reports: Greg Mitchell's Pressing Matters blog. He has been way ahead of other aggregators I follow (such as TPM and Huffington Post), pulling together news from a wide variety of sources and commenting minimally to provide a professional, old-school journalist's interpretation. Most of his remarks are directed at helping the reader to avoid overinterpreting the reporting or to point out examples of bad journalistic practice. I only noticed one or two ham-handed quips in all his liveblogging over the past 2 or 3 days.
Third: Boston was not on "lockdown," as all media were breathlessly reporting this morning. I say this because the use of that term is nonsensical. You can't put a city on "lockdown"! As far as I can tell, no curfew was declared either: the police told people in Boston and environs to stay off the streets and to "shelter in place." Both seem to be sensible recommendations. And I'll add that the phrase shelter in place is a legitimate term of art for terrorism and hostage-type situations. The use of lockdown, though, is an example of what I see as a creeping compulsion by media and their slavish consumers to glamorize every aspect of life as if it were an action movie or made-for-TV drama. The news, you see, becomes much more thrilling to consume if described in terms of entertainment programming. I think of it as a social disease---an infection of real culture with the virus of mass media narrative. In my lifetime I've seen journalism migrate from (1) traditional news reporting, to (2) finding the "story" in the news to "help" the audience understand, to (3) intentionally communicating durable "story lines" to which facts are fit and cherrypicked against. This last stage is The Narrative. Many media and political scholars argue that the narrative long predates my perception of memory of it, and I wouldn't argue against that. But I think my basic point here remains intact.
Last: NPR's so-called counterterrorism correspondent on All Things Considered tonight, "Dina Temple-Raston," behaved like a colossal douchebag by repeatedly telling everyone how taking the suspect alive was a top priority in order to get "intelligence" from him about "the plotters," with thick implications that we already know that the bombing was a coordinated foreign terrorist operation. No verified fact reported so far remotely supports that kind of language; everything that I've read and heard up to this moment indicates that two guys created some crude antipersonnel IEDs out of household materials and may have had their getaway car in queue for work at a body shop as late as Wednesday morning. Some plot! It may actually turn out to be true, but even the liberal NPR should know that it's best to wait for some facts to emerge before extrapolating too far along The Narrative.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
