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A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times “After Deadline” blog took on an issue close to my heart—the use of descriptive adjectives as nouns to refer to a group of people that share a particular characteristic. I’ve discussed my reservations about that usage briefly here before, but I thought it merited another mention. The “After Deadline” post specifically addresses use of the term “disabled” as a noun, arguing that “the difference between ‘the disabled’ and ‘disabled people’ (or ‘people with disabilities’) is subtle but significant. …it’s better to refer to people who, among other characteristics, have some disability, rather than to use the disability as the sole label.”
I couldn’t agree more, but wish that Times Deputy News Editor Philip B. Corbett, who maintains the blog and the Times stylebook, had gone on to generalize his conclusion to other nouns and other groups of people. According to the stylebook as cited by Corbett, “the disabled” should be avoided as a noun because “it may seem to equate widely diverse people and undervalue the productive parts of their lives.” I understand that the second listed reason for avoiding the term—undervaluing productive parts of peoples’ lives—applies specifically to “disabled,” which some might perceive as emphasizing a negative characteristic. But the first reason—the desire to avoid equating widely diverse people—applies equally to nouns like “blacks” and “homosexuals” (which are both used relatively often in the Times, as here and here).
I do think that there’s an extra element of “othering” in the fact that the adjective-noun “disabled” is always preceded by the article “the.” The only other adjective-nouns I can think of that are used that way are nationality nouns like “the Chinese” or “the French.” And the fact that it would sound absurd to discuss “the Americans” in a newspaper story suggests that that construction only works with groups that are unfamiliar or “other” enough to the audience that they can be comfortably grouped into a monolith. But why not avoid the problem altogether by using “disabled people,” “white people,” and “Senegalese people”? Adjectives are the right parts of speech for that kind of information because their function is to describe things, where the function of nouns is to define things.
One of the most frustrating elements of news coverage of the 2004 election for me was the persistence of the phrases “moral issues” and “moral values” in descriptions of socially conservative voting patterns. Obviously socially liberal positions come from at least as moral a place as do socially conservative ones. I doubt that reporters meant to imply that they don’t, but using “values” as a shorthand for social conservatism left readers with that strange and inaccurate impression. I was particularly disturbed at the tendency to describe support for anti-gay measures in that way, because while the issue of gay rights is emphatically a moral one, I don’t think that the right lies with the discriminatory side.
So I approached the coverage of the passing of this year’s four anti-gay ballot measures with trepidation. I found, however, that the 2008 coverage wasn’t as ready to equate morality with social conservatism, and in some cases mainstream news reports acknowledged that the winning side hurt people by denying them their civil rights. The main New York Times article opens with the moving image of “a giant rainbow-colored flag in the gay-friendly Castro neighborhood of San Francisco…flying at half-staff” over the success of California’s Proposition 8. And for the most part, support for the bans was attributed to “social conservatives” or “religious conservatives,” rather than the “values voters” of 2004. By framing Proposition 8’s passage as “paradoxical” in an election that was so historic for the history of civil rights in the U.S., a CNN story acknowledges that gay marriage is indeed a civil-rights issue. And it was heartening to see news organizations recycle the (accurate) language of Proposition 8 itself, which points out that the measure seeks to deny a right, “the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.” There were a host of good stories speculating about the emotional, legal, and practical effects of Proposition 8 on same-sex couples who had married in California.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof seems to think that this descriptive evolution is a problem—or that is in part how I read his election day blog post about the relationship between his papers’ reporters and social conservatism. Kristof’s post dismisses—correctly, I think—the claim that the Times has a political bias, but it frets about the paper’s socially liberal ethos. There may be truth to some of his complaints, and I haven’t thought much about the way the Times addresses issues like gun control and abortion. But Kristof also mentions the Times‘ coverage of gay marriage as a problem. He points approvingly to a 2004 column by then–New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent in which Okrent laments the absence of stories exploring “partner abuse in the gay community, about any social difficulties that might be encountered by children of gay couples or about divorce rates,” among other issues that he thinks are necessary elements of “the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires.” Presumably he is suggesting that such stories are relevant to the question of whether gay marriage should be legal. In somewhat sarcastic language, Okrent bemoans the preponderance of positive stories about people who have been granted this right:
But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it’s disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading. So far this year, front-page headlines have told me that ”For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy” (March 19); that the family of ”Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home” (Jan. 12) is a new archetype; and that ”Gay Couples Seek Unions in God’s Eyes” (Jan. 30). I’ve learned where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I’ve met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I’ve been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability.
Every one of these articles was perfectly legitimate. Cumulatively, though, they would make a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn’t even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you’d have the makings of a life insurance commercial.
Okrent’s column drew a great deal of mail, some of which he published in a subsequent column. One letter, which made a strong impression on me and which I have remembered often since, made the following concise argument:
In making the case that The Times’s coverage of the gay marriage issue has shown a liberal imbalance by printing articles portraying gay marital bliss over articles describing potential marital strife, you confuse balance with illogical overextension.
During the civil rights movement, it was not incumbent upon newspapers to run articles about the risks of African-Americans drowning in public swimming pools as arguments against desegregating those pools.
LAURA NEWMAN
Astoria, Queens, July 26, 2004
Kristof and Okrent seem to want to cloud what should be a straightforward question of discrimination and equality in the interest of appeasing a (large) segment of the population that does not want to consider the question in those terms.
Same-sex marriage and adoption are civil rights issues. So many newspapers have had to face their institutional regrets for not covering the Civil Rights Movements of the 1940s, 50s and 60s in terms of objective right and wrong. That ugly period in media history should serve as a cautionary tale to media organizations working to cover modern civil rights issues. Perhaps the coverage of gay rights in the 2008 election indicates that in one area, at least, the lesson is finally being heeded.
This incredibly offensive and inaccurate headline appeared on CNN.com on Monday: “Ellen DeGeneres ‘marries’ Portia Rossi.” There was, of course, nothing pretend about the marriage–DeGeneres and de Rossi wed in California over the weekend. I personally don’t think that a marriage’s legal status is what should confer legitimacy on the union–I wouldn’t use scare quotes to call into question the legitimacy of a marriage between consenting adults in any state. But I really can’t imagine how anyone at CNN could perceive those quotes as ethical or accurate when the marriage in question was entirely legal.
It's hard to imagine what they were thinking...
The editors at CNN.com apparently came to the same conclusion because they changed their headline later in the morning to “Ellen DeGeneres reportedly weds Portia Rossi.” Hopefully, the original headline was the work of an individual that slipped through the editorial cracks, instead of the more troubling possibility that it was approved for publication by several sets of eyes. Either way, it should never have appeared. It should have sent up an armada of red flags to anyone who saw it. And the fact that it didn’t immediately do so suggests a culture–if not of overt homophobia, then of a tendency to advance socially conservative and discriminatory narratives about family life.
CNN.com rethinks its headline.
A friend alerted me to this post on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, and I wanted to share a CBS News video that Cole points to. It features Army Times reporter and former soldier Kelly Kennedy discussing in gruesome detail the horrible things that she witnessed as an embedded reporter in Iraq. She has a really interesting perspective on the question of whether to report physically graphic details of war, and discusses how her desire to communicate her growing understanding of soldiers’ experiences sometimes conflicted with concerns about burdening her audience with the harrowing details. She catalogs some of the reasons that war reporters don’t report the worst of what they encounter.
A big question about the coverage of Cyclone Nargis was raised for me from this post by Tami at Racialicious (it was originally posted at What Tami Said). Tami describes her own experience watching CNN coverage of the storm:
There were bodies and bodies and more bodies–Burmese men, women, even children, dead, bloated, discolored and rotting in the Southeast Asian sun; arms and legs akimbo as if their owners had been tossed like rag dolls. I know this is what death looks like, especially when it takes place in a poor country where the people have been colonized, militarized and rocked by ethnic strife and drug trafficking. But I watched the television and couldn’t help thinking that this video desecration of the already desecrated was another example of how American culture sees brown people as somehow less human.
She goes on to challenge the value of showing such graphic images of death, and to assert that the victims’ race influences media decisions about whether to show those images or not:
What are the chances that CNN will show the broken bodies of the 22 people killed in twisters that plowed across the central United States this weekend, y’know so we get “the enormity of the story?” We did not need to see graphic footage of victims to understand the enormity of Oklahoma City or 9/11. I do remember seeing some footage of the dead in Katrina–not as graphic as the Myanmar coverage–but we all know those folks weren’t American anyway, they were “refugees.” (Tongue firmly in cheek, here.
I especially take Tami’s point about images of dead people from the 2000 Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11 attacks. Showing such images would have been considered impossibly disrespectful. Is it the fact that the victims of the cyclone live far away, have different colors of skin from most of the U.S. news audience, and live lives that seem remote to us that makes it more acceptable to show images of their dead bodies?
When I brought this problem up with friends, one suggested that the answer to that question might lie partly in the immediacy of the Oklahoma and September 11 attacks to the majority of the U.S. news audience. For whatever reason, we felt those events as tragedies that were “close to home;” we didn’t need graphic images to understand them. So perhaps graphic images can serve as a (poor) substitute to whatever nationalistic or cultural feelings bind us to the victims of homegrown tragedies?
In general, I incline toward encouraging graphic language about—and images of—mass death, because I think it is one way to heighten the audience’s ethical awareness of the events that caused the deaths. I think it is an important means of piercing Michael Ignatieff’s “carapace of self-absorption and estrangement that separates us from the moral worlds of others.” But plenty of thinkers-about-journalism have argued that physically realistic images of death can serve as a sort of “war-” or “disaster-porn,” objectifying the subjects of the portrayal without engaging the reader on a deeper level. And if it is true that we see more images of nonwhite victims of natural disaster, then that understanding of graphic images has to be taken even more seriously.
Ignatieff goes on: “The struggle to believe one’s senses is at the heart of the process of moving from voyeurism to commitment.” So I guess the question is whether images of dead bodies help us to believe what is being described, or wheter—since it is so often “others” who are pictured—it reinforces or amplifies our estrangement from them.
A couple of weeks ago, the Chicago Tribune‘s public editor, Kathleen Parker. The Parker column, which sparked so much comment that McNulty devoted a second column to reader responses to the controversy, defends the argument of a white voter that Barack Obama is less than “a full-blooded American:”
It’s about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.
Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Fry’s political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically—and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century—there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.
It’s pretty easy to see what upset the Tribune readers cited by McNulty in his column, and McNulty acknowledges that Parker’s ideas are likely to be “ridiculous and repugnant … to many, if not most, Americans.” But he goes on to defend the piece’s placement in the Tribune:
Anyone who believes that the race issue will be dormant in the general election—presuming that Obama is the Democratic candidate—is hiding from reality. It remains a divisive issue and, as Parker noted, some fear that “their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative.”
I think it is the news media’s responsibility to highlight not just the political stratagems but the attitudes that help create them.
The aim of the Tribune’s Commentary page is to display a wide range of subjective opinions, even those some may consider offensive. Printing a column is not the same as sanctioning it.
I don’t think I can agree with McNulty. Printing a column is not the same thing as agreeing with it, but it does amount to sanctioning it by assuming that its ideas will contribute in a meaningful way to the national conversation. There are obviously some ideas so offensive and devoid of intellectual and social value that respected newspapers would not consider publishing a column that espoused them. The Tribune decided that Paker’s column fell on the acceptable side of that divide despite her extensive use of what McNulty calls “code words” for racism.
To argue that the op-ed page is one big mirror on which is reflected the nation’s (or Illinois’) entire range of opinions, however offensive, is either disingenuous or silly. So is comparing the publishing of Parker’s column to printing news reports of racist attitudes (as McNulty does later in his column). It is indeed “the news media’s responsibility to highlight not just the political stratagems but the attitudes that help create them,” but when those attitudes are highly offensive, news reporting is the appropriate place to address them. The opinion page should be a forum for intelligent debate. By placing Parker’s racist column there, the Tribune asserted that it could contribute something to the national debate.
The dust-up recalled the uproar over the Washington Post‘s decision to publish in its Sunday “Outlook” section Charlotte Allen’s anti-feminist March 2 column entitled “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” It’s quite a piece—deeply sexist, as thousands of outraged readers pointed out to the Post, and I think it’s also fair to characterize it as silly, somewhat rambling, and full of generalizations that don’t make a lot of sense. What struck me most about the piece was what seemed to me an utter lack of intellectual content. It’s hard to see what serious thinkers about gender issues would latch onto in order to engage it.
Post editors originally defended their decision to publish the piece by calling it “tongue-in-cheek” (a characterization that Allen herself disclaimed), but they addressed the controversy extensively in print, allowing several columnists to rebut Allen’s piece and publishing several of the many, many critical letters the newspaper received from readers. Deborah Howell, the Post‘s ombudsman, concluded that the newspaper shouldn’t have published the piece because it was a misguided attempt to coat offensive ideas in humor. I agree with Howell (though I don’t think the humor is the root of the column’s problem), and with MissLaura of Daily Kos, who argued that “Charlotte Allen isn’t the problem. The Washington Post is.”
I like that the editorial pages of respected newspapers are willing to publish controversial, and even blatantly wrong-headed, opinions. But such pieces are only valuable when they contribute something other than vitriol to the national debate(s). Garden-variety racism and sexism aren’t likely to do that. Nor are non garden–variety racism and sexism, for that matter.
The devastating natural disasters in Myanmar and China that have dominated this month’s news have unfortunately offered a good platform for examining the way news media outlets describe deaths that occur as a result of natural disasters. The question of how those deaths are communicated to distant readers is interesting in itself, but it also sets up interesting comparisons to the description of war deaths.
Some research I’ve conducted myself has suggested that natural disaster reporting is not more likely to use graphic physical descriptions of dead bodies than war reporting, but the cyclone and earthquake coverage in the last three weeks has made me want to revisit those findings.
The majority of the coverage that I have encountered has seemed both to discuss death more, and to evoke it more graphically, than an average day of war coverage. Entire lengthy articles are devoted to death tolls, and articles about other aspects of the cyclone and the earthquake are generally framed in terms of the human destruction that characterizes their aftermath (in several articles about the bureaucratic attitude of the Myanmar junta toward international offers of aid, reporters have juxtaposed it with the worsening physical conditions in the storm’s aftermath, for example). By contrast, death and killing can sometimes feel like a secondary element of war, mentioned in passing in articles that focus on military strategy or the political wrangling that usually accompanies war’s most violent episodes.
The nature of the descriptions of death in natural disaster reporting has also been notable. The descriptions are—appropriately—horrifying, describing the visual, tactile and olfactory attributes of death in ways that evoke the pain and horror of death. In the cyclone particularly, human remains and the difficulties inherent in disposing of them have been a major focus.
The screenshots below (from The New York Times online and CNN.com) are some examples I ran into this week of cyclone coverage specifically focusing on the physical realities of death:
If it’s true, as anecdotal evidence suggests, that the natural disaster descriptions include more, and more graphic, descriptions of death than war coverage, there are lots of possible explanations for this fact, most of them very reasonable from the perspective of journalists and editors. Chief among them, of course, is that though wars often kill many hundreds of thousands of people in a relatively short space of time, there are not likely to be tens of thousands of unburied bodies at any one moment. The U.S. news media is notoriously event-focused, and natural disaster deaths become “events” in themselves due to their much higher rate (in “deaths per minute”) than war deaths.
But I think it may also be true that war deaths aren’t considered as central to war as natural disaster deaths are to natural disasters. Many articles are published each year that discuss ongoing wars without once mentioning death explicitly. While death and destruction of human habitats are what make storms and earthquakes newsworthy, war is understood to have meaning outside of the deaths that it causes. Here’s how Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, describes this phenomenon (emphasis hers):
The essential structure of war…resides in the relation between its own largest parts, the relation between the collective casualties that occur within war, and the verbal issues (freedom, national sovereignty, the right to a disputed ground, the extra-territorial authority of a particular ideology) that stand outside war, that are there before the act of war begins and after it ends, that are understood by warring populations as the motive and justification and will again be recognized after the war as the thing substantiated or (if one is on the losing side) not substantiated by war’s activity
Regardless of whether the explanation for the apparent discrepancy between descriptions of death in war and natural disaster reporting is practical or cultural, its effects seem important to examine. Do the prominently placed images and descriptions of dead bodies and ruined cities in coverage of the Myanmar cyclone and the earthquake in China make it more difficult for the reader to ignore those deaths than the deaths that occur every day in Iraq and Afghanistan? Should journalists and editors try to find ways to use the tools of natural disaster coverage to feature the carnage that results from war? In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss more about other ethical questions raised by graphic images of death and graphic physical language describing it in the news.
[This post is the first installment of what I hope will become a regular feature. I’ll pick a specific issue that presents journalists with descriptive problems and discuss (ideally with others) the most ethical way for them to articulate it. The idea will be to address usage questions that are too specific or too sensitive for media style guides to address, or for which the style guides offer unsatisfactory prescriptions. I’m going to call it “The Usage Panel,” partly to bolster my hope that in the future there will be more than one panelist, but mostly because I would like for it to be an ethics- and accuracy-focused media analog to the practical usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Suggestions for future Usage Panel topics are welcome!]
During the March upsurge in violence in and around Basra, a lot of the print publications that I see regularly used “Shiite-on-Shiite” as an adjective to describe the fighting and to distinguish it from the violence between Shiite and Sunni factions that has been more characteristic of the civil war in Iraq. It struck me as an appropriate topic for the first Usage Panel because it was so pervasive and raised some questions about how to describe ethnic and religious violence.
The expression recalls “black-on-black,” an adjective that appeared regularly in 1980’s reports of violence in South Africa that was not between black anti-Apartheid and white pro-Apartheid forces. The phrase still appears in U.S. newspapers, but almost always to describe either violence in urban black neighborhoods in the U.S. or discrimination against black Americans perpetrated by black Americans. (The expression “black-on-black violence” is specifically proscribed by the Guardian Style Guide, but not addressed by the NYT or AP stylebooks or by the Chicago Manual of Style).
Like the earlier usage of “black-on-black,” “Shiite-on-Shiite” is used to point out a way in which the violence being described defies the audience’s expectations. In South Africa in the 1980s, we expected violence to be racially motivated, and in Iraq now we expect violence that does not involve foreign forces to be between Shiite and Sunni groups.
I think that my primary hesitation about both expressions is that they present an uncomplicated understanding of the state of being “Shiite” or “black.” To use “Shiite-on-Shiite” as the primary descriptor of a violent incident suggests that it is, above other notable features of the incident, surprising that someone who identifies as Shiite would hurt someone else who identifies as Shiite. There’s a suggestion of “unnatural,” almost incestuous, betrayal in the construction. “Shiite-on-Shiite” and “black-on-black” encourage an inaccurate lumping of many, many individuals, political parties, ethnic groups, organizations and motivations into monolithic groups.
I fully accept that it was important—perhaps of primary importance—in all of the stories where I noticed the usage to explain that the violence occurring was between opposing Shiite groups. But the expression “Shiite-on-Shiite violence” evokes a simplistic understanding of “Shiiteness” that seems even less nuanced than “violence between opposing Shiite factions” or a similar description.
I’m sure that some of my discomfort with these phrases derives from their employment of “black” and “Shiite” as nouns rather than as the adjectives I think they should be. I have never liked the usage “10 blacks” or “three Shiites” or “a group of Christians,” (as opposed to “black people,” etc.) because it reduces people to one classifying adjective instead of using the adjective to indicate one salient element of peoples’ humanity.
But there is also something unique to the construction “x-on-x” that estranges the audience from the “x”-es. The fact that the expression evokes a colloquial and objectifying description of sexual activities might be relevant. I think it’s significant that such adjectival phrases are often used to describe pornographic representations of sex.
Of course all media descriptions—and certainly all one-phrase adjectives—inevitably reduce and simplify realities. But describing the violence in Basra as “Shiite-on-Shiite” inaccurately and unnecessarily endowed the violence, and its perpetrators and victims, with a nonexistent simplicity.
Or that’s what I think right now. Thoughts?
Something I’ve been interested in for a long time is the way war reports describe the deaths that happen in war. War deaths are mentioned in some capacity in almost every day’s newspaper and television newscast and I would argue that the way reporters describe those deaths significantly impacts the way we think about the war being described.
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry points to how peripheral death, injury, and the destruction of homes can seem in published accounts of war: “one can read many pages of a historic or strategic account of a particular military campaign, or listen to many successive installments in a newscast narrative of events in a contemporary war, without encountering the acknowledgment that the purpose of the event described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape, and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves.”
I find that even when death is mentioned—even when it is central to a news story about, for example, the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—it is described in ways that obscure its terrible physical realities. (And I just want to mention that I don’t believe that journalists set out to obscure this reality, and I recognize that there are dozens of legitimate reasons for writing brief, succinct accounts of this particular kind of violence. What interests me, though—and what I think is more relevant to the ethical value of the story—is the effect of these descriptions on the reader’s understanding of events.)
In “Is Nothing Sacred? The Ethics of Television,” (I keep mentioning this essay, but only because it’s great), Michael Ignatieff, speaking of television, says that “in a culture overwhelmed by the volume of promiscuous representation, there must be some practice by which the real—the instant when a real body is struck, abused, or violated—is given a place of special attention, a demarcation that insists that it be seen.”
Of course, the “instant when a real body is struck, abused, or violated” would be unbearable to a reader if language could perfectly communicate its physical violence and “make real” its terror. No representation could. But physically graphic language, like graphic television images, can force us to experience—in some real but infinitely and necessarily circumscribed way—the physical horror of war.
I collected all the discussions of Iraq war deaths that I could find from New York Times stories (including Reuters and AP stories that appeared on the New York Times website) dated April 10th. I found eight articles that referred to injury and several articles, like this one, that discussed war strategy but didn’t mention injury. The descriptions of death tended to use stereotyped language like “The U.S. military says an American soldier has been killed by a roadside bomb in central Baghdad.” and “U.S. air strikes killed 10 people in a Baghdad slum where dozens of people died in clashes this week,” phrases that communicate the fact of death but don’t evoke its physical reality.
One article that listed soldiers who had died recently twice referred to soldiers dying of wounds sustained during a particular event: “Army Staff Sgt. Jeffery L. Hartley, 25, Hempstead, Texas; died Tuesday in Kharguliah, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle struck an explosive” and “Army Sgt. Shaun P. Tousha, 30, Hull, Texas; died Wednesday in Baghdad of wounds when his vehicle struck an explosive.” This description was the only one I could find that mentioned any physical aspect of deadly injuries (wounds).
Here are links to the articles that mentioned death or injury in Iraq:
Roadside Bomb Kills US Soldier in Iraq
Family Honors Son’s Memory With Iraq Aid
U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq at 4,030
A Dozen Iraqis Die in Continuing Fighting in Sadr City, and Bombs Kill Three Americans
Colonel is 9th of Rank to Die in Iraq
I don’t really mean for my title to disparage the kind of media ethics taught in journalism school—I would never argue that fair comment, the treatment of sources, and privacy aren’t important issues for journalists to spend time thinking about and wrestling with. But the ways in which news stories affect audience perceptions of social and political questions seem to get short shrift in the conversation about media ethics. News media often provide audiences with initial constructions of remote events, so that our engagement with events is likely to be shaped in part by the way journalists communicate their reality.
My idea for this blog is to explore the relationship between journalistic construction of events and audiences’ moral understanding of those events. How we respond to social and political events depends on how we understand them—how we interpret their significance and whether we feel a responsibility or connection to them.
I would like to look especially (though not exclusively) at news consumers’ engagement with events that cause human suffering, which I consider an especially important and problematic element of the reader-news relationship. It’s an element that commentators and theorists have done a good job of defining, usually while lamenting the failures of news media actors to effectively produce such engagement. In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred? The Ethics of Television,” Michael Ignatieff describes how the deadlines that characterize all mainstream news media formats raise obstacles to the responsible communication of human tragedy: “The time disciplines of the news genre militate against the minimum moral requirement of engagement with another person’s suffering: that one spends enough time with them, enough time to pierce the carapace of self-absorption and estrangement that separates us from the moral worlds of others.” In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag addresses the limitations of photographic language in communicating news: “To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”
I think that examining the building blocks of news stories is a good way to get at the social and political ideas they convey. My particular interest is in the way that word use and syntax creates moral meaning, but I’m glad that I picked an ambiguous tagline— “a conversation about the language of the news”—because I want to reserve the right to discuss the visual and aural languages of news media as well.
And I really do hope that it becomes a conversation. I’m excited for the “comment” feature to become an integral part of this blog.
Real Media Ethics 