Media Terminologies and Perceptions
By Rhodo Zeb. Filed in Uncategorized |Tags: international.crimes, media.complicity
Black and White Cat has an important post from a few days ago. Choice quote:
The world is divided into good countries (us) and bad countries (them). Bad countries’ leaders “say,” “claim,” or even “insist” they are doing one thing, but good countries’ leaders “believe” or “fear” that the bad countries are actually doing something else. Journalists know what good countries’ leaders really believe because they are psychic.
This is exactly right, and media organizations really need to improve their polices. I am not holding my breath, however. The above quote reminded me of an issue that makes me very angry, which is the media’s tendency to accept the terminology given to them by, oh say the US military. Those killed by the ‘good’ countries are almost invariably ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’, at least at the time, and the media prints this without any sort of verification. Later on, long after the fact, they sometimes are more properly described as ‘women’ and ‘children’.
Media organizations should start with ‘people’ and then add information only once verification has begun. The post is an important one, and lays out in detail the games that governments play and how media enables it all, so click over and read the whole thing.
Sunday, March 22nd 2009 at 02:21 |
I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days as there’s been a discussion over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog on a similar subject. Coates started out by praising a particularly well-written piece on the Icelandic financial crisis (available here: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904 ) but it later turned out that the journalist who wrote it was actually playing fast-and-loose with some of the facts ( http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/03/in_defense_of_iceland.php ). Now, I still think the piece was very entertaining, and that it gave you a good feel for the situation, but I certainly don’t think people should rely on this kind of journalism as anything more than a backgrounder.
You see a similar situation in a lot of the US media in relation to Europe – it really is quite frustrating to meet otherwise intelligent people who believe, say, that Europe is fast turning into Eurabia because of the threat from islamic extremists, or that the EU is on the brink of collapse, when nothing of the kind is actually happening. They think this because rather than bog down/weaken their stories with statistics, journalists reporting on Europe find it a lot easier to paint with a broad brush. The same of course is true of a lot of European reporting on America.
This kind of laziness becomes particularly odious when you come to examples such as the use of torture by US and UK forces and their allies in the war on terror – now fully documented and convincingly proved. Getting any newspapers to actually use words like ‘torture’ without giving them the quotation-marks treatment took a long time, although I’m glad that the UK media has finally started to do so – but the mainstream US media has not. The language used to describe our opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan is also instructive – ‘guerilla’ was quickly done away with, ‘partisan’ never seemed to be used more than peripherally, ‘terrorist’ was a bit out of place when those being described were engaged in open combat – somehow the media settled on the term ‘insurgent’ as a catch-all. The labelling of detainees as ‘terrorist suspects’ seems to totally negate the second word and turn those imprisoned into a class of people indistinguishable from terrorists themselves, when many of those are nothing of the kind.