The Media

Frontline Ideas

We live in media-saturated societies…media production is now one of the largest &most lucrative industrial sectors in the global economy…media saturation is not a ‘good’ thing, credited with ‘fabulous’ powers to change people & have been blamed for contributing to most social ills.

The Media as Definers of Social Reality

- As the societies & the world we live in grow more complex, the range of information that we ‘need’ also increases… if we wish to function as informed & competent citizens… then we need to know about evens happening in geographically distant places… things that are outside the scope of personal experiences.

- Media delivers events we do not witness personally & that happen in places which we have no access

- In this capacity they bring us two types of information: 1) events outside our own society 2) information about our own society, e.g. important issues arise, debated & solved, include social & political institutions such as Parliament, law courts, urban ghettos etc.

How reliable & accurate is the information that the media deliver to us? If we base our attitudes & action in the world on information derived from media, how predictable & successful would these be?

Two views to the question

1) Of journalists & media: media is a ‘window on the world’ it’s not possible for media to tell us everything that is going on. Media space & time are limited so only so much information can be carried. Limited carrying capacity means that some element of selectivity is inevitable. A significant number of facts & perspectives are left out then a central condition of an adequate democratic media – that of ‘meaningful diversity’ is not achieved.

2) Fractured glass: selectivity means that media can control & shape the knowledge & understanding that we, their audience, develop about the world.

Two arguments:

1) information is a direct reflection of world or of social reality

2) media account of reality is selective one… constitutes a distortion & misrepresentation of significant events & issues in the world

Media power as selectivity

- do not provide a reliable & accurate guide to the range of important events in the social & political world

- it thus controls the information that is available to media audiences & so has the potential to shape or to set limits to their social knowledge & to images that they can construct of the world in which they live.

- Can encourage one to take a particular position, use of camera shots convey different kinds of attitudes. e.g. ‘tight’ reproduce the kind of closeness, medium-long: objective in that the camera adopts the spectator’s perspective on events, e.g. ‘cultural neutrality’ at a visual level.

- Specific example: the conflict between Palestinians & Israelis, on Israeli TV coverage, there are very few ‘close ups’ or ‘zoom-ins’ since use of close up conveyed impression of order, of respect, of control

- Thus, the ‘realism’ of television is deceptive, not ‘raw’ reality that unfolds before our eyes, but a mediated & selected vision of it… bias & selectivity are not accidental features of media, but inevitable features of the language we use to describe the world…. Notion of ‘framing’

Framing

- Media do not simply select events to cover; they also offer interpretative frameworks through which these are to be understood. Frames are the ‘persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, & presentation, of selection, emphasis, & exclusion…enable audiences to locate, perceive, identify & label.’