December 3, 2004
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Topic: Questions about the media
If you haven’t read my last post, take a look at the article first. Through the American Enterprise Institute website, I discovered this link to an organization called the Broadcasting Board of Governors
http://www.aei.org/news/filter.,newsID.20529/news_detail.asp
which discusses what seems like the purist form of propaganda. It’s a gov’t agency that promotes the spreading of “truth,” which, as in any media, from Fox News to the New York Times to al Jazeera, means, promoting the spreading of an agenda. In this case…the US is using the airwaves to inform/pursuade the people of the Middle East that we’re in Iraq for their benefit, not simply ours. Just as I’ve realized that the word “mandate,” means nothing legally or politically accept in discussion, does that also apply to the word “propaganda” a word which growing up we were all taught was something that could never be associated with a democracy? Or…is this agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors) that is doing something unlawful/immoral?
The issue of “which side is right, democrats vs. republicans, socialists vs. capitalists,” has made me reflect that this isn’t necessarily a combative game, or at least, it doesn’t have to be. For instance, the movie Outfoxed, which shows the Republican nature of the Fox news channel, is a movie hailed by liberals, who naturally, praise the movie with their own liberal bias. As the historian Howard Zinn notes, there’s not a single thing in this world that isn’t without bias. Any given headline in a newspaper is bias in that it denotes importance compared to all other articles. While the bias is intentional or not, there is bias. As someone interested in higher education reform, the fact that this topic has rarely, and in some specific topics, never made it into the New York Times or other major media, makes me think, “hey, these guys are biased in favor of maintaining the status quo of education.”
So…how are we to view the media?
A topic that has come up in my educational internship is the idea of relativistic morals vs. I believe it’s called “normative,” values. Anyways…the former says that since nobody can claim there morals are right, then we can’t push any moral agenda. The latter suggests that we can come to some common ground on what morals we agree on and can bring into the classroom. These would include tolerance of others, having an open-mind, thinking critically, etc. I think this is the approach we need to take to the media. Rather than spending time and energy combatting bias, we should welcome as many form as bias as possible. Zinn’s history of the United States that paints a portrait of a country of shame, should be welcomed as much as another history that paints a more patriotic picture. I think that’s the theoretical open-mindedness that we talk about, but I can’t think of many instances in the real world or in college where I saw this true balancing act take place, where we look at the other side openly, and then draw our own conclusions.
I was just flipping through the first few pages of a book “Myths of Rich and Poor” that my roommate, a business guy, is reading. Before even starting, I could sense the bias I brought in. “This book is written by somebody who only cares about profits, and is going to overlook or try to belittle the facts of the rich and poor.” But, I flipped through, and low and behold, they did acknowledge my argument in the most compassionate way, then went on to say they’re not philosophers or psychologists, rather they are economists, and therefor their concern is to examine the issue of rich and poor from economic data.
I immediately froze at this line, “the fact show that the free-enterprise system continues to deliver prosperity.” But, they acknowledged that it could be better, and that it does not apply that everyone is better off in every way. I think it’s important that I expose myself to these types of views, as well as the political views of the American Enterprise Institute, which isn’t “a biased right-wing organization,” but, is an organization that promotes policies based on conservative philosophies. I believe that allowing myself to get into the minds of the people that I have been taught to hate and to in fact tolerate them, (i am referring to most liberals who share my values but promote intolerance to those who don’t) I will better be able to understand the other side, which will make me better off in many ways. Some of you might feel the same way as I do, when I go to a conservative website and see the picture of someone who wrote an article I disagree with, I just look at them and do think, “they’re evil,” when for the most part, they’re not, they just see the world differently. And, I think a healthy strategy to pursuade others is first to show them respect, and second to be able to show them your side, since the other side is as unlikely to see your point of view as you are theirs. My roommate who is reading this book is not openly political, but his job lends him to be 100% supportive of capitalist practices. As I come to better understand what these practices are, and the viewpoints of those who say the economy needs to keep growing and people need to keep consuming, I will better be able to show people that there are in fact, grave consequences to our use of and emotional attachment to the notion of economic growth is good for this country and good for this world.
-dan
Comments (4)
a very valid topic these days…
you should read manafacturing consent by chomsky. it discusses in a novel, for the time, and significant manner how the media spreads truth
This is really interesting to me… the question of media bias. You are correct in saying that all media reflects bias. This is because it is written by human subjects who can never entirely seperate their personal subjectivity from objective reality. It is a dialectical and ideological process. That makes uncovering the “truth” rather tricky, given that everyone is always already ideologically interpellated and that all media caries with it propaganda.
So understanding truth is like detective work. The philosopher Althusser calls this “Theoretical Practice” – taking ideological raw material and refining it. In terms of understanding media, it comes down to structural analysis. The key is understanding the way in which structures (the juridico-political and ideological superstructures and the economic infrastructure) act as forces upon eachother in a “complex structured whole.” This is Althusserian Social Science. Thus if we are well informed by the standards presented to us by the average US American (we read the NY Times and watch the evening news) we really aren’t well informed in any structural sense, as the lack of objectivity or perspective doesn’t allow for accurate analysis.
Here’s what I do:
I read many papers and journal from various perspectives. I read what the Press agencies put out, namely Reuters; the Corporate Media (meaning media that is profit driven, based upon advertising and thus runs stories that are profitable based upon market analysis): The NY Times and the LA Times – this gives perspective upon what people are generally thinking about who consider themselves well informed; also the journals from both the right and the left that offer an nuanced analysis of events: on the left, CounterPunch, Z Magazine and Monthly Review, on the right, The Economist. You can’t stop there – you have to understand the perspectives of the other global players, so check out international papers such as the BBC, Cuba’s Granma, China’s People’s Daily, the Aljazeera. All these are bourgeois papers, so read the proletarian papers too – the Militant (Trotskyist) and Revolutionary Worker (Maoist) are both important for perspective.
Understanding dollar hegemony is more important for understanding the war in Iraq than anything else. It is what Mao Tse-tung calls the “principal contradiction” of the situation.
But on any international issue check out the proper national papers that deal with it in the nations involved - for example, I read such papers as The Himilayan Times (Nepal) and New Kerala (India) when I want to analize the Maoist insurgency in central Asia, which is the event that I’ve analized more closely than any other.
So using a structural analysis of the Nepalese situation, we can get intelligence from an article on CPN-UML that requires quite a bit of context and perspective to uncover the truth. Knowing the history of the insurgency, and knowing the opportunistic line of the CPN-UML we can make certain inductive truth claims regarding the successes and prospects of the revolution – shifting winds. Another example would be a series of articles from Indian and Pakistani papers that made a statement about a particular battle in that insurgency. These papers stated that “hundreds” of Maoists were killed and and “eight” people from government forces were killed. The BBC, however, reported the same casualties from government forces, but instead of “hundreds” for the rebels, reported “several” killed. The BBC also mentioned that the Maoists admitted to only one casualty on their side. This discrepency is made more interesting later by an article in the Himilayan Times stating that they didn’t know where the paper’s reporting “hundreds of Maoists” dead got their figures. To understand this, it is important to note that India is dealing with its own insurgency under the recently united Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the North, and that both the Nepalese and Indian insurgents are part of the the same international organization, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. Thus it is in the interest of India and the Pakastani neighbors to lower moral for the insurgent forces by drastically overstating casualty figures, for the phases of the Napali moon could well influenc the Indian tide – and that degree of change in India would have vast global consequences on every level.
Of course in any dynamical system (a system with an excess of variables) no analysis is rock solid. But this is the best method I’ve come up with understanding events: study history and contemporary reporting, both from as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and then combine this with economic analysis.
Also, to respond to your comment: Capital Accumulation is one the most complicated aspects of economics and based upon the Capitalist’s ability to produce surplus-value from surplus-labor. Basically you are right, the international division of labor escapes macroeconomic analysis. If the standard of living goes up in the First World, the law of value states that it has to lower elsewhere. What USA has is an immense buraucracy of cubicle workers – the middle management of global capitalism – wage laborors who are substantially better off than the producing masses of the peripheral sphere of capitalist development, such as the sweat-shop workers in Latin America and South East Asia