WORKING NOTES ON MEDIA BIAS AIM: A theory-of-meaning analysis of media bias In the past few years I have done occasional analyses of media bias, mostly from Newsweek & TIME. My own bias, which I belabour in my analyses, is Likud-Zionist. My remarks tend to fall into three levels: (1) analyses of specific terms and phrases (2) theoretic remarks on the theory-of-meaning techniques used to produce those bias effects (3) McLuhaneque reflections of the role of media in contemprary politics. In this essay I'll focus on (2). Ideally, this would be an apolitical, academic philosophy sort of essay in theory of meaning. Realistically, the political context will intrude. Working through this material, I'm not sure that works. It would be lovely to think that the quintessence of every trick of media bias can be found, refined, in a nusance of a theory of meaning. But my sense at the moment is: to reveal media-bias, you've got to wallow around in it; this is a matter of delineating unadmitted cultural neuroses; one can't but be offensive, and needs to improvise a language and methodology. Academically respectable it ain't. So to do justice to what I've already got would take a long book, inchoate; a lot more material would be needed to make a shorter, coherent book. So all I'll get here will be a few academic footnotes. Oh well. ----------------------------------------------------------------- mb0103 TIME 1/3/94 'fanatical settlers and other right-wing Jews' A nice trick; let's name it the UNQANTITIZED DISJUNCTIVE There's no (locutionary) 'implication' in the logical sense of entailment; but the reader is led to understand or `given the impression' that virtually all settlers are fanatics; while the writer remains safe from charges of deliberate falsehood because, by strict logic, the statement could be true of any class containing 2 or more `fanatic settlers'. 'fanatic settlers' has become an epithet, like 'fleet-footed Akilles' --------------------------------------------------------------- Again, I suggest that one must bring the methodololgic analysis of subliminal advertising techniques to bear in analyzing media bias, and recognize that literal as well as visual mass-media commnicate primarily by conceptual 'images' (which may be ideas, visual images, or a combination) THEORY: Media bias addresses a particular cultural sub-group by evoking images presumably common to that group - it's not news that to be au courant -- ie, to be upwardly mobile in the managerial class -- one must keep up with the fashionable movies, TV shows, etc. So one may assume that these have been evoked with deliberate taste, if not necessarily explicit intent. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Like I say, Sceptical epistemology is the last refuge of a scoundrel. ================================================================= mb0114 TIME 01/17/94: "Playing Hard to Get: (b) ANALYSIS: 'little more than' -- an unusually straightforward technique. If one gets 'little more than' then, one may infer, one deserves a bit more. (2) 'Israel continues to toss the PLO little tidbits, like the release of 101 Arab prisoners'. ANALYSIS: Ditto, but a bit more blatant; 'toss...tidbits' is how a boorish gentleman feeds his dog ================================================================= mb1202 Of course, the crucial move in an argument is the set-up of the terms of debate. ================================================================= mb1207 NEWSWEEK 12/06/93 (Mark Frankel/Dickey, Bartholet, Taher) Business: "The Best Peace Money can Buy" ANALYSIS OF BIAS TECHNIQUE: 'hindered from trading' is an ambiguous phrase, with 'hindered' serving as the 'weasel-word': the connotation is of a complete block to trade, but the strict denotation of 'hindered' is merely 'impeded'; 'hindered in trading' would be the correct phrase, I think. ----------------------------------------------------------------- NEWSWEEK 12/06/93 "Breaking the Habit of War" (Bartholet) ANALYSIS: There is a need now to determine, with the assistance of professional Photo and TV news photographers and editors, principles of Photo and TV-news visual bias. [SEE FOOTNOTE 1] Briefly: Where the media is sympathetic to the subject, one should looked for both staged and contrived events (staged by photographers; contrived by demonstrators primarily to be broadcast by photographers). Where the media is hostile, one should identify misleading foreshortening of perspective by tele-photo, miseading editting out of spatial context, misleading editting out of temporal context (eg, preceeding provocations to settler reaction). The interplay of photo-journalism, esp. TV, with popular myths, including those expresed in popular movies and video, as well as those that influenced today's reporters, editors, and decision- makers in their own formative years (usually college) (eg, reaction to USA and UK imperialism). FOOTNOTE 1: The public is often sceptical of spoken statements, on radio on TV; far less sceptical of statements written in the press; and almost entirely credulous of photographs and TV footage, to the point that these have determined Presidential reactions. I would suggest that the Palestinian nationalists, esp. the PLO, have very skillfully exploited the shift from decisive physical confrontation to a sort of "virtual reality war". And I would suggest that Israel ought to re-evaluate 18th-century axioms of democratic freedom-of-information in the context of 1990's `global village virtual reality'. (I am clumsily trying to coin temporary phrases to earmark significant but generally overlooked causal patterns in contemporary international politics. ) In a media bias memo last spring, I noted how Newsweek had cropped a photo to suppress the 'CONTEXT' of the incident, and so create the impression that what may have been a staged or contrived incident was (as the viewing public almost always assumes) spontaneous. It is our loss that McLuhan was not taken seriously enough in his time, and that his insight into culture-wide paradigm-shifts has not been applied to the shifts occurring since his time. ================================================================= nb1213a REF: Newsweek 12/13/93 (Deming/bureau) "Zionism Tranformed" Often I do media analysis by noting and conceptualizing my own reactions. I did not find this photo of a young man in tallit and tfillin offensive; but I'm too close to all that; to a typical gentile reader it might convey an impression of Judaism as a barbaric religion. As a drop-out graduate student of analytic philosophy in a leading-edge hippy commune of the late '60's, I tried to block outside photographers; one recognized -- often from their choice of subject -- that they would somehow trivialize the project. Israel must face the fact that photography is not necessarily objective; photo-journalism is usually tendentious. I have continually tried to suggest that the Palestinian move to take over at least a part of Israel is being fought primarily in the mass media, not on the streets; and that accordingly Israel is justified in exterting much stricter control over foreign correspondents and foreign-media-employed photographers. (This issue of Newsweek catches that point nicely in a quote from an official in the Finland Defense Ministry: "The current strategic doctrine of the Baltics would probably be best described as the CNN defense. The idea is, you resist just long enough so the whole world can see you have been attacked.") ================================================================= mb1214 NY Times Weekly Review 12/12/93 (Haberman) 1) Florid style with no content: 2) False equivalence ("plague on both your houses") 3) Re-setting parameters of argument: the Jews are sissies COMMENT: This is a serious move; it tries to redefine the paramaters of debate such that only a conventional military threat, not sustained terrorism, can justify Israel's repression of Palestinian nationalism. 4) `Post-Historical' revision: minimizing the contemporary significance of the Holocaust 5) Dismissing out-of-hand fears that withdrawal to or toward the 1948 Armistice lines would be strategically suicidal. ================================================================== mb1220 TIME 12/20/93 A disingenous trick: the writer does not say it happened, only that it was 'shown' (which might imply that it did happen, but could be taken to imply that it appeared to happen) -- on Israeli TV. So far, that's just epistemology; but with a quick application: as I noted in a previous memo, both TV and photo-journalism can, intentionally or not, use telo-photo foreshortening of perspective, and framing/cropping of detail from context, to create misleading impressions.