Media Curmudgeon

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November 24, 2007

Response to Guest Blogger, Chuck Wooldridge

Guest blogger, Chuck Wooldridge, a professor of Chinese history at Bryn Mawr College, asked for my and my readers’ thoughts on recent media coverage of China and on management’s responsibility for various product safety scandals in the last several months.. Two of my intelligent readers responded, as Wooldridge predicted, by finding “what they wish to look for” and berating the Chinese government for past sins, but didn’t adequately address media coverage of China, which for a blog titled Media Curmudgeon is sort of relevant.

I think Wooldridge makes a good point, which is that the media doesn’t do a good job of covering China, or, for that matter, any complicated issue, in my view. But we have to define what we mean as “the media.” When I refer to the media, I am like most people and generally mean the fishbowl media: commercial television (broadcast and cable), national and major-market newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times), large-circulation national news magazines (Time, and Newsweek), high-traffic news websites (CNN, MSNBC, Google News, Yahoo News), and radio (nationally syndicated talk shows, such as Rush Limbaugh, and NPR).

Like most humans, I can’t keep more than seven things on my mind at one time, and a concept such as the media is no exception—I can’t get my neurons around more than about six types of media. Of course, the problem is that when we stereotype anything, the media included, the stereotype becomes a broad, all-encompassing generalization that is meaningless when applied to a specific element—a medium, a person, or a group of people. To include both the NY Times and Rush Limbaugh in a single definition of the media is absurd on the face of it and clearly demonstrates what’s wrong and dangerous with stereotyping.

Also, the news media typically don’t put news items in an historical context, which is understandable because they neither have time or nor much of a journalistic memory. The media’s charge, as stated in the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947) is to present “a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning.” This is an idealistic goal that has never been achieved, but it points out that news is about what’s new—the day’s events, not yesterday’s, last month’s, or last year’s. The media rarely provides context or has a memory, especially when it has to fit in commercials, hold and entertain an audience, and please advertisers.

Furthermore, Herbert Gans in his seminal book, Deciding What’s News, identified six enduring values in the news:

1. Ethnocentrism – “Like the news of other countries, America news values its own nation above all, even though it sometimes disparages blatant patriotism. This ethnocentrism comes through most explicitly in foreign news, which judges other countries by the extent to which they live up to or imitate American practices and values.”
2. Altruistic Democracy - “While foreign news suggests quite explicitly that democracy is superior to dictatorship, and the more so if it follows American forms…”
3. Responsible Capitalism - “The underlying posture of the news toward the economy resembles that taken toward the polity: an optimistic faith that in the good society, businessmen and women will compete with each other in order to create increased prosperity for all…” and that “…business officials are expected to be honest and efficient; but while corruption and bureaucratic misbehavior are as undesirable in business and in government, they are nevertheless tolerated to a somewhat greater extent in the former.”
4. Small Town Pastoralism - “Bigness is feared, among other things, as impersonal and inhuman.” Not relevant to this discussion.
5. Individualism – The glorification of rugged individualism. Not relevant to this discussion.
6. Moderatism – An enduring value that discourages excess and extremism.…groups that exhibit what is seen as extreme behavior are criticized in the news…”

If we look are the four enduring values in bold above, we can understand why the media doesn’t do a good job of covering China and tends to blame China instead of American management for some of the recent product failures.

Gans wrote Deciding What’s News in 1979, but I believe his enduring values still endure and help us understand media coverage today.

Posted by Charles Warner at November 24, 2007 11:42 PM

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