mass-communication-theory

304 Section 4 Contemporary Mass Communication Theory
Consider the long, contentious national debate over health care reform
that has gripped the nation for the last several years. Although most Americans
would agree that “something must be done” about spiraling costs, denial
of coverage, terminated policies, and the uninsured, “the problem with healthcare
is that it’s so big and so complicated that the public is never really going
to understand all the moving parts,” said National Public Radio’s Julie Rovner.
“It’s not a journalism-friendly story,” added the New York Times’s John
Harwood (both in Hart, 2009b, p. 7). MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan explained,
“Health care is bad for ratings” (in Rich, 2009, p. WK8).
News production research explains that the way to solve the problem is to
add a bit of drama; Congressman Earl Blumenauer from Oregon explains how
that was accomplished: “All the national news organizations monitored any
meetings they could find between lawmakers and constituents [about healthcare
reform], looking for flare-ups, for YouTube moments. The meetings that
involved thoughtful exchanges or even support for the proposals would never
find their way on air; coverage was given only to the most outrageous behavior,
furthering distorting the true picture” (2009, p. WK12).
Media critic Howard Kurtz (2009) identified an archetypal moment. At
the height of the raucous, sometimes violent public forums of summer, 2009,
President Obama met with a group of citizens in New Hampshire in a nationally
televised talk. Partway through the “low-key” discussion, Fox News anchor
Trace Gallagher explained to viewers that his network would be leaving
the event, but would return. “Any contentious questions, anybody yelling,
we’ll bring it to you.” Fox News, generally unsympathetic to healthcare reform,
was not atypical. A reporter for one of the three commercial broadcast
networks told Congressman David Price of North Carolina that his network
assigned ten reporters to cover meetings across the country but that he was
advised by news executives that “your meeting doesn’t get covered unless it
blows up” (Dionne, 2009, p. A19).
3. Fragmented news: The typical newspaper and news broadcast is made up of
brief capsulized reports of events—snapshots of the social world. By constructing
news in this way, journalists attempt to fulfill their norm of objectivity.
Events are treated in isolation with little effort to interconnect them. Connection
requires putting them into a broader context, and this would require
making speculative, sometimes controversial linkages. Is there a link between
three isolated plane crashes, or between three separate toxic waste spills?
Should journalists remind readers of a candidate’s three divorces when reporting
on that politician’s opposition to gay unions in the name of “preserving the
sanctity of marriage”? By compartmentalizing events, news reports make it
difficult for news consumers to make their own connections. Bennett argued
that when journalists attempt to do analysis, they create a collage. They assemble
evidence and viewpoints from conflicting sources and then juxtapose these
pieces in a manner that defies interpretation, especially by news consumers who
lack interest or background knowledge. These stories might meet the norm of
being “balanced,” but they don’t assist the reader in making sense of things.
4. Normalized news: Stories about disasters or about social movements tend to
“normalize” these potential threats to the status quo. Elite sources are allowed
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