File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2003/postcolonial.0304, message 15


Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 12:26:30 -0500 (EST)
From: lewiss-AT-cofc.edu
Subject: RE: peter arnett--media objectivity


Salil's professionalism is almost always helpful on this list, and even on
this issue the distinction between press and television behavior in
Britain and the US is useful.  However, you don't have to be
a die-hard Althusserian to recognize that "objectivity" is
ideologically-laden.  In some ways you might argue that sticking in
obviously value-laden adjectives simply reflects a degree of honesty about
oneself as a participant-observer. Leaving out such adjectives doesn't
make one objective. When news anchors here in the US use the phrase "War
on Terrorism," for instance, should there _not_ be a "so-called"
qualifying that phrase? The absence of qualifying phrases in these cases,
the result of pressure of time in news broadcasts, results in most TV news
at least resorting to the soundbites and phrasing provided for them by
press releases (at least, to a non-professional such as me, that is the
way it increasingly appears). Any objectivity is heavily compromised by
such vigorous truncation and compression.
Moreover, this is not just a question of adjectives but clearly of nouns
too, abstract ones such as "shock," "awe," "freedom," "democracy",
"patriot" (with a small or capital P), common nouns such as "soldier,"
"paramilitary," "guerrilla," not to mention all of those proper nouns with
their supercharge of emotion such as "America," "Saddam" and even, well,
maybe, "Blair."
It's about verbs, too. I almost drove off the road when NPR news--which I
normally trust as most intelligent, most fully informative of the
broadcast media here in the US--reported on Turkey's having "failed" to
allow the US to station troops in its territory. Maybe that was objective
reporting--not doing something can indeed be construed as "failing" to do
something. But a democrat (spot my use of ideologically-laden rhetoric)
might have reported that Turkey had voted against allowing etc.
Finally, it seems to me that this is precisely where academics and folks
like me in English departments matter--we, like broadcasters, should be
committed to accuracy, and committed to paying due attention to the
politics of language. We should vote to fail to use the politicians'
"folded lies"--among which is the claim that our view is objective, our
language transparent.
Simon


Simon Lewis
Associate Professor of English

Editor--Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing
http://www.cofc.edu/Illuminations

Co-Director--Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World
http://www.cofc.edu/Atlanticworld/

Department of English
College of Charleston
66 George Street
Charleston SC, 29424-0001

Tel:  843-953-1920; Fax: 843-953-3180





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