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Before I know it I'm sucked into the New York Times story and I haven't had my Prozac or anything.
Through the
miracle of language, here we are, walking with U.S. troops on patrol
through the streets of Mosul, and by the time the story's point has
been thoroughly explicated, two kindergarten-age Iraqi boys, bait on
the hook of evil, are blown to Kingdom Come by an IED that had been
planted in the car in which they sat helplessly.
Before I know it I'm sucked into the New York Times story and I haven't had my Prozac or anything.
Through the
miracle of language, here we are, walking with U.S. troops on patrol
through the streets of Mosul, and by the time the story's point has
been thoroughly explicated, two kindergarten-age Iraqi boys, bait on
the hook of evil, are blown to Kingdom Come by an IED that had been
planted in the car in which they sat helplessly.
Even (or
especially) if the story is true, I whistle in amazement at the
triviality of the use to which it was put in this page-one article, "In
Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable": to illustrate the idea that
intuition or a funny feeling that something's amiss can save the lives
of soldiers fighting wars of occupation, or whatever. The story's focus
was as narrow as a videogame, as though aimed, so to speak, primarily
at the nation's couch potato warriors, who support our troops by
reveling in virtual danger.
What
happened, according to the article, is that the Americans were making
the rounds one morning in 2004 when they spotted a car in which the two
boys sat suffocating. It was 120 degrees outside. A soldier asked for
permission to give them some water, but the commanding officer,
inexplicably sensing danger, cried "Fall back!" an instant before the
car exploded. No Americans were killed in the incident, but the boys
"almost certainly" died, the article notes. (Did no one check?)
This story
chills me to the core. Everything about it makes me cry, "Fall back!"
Before we move on to further matters, we must, as readers, allow our
hearts to rend for the murdered boys and stand in bewilderment at how
such a thing could have happened: children as bomb bait, used to lure
honest American soldiers to their doom? Well, anything is possible, but
at the very least we must face the full horror of the phenomenon, which
means refusing to regard it as an illustrative detail but the shocking
consequence of a war that we, in fact, started.
The fact
that the article asks nothing of the sort from us, or in any way
evinces awareness of any context at all in which these deaths occurred
-- except, of course, the simplistic context of good vs. evil -- becomes
the second reason why we as readers must fall back, step away from this
story and look at it with deep suspicion. And in so doing, we scan the
whole terrain of American journalism and are able to see, and mourn,
the paradoxical allegiances that are contributing to its collapse.
Every news
story, whatever the medium that purveys it -- newspaper, television,
radio, Internet -- has a frame: a verbal context that gives meaning to
the raw data being presented. This frame can be painstakingly
constructed of multiple and competing viewpoints to provide the
audience with a fresh, hard-won understanding of a given event. But
more often, the frames are shoddily constructed and prefab: simplistic
narratives that coerce the participants in a given story into
preassigned roles, regardless of the complexity of what actually
happened.
Take, for
instance, the "riot-suppression narrative," as discussed in a study, by
the North American Congress on Latin America, of the coverage by Los
Angeles television stations of a large immigrant rights rally in 2007.
At one point, as marchers gathered in a park, Los Angeles police
forcibly broke up the event, moving in on the participants with their
batons. A total of 246 people were injured.
While the
LAPD, in its own internal report, conceded that it had made many
mistakes -- the attack was unprovoked, and no orders to disperse had
been given -- the TV coverage portrayed the event as a riot forcibly but
heroically contained by the police, distorting evidence and converting
uncorroborated hearsay into fact in order to do so.
"Like all
journalistic narrative frames, the riot-suppression narrative features
a set of stock characters -- villains, victims, and heroes," wrote Otto
Santa Ana, who headed the research team monitoring the coverage. The
marchers, no matter that they included moms and dads and children in
strollers, were the bad guys, the unruly mob.
To my mind,
reporting like this represents the worst of American journalism:
feeding the target audience what it expects to hear and not only
hardening the divisions among people but perpetuating the idea that
there's always an enemy. This keeps fear and the inevitability of nasty
confrontation at the forefront of American consciousness and makes
intelligent social policy impossible.
And
the "riot-suppression narrative," of course, is merely a variation of
the America at War narrative, with the same stock characters. The
high-profile New York Times story has the same cheap frame, the same
factual innocence: The enemy uses children as bomb bait while we offer
them water.
Forget the
children we've killed in staggering numbers with our bombs and in so
many other ways. Indeed, forget everything. Just read the story. Better
yet, turn on the TV.
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Before I know it I'm sucked into the New York Times story and I haven't had my Prozac or anything.
Through the
miracle of language, here we are, walking with U.S. troops on patrol
through the streets of Mosul, and by the time the story's point has
been thoroughly explicated, two kindergarten-age Iraqi boys, bait on
the hook of evil, are blown to Kingdom Come by an IED that had been
planted in the car in which they sat helplessly.
Even (or
especially) if the story is true, I whistle in amazement at the
triviality of the use to which it was put in this page-one article, "In
Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable": to illustrate the idea that
intuition or a funny feeling that something's amiss can save the lives
of soldiers fighting wars of occupation, or whatever. The story's focus
was as narrow as a videogame, as though aimed, so to speak, primarily
at the nation's couch potato warriors, who support our troops by
reveling in virtual danger.
What
happened, according to the article, is that the Americans were making
the rounds one morning in 2004 when they spotted a car in which the two
boys sat suffocating. It was 120 degrees outside. A soldier asked for
permission to give them some water, but the commanding officer,
inexplicably sensing danger, cried "Fall back!" an instant before the
car exploded. No Americans were killed in the incident, but the boys
"almost certainly" died, the article notes. (Did no one check?)
This story
chills me to the core. Everything about it makes me cry, "Fall back!"
Before we move on to further matters, we must, as readers, allow our
hearts to rend for the murdered boys and stand in bewilderment at how
such a thing could have happened: children as bomb bait, used to lure
honest American soldiers to their doom? Well, anything is possible, but
at the very least we must face the full horror of the phenomenon, which
means refusing to regard it as an illustrative detail but the shocking
consequence of a war that we, in fact, started.
The fact
that the article asks nothing of the sort from us, or in any way
evinces awareness of any context at all in which these deaths occurred
-- except, of course, the simplistic context of good vs. evil -- becomes
the second reason why we as readers must fall back, step away from this
story and look at it with deep suspicion. And in so doing, we scan the
whole terrain of American journalism and are able to see, and mourn,
the paradoxical allegiances that are contributing to its collapse.
Every news
story, whatever the medium that purveys it -- newspaper, television,
radio, Internet -- has a frame: a verbal context that gives meaning to
the raw data being presented. This frame can be painstakingly
constructed of multiple and competing viewpoints to provide the
audience with a fresh, hard-won understanding of a given event. But
more often, the frames are shoddily constructed and prefab: simplistic
narratives that coerce the participants in a given story into
preassigned roles, regardless of the complexity of what actually
happened.
Take, for
instance, the "riot-suppression narrative," as discussed in a study, by
the North American Congress on Latin America, of the coverage by Los
Angeles television stations of a large immigrant rights rally in 2007.
At one point, as marchers gathered in a park, Los Angeles police
forcibly broke up the event, moving in on the participants with their
batons. A total of 246 people were injured.
While the
LAPD, in its own internal report, conceded that it had made many
mistakes -- the attack was unprovoked, and no orders to disperse had
been given -- the TV coverage portrayed the event as a riot forcibly but
heroically contained by the police, distorting evidence and converting
uncorroborated hearsay into fact in order to do so.
"Like all
journalistic narrative frames, the riot-suppression narrative features
a set of stock characters -- villains, victims, and heroes," wrote Otto
Santa Ana, who headed the research team monitoring the coverage. The
marchers, no matter that they included moms and dads and children in
strollers, were the bad guys, the unruly mob.
To my mind,
reporting like this represents the worst of American journalism:
feeding the target audience what it expects to hear and not only
hardening the divisions among people but perpetuating the idea that
there's always an enemy. This keeps fear and the inevitability of nasty
confrontation at the forefront of American consciousness and makes
intelligent social policy impossible.
And
the "riot-suppression narrative," of course, is merely a variation of
the America at War narrative, with the same stock characters. The
high-profile New York Times story has the same cheap frame, the same
factual innocence: The enemy uses children as bomb bait while we offer
them water.
Forget the
children we've killed in staggering numbers with our bombs and in so
many other ways. Indeed, forget everything. Just read the story. Better
yet, turn on the TV.
Before I know it I'm sucked into the New York Times story and I haven't had my Prozac or anything.
Through the
miracle of language, here we are, walking with U.S. troops on patrol
through the streets of Mosul, and by the time the story's point has
been thoroughly explicated, two kindergarten-age Iraqi boys, bait on
the hook of evil, are blown to Kingdom Come by an IED that had been
planted in the car in which they sat helplessly.
Even (or
especially) if the story is true, I whistle in amazement at the
triviality of the use to which it was put in this page-one article, "In
Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable": to illustrate the idea that
intuition or a funny feeling that something's amiss can save the lives
of soldiers fighting wars of occupation, or whatever. The story's focus
was as narrow as a videogame, as though aimed, so to speak, primarily
at the nation's couch potato warriors, who support our troops by
reveling in virtual danger.
What
happened, according to the article, is that the Americans were making
the rounds one morning in 2004 when they spotted a car in which the two
boys sat suffocating. It was 120 degrees outside. A soldier asked for
permission to give them some water, but the commanding officer,
inexplicably sensing danger, cried "Fall back!" an instant before the
car exploded. No Americans were killed in the incident, but the boys
"almost certainly" died, the article notes. (Did no one check?)
This story
chills me to the core. Everything about it makes me cry, "Fall back!"
Before we move on to further matters, we must, as readers, allow our
hearts to rend for the murdered boys and stand in bewilderment at how
such a thing could have happened: children as bomb bait, used to lure
honest American soldiers to their doom? Well, anything is possible, but
at the very least we must face the full horror of the phenomenon, which
means refusing to regard it as an illustrative detail but the shocking
consequence of a war that we, in fact, started.
The fact
that the article asks nothing of the sort from us, or in any way
evinces awareness of any context at all in which these deaths occurred
-- except, of course, the simplistic context of good vs. evil -- becomes
the second reason why we as readers must fall back, step away from this
story and look at it with deep suspicion. And in so doing, we scan the
whole terrain of American journalism and are able to see, and mourn,
the paradoxical allegiances that are contributing to its collapse.
Every news
story, whatever the medium that purveys it -- newspaper, television,
radio, Internet -- has a frame: a verbal context that gives meaning to
the raw data being presented. This frame can be painstakingly
constructed of multiple and competing viewpoints to provide the
audience with a fresh, hard-won understanding of a given event. But
more often, the frames are shoddily constructed and prefab: simplistic
narratives that coerce the participants in a given story into
preassigned roles, regardless of the complexity of what actually
happened.
Take, for
instance, the "riot-suppression narrative," as discussed in a study, by
the North American Congress on Latin America, of the coverage by Los
Angeles television stations of a large immigrant rights rally in 2007.
At one point, as marchers gathered in a park, Los Angeles police
forcibly broke up the event, moving in on the participants with their
batons. A total of 246 people were injured.
While the
LAPD, in its own internal report, conceded that it had made many
mistakes -- the attack was unprovoked, and no orders to disperse had
been given -- the TV coverage portrayed the event as a riot forcibly but
heroically contained by the police, distorting evidence and converting
uncorroborated hearsay into fact in order to do so.
"Like all
journalistic narrative frames, the riot-suppression narrative features
a set of stock characters -- villains, victims, and heroes," wrote Otto
Santa Ana, who headed the research team monitoring the coverage. The
marchers, no matter that they included moms and dads and children in
strollers, were the bad guys, the unruly mob.
To my mind,
reporting like this represents the worst of American journalism:
feeding the target audience what it expects to hear and not only
hardening the divisions among people but perpetuating the idea that
there's always an enemy. This keeps fear and the inevitability of nasty
confrontation at the forefront of American consciousness and makes
intelligent social policy impossible.
And
the "riot-suppression narrative," of course, is merely a variation of
the America at War narrative, with the same stock characters. The
high-profile New York Times story has the same cheap frame, the same
factual innocence: The enemy uses children as bomb bait while we offer
them water.
Forget the
children we've killed in staggering numbers with our bombs and in so
many other ways. Indeed, forget everything. Just read the story. Better
yet, turn on the TV.