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Seeing and Unseeing in Big Media

As you will perhaps remember from your intro comp or literary analysis courses in high school or college, one of the first things a critical reader must determine is the point of view of the writer of a given piece of prose. In other words, onto what particular elements within the vast plain of reality is he or she casting their eyes?

Why is this important? Because all gazes are necessarily partial; the choice to fix our partial field of sight on one segment of reality means necessarily that we are not fixing it upon another part of reality.

Or as the great Spanish essayist Ortega y Gasset said: “Every act of seeing is also an act of unseeing.”

All this as a prelude to an article in today’s New York Times which bears the headline “German Politics Faces Grass Roots Threat,” a story which tells us about how citizens are organizing to challenge the long-standing hegemony of the Christian Democrat and Socialist parties in that country.

Let’s go back to that headline and the use of the word threat.

I don’t know about you, but to me the word “threat” has an undeniably pejorative value in our daily news parlance. As in Hamas or Iraq “pose existential threats to the state of Israel” or “Al Qaeda threatens our collective security” or “deficits threaten the futures of our children.” No?

So here we have a reporter and/or a headline editor using this word to refer to citizen organizing in Germany.

From what I’ve always understood, citizen organizing was the lifeblood of democracy, a key sign of the vitality of democratic processes.

But here, it is described unambiguously as a “threat.”

Let’s walk this back. For whom is this democratic organizing a threat?

For the existing elites, of course.

So what we’re seeing in this article is that the writer and/or headline editor have effectively adopted the point of view of the elites as the one they will use as their own in this article.

This headline could have been written lots of other ways. For example: “Germany Politics Riding a Wave of Citizen Involvement” or “Long-Dominant Germany Parties Challenged by Citizen Activism” or even “German Public Life Reinvigorated by Citizen Activism.”

But no, when left to give their take on the new movements in German politics, the people at the Grey Lady did what they do best: they adopted the point of view of the powerful as their primary tool for framing reality.

This is nothing new. The question is to what extent are the Times’ readers aware of how insidiously effective this technique is as a means of a) marshaling mass support of the elite points of view and b) engendering the effective “unseeing” of many other valid frames of reality?

16 May 2011