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Journalistics?

Bloggers are no journalists is the claim of some journalists...
In my definition, a journalist can be a blogger, but not every blogger is a journalist.
Exactly the same with newspaper can be paper, but not every paper is a newspaper -think of some Belgian newspapers...-

For a paper in school, I did some research on the 'media', some facts are really stunnning.
An extract out of this paper, based on official surveys:

The most important newsmaker in the world is the White House. In the study of “Age of Propaganda – The everyday use and abuse of persuasion” Anthony Pratgkanis and Elliot Aronson refer to politicological research stating that the American presidents give about one speech a day. Many of those speeches are generated in this way that they get the news.
‘By talking about certain things and get the evening news, the president can create a political agenda – an image of the world that serves his/her politics’

The second big newsmaker is the State Department, the American ministery of Foreign Affairs. Every noon the State-department gives a briefing.

The third in row is the Pentagon, the American ministery of Defense.
The influence on the American and Western opionion is huge, especially in times of war and peace, who is a threat for who and why.
During the eighties, under Reagan’s presidency, the Pentagon published a ‘fact book’ about the Soviet Military Power, that was adapted each year, and distributed freely. It was ‘the’ resource book for Western politicians and journalists.
Tom Gervasi, a specialist in weapons, looked it over and published his own version of the book. His conclusion was that on each page there were profound changes, in comparisons, in terms and in categorisation.
After the Cold War, it became clear that he had been right the whole time: the Sovjet army never was the ‘huge fighting machine’ as stated in the fact book.

During the recent Gulf war the importance of the media was something the Americans used in a very particular way.
For the first time ‘embedded journalism’ was accepted, but the journalists had to sign papers in which they obeyed the rules.
An press information center from the Ministery of Defense was created in Quwait, and every day there was an update of the situation, reported by all journalists.

David Simpson states:
“The war has been about the control of images as well as of oilfields and territories. Al-Jazeera's broadcasts from Iraq have been threatened and often pre-empted by the US armed forces.
The captured Saddam Hussein, briefly fixed in the bright lights of international media attention, has more or less vanished from sight. Some images, like those of the planes hitting the towers, are shown over and over again. Others, like those of people jumping or falling from great heights onto the streets below, have been removed from circulation. It is not news that all images are subject to both direct and self-imposed political and ideological control. Private Jessica Lynch, who had the independence of mind to resent the falsifications of her captivity narrative for propaganda purposes and the courage to say so, has also quietly disappeared from major-media sight.”

As he goes on: “Now we live in a world of largely incommensurate images, some seen on one continent and others in the rest of the world. The tendency to political isolationism is reinforced and perhaps significantly enabled by an aesthetic isolationism that allows the debate about images of our dead to seem like the only debate to be had”

That the images are not used only by the Americans is a fact. Everybody plays the game, and also the ‘opposite party’ realized the power of it. The release of the movie of the beheading of an American prisoner in Iraq is cruel but got world attention.
The repetition of bombings in Iraq and in Israel don’t make ‘big amounts’ of deaths, but its shocking manner, make them catch the news every time.
These bombings keep the underlying subject (the political situation in that country) in the spotlight (Compare it with the terrible situation in Africa, concerning the HIV, that kills more people everyday, a situation that doesn’t get press attention in the news.)
Some state that terrorism is a creation of the media. Terrorists use the effect of shock to track the attention and put a light on their ideas. Since its nature, media will give prime time to these events and thus feed the terrorists with what they wanted: world attention and influence the opinion of the viewer.
Think of the recent beheading of the Korean, which resulted in mass demonstrations in the streets of Korea, condemning the governments decision to send more troops to Iraq.

(information gathered out of Jaap van Ginniken, “De schepping van de wereld in het nieuws”, 1996, Houten/Diegem (Creation of the world in the news), David Simpson's “The Mourning Paper”, and David L. Altheide, “Creating Reality, How TV news distorts events”, 1976, Sage Publications)

Posted on July 27, 2004
in Limit of my knowledge

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