The Media Syndrome

David Altheide

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315532950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past 45 years, award-winning sociologist David L. Altheide has illuminated how media formats and media logic affect our understanding of social issues, of how political decisions are made, and of how we relate to each other. In this masterful, summative work, Altheide describes the media syndrome: how these factors shape our expectations of, and reactions to, both public and personal events. Ideal for courses on mass media and political communication, the book

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• provides a detailed description of the media syndrome and its impact on daily life;

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• uses historical and contemporary examples from Watergate to Edward Snowden;

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• includes the changes in the ecology of communication from mass media to social media and its social impact.

Chapter 1
Introduction

I spoke to the faintest first starlight

And I said next time

Next time

We’ll get it right

—Bob Seger, “Roll Me Away”

Contemporary life has been transformed by the media and its embedded logic, rhythms, and content into mundane and trivial, as well as significant personal and social, events and issues. Increasingly, we are not just programmed, but are a program—or at least parts of one or more programs—and guide and evaluate our social performances in popular culture terms and criteria, most of which reflect the mass media as well as social media. I have been studying this process for nearly forty-five years. This book will trace the development of mediated reality from the period of Watergate through the current war on terrorism, massive surveillance, and global diseases. This book reports some of the most important events between 1970 and 2015 that have been affected by the mass media. I call this the media syndrome:

The media syndrome (MS) refers to the prevalence of media logic, communication formats, and media content in social life. The media syndrome might include individual personas and identities, social issues, and political actions that are modeled on media personalities and characters who are situated in entertainment-oriented public and popular culture scenarios depicted and constituted through media logic, including information technology and communication formats.

A major assumption of this work is that the meanings of events and activities are reflexively joined to the cultural, political, and societal contexts in which they occur, as well as the prevailing communication processes and information technologies. Events do not just happen and then get reported and acted upon through independent communication, technology, and networks; rather, the events themselves are features of a communication process that is mediated through various information technologies and formats. The mass media and related technologies influence our lives as they are incorporated into everyday events and social institutions. In this sense, any general communication theory of power must consider agency in promoting definitions and meanings, on the one hand, while also considering cultural changes, including the institutional social processes through which new information technologies are enacted and incorporated into both mundane and significant social action on the other (Castells, 2009; van Dijk, 2010). I further suggest that the impact of more than fifty years of massive communicative changes is that our media have become more instant, visual, and personal. This is a change in our world, and it has fundamentally changed the global order. Modern living is situated in mediated contexts of communicated experience that conveys emotionally charged meanings of relationships, contested desirability, personal and social crises, and conventional narratives. Consider individual identities: A Twitter app, “Live On,” promises that “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting” (www.liveson.org/connect.php).

The app operates by mining one’s tweets and then applying an algorithm. It is not only individuals who can gain immortality through the media syndrome, but entire countries can do the same. One example is Kosovo, a small country that gained independence from Serbia in 2008 after a brutal war that left tens of thousands people dead. Despite Kosovo’s five-year struggle for independence, neither the United Nations nor the European Union would recognize its sovereignty. But Facebook gave it some legitimacy when its software permitted users to identify themselves as citizens of Kosovo. Deputy Prime Minister Petrit Selimi stated, “Being recognized on the soccer pitch and online has far greater resonance than some back room in Brussels.” And Kosovo is not alone: other regions seeking independence and recognition have their own Facebook domain names: Catalonia and the Basque regions in Spain—that have sought independence from Spain for decades—and Palestine, that seemingly fights wars every few years to gain control of territory in the Middle East.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, lauded the move, through a spokesman, telling Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, that Google “put Palestine on the Internet map, making it a geographical reality.” (Bilefsky, 2013)

Social realities are bound up with the communication order operating at the time. Events are defined culturally through a process of symbolic construction, including putting various parameters or brackets around various actions, decisions, and policies that constitute an “event.” But more importantly for our purposes, events are given meaning through symbolic communication to audiences, who, in turn, interpret and selectively edit certain features, aspects, and nuances of the event. Consider a few.

In November, 2014, the Sony Corporation was hacked by the organization known as “Guardians of Peace,” a North Korean pseudonym, which revealed internal emails, released trailers of movies in production, and threatened more damage and even violence if a comedic movie, The Interview, about a plot by the CIA and a journalism team to assassinate the President of North Korea, was shown. One character, a parody of entertaining journalism, is enthused about the perfunctory interview, stating, “Journalism is giving people what they want.” Sony pulled the movie from theaters, but then President Obama and others urged them to reconsider, suggesting that this was censorship and blackmail. The showing of the movie a few days later attracted huge audiences, including a large video-on-demand audience.

Popular culture entertainment logic has sustained the Discovery Investigation Network as it slides into low-budget reenactments of horrific crimes slathered in sexual goo, a kind of “murder porn,” being shown in 10 million homes in 157 countries. Such programming builds on the popularity of a host of crime shows in the US, such as NCIS, CSI, and Law and Order, but at a fraction of the cost. So weird is the audience receptivity to murder porn, that a South Park episode had its young miscreants concerned about parental viewing: “the vile and despicable trash that our parents are watching on cable television.” And, if the network president is to be believed, this brand is well on its way: “We can be a place where viewers can consistently know that regardless of the hours, regardless of the day, that they will always be able to flip to this network and know that they are going to get a story of the mystery, crime, suspense genre” (Emily Steel, Jan. 4, 2015).

Ebola, which is examined in Chapter 10, was in the news a few months earlier. This deadly disease rocked several west Africa countries (e.g., Liberia, Sierra Leone), but was lethal to only one US citizen, whose symptoms were misdiagnosed during a visit to an emergency room and was sent home. Despite clear statements that it could only be transmitted through exchange of bodily fluids, hundreds of images of dead Africans led some politicians to quarantine US medical workers, who returned from treating patients abroad. Ebola virtually disappeared form US news reports by the end of November, despite its expansion in West Africa.

The mass media and the information technologies and formats that transport and emphasize images, sounds, narratives, and meanings are crucial components of this meaning-making process. This may be referred to as a mediation process, which involves the construction and use of media logic to provide order and sense to the mass communication process that will be anticipated, understood, and shared by various audiences. As many scholars have noted, in this way “effective communication” is a bit circular, where the messengers—such as journalists or policy makers—take into account the audience members’ awareness, familiarity, sophistication, and preferences for certain kinds of messages over certain media. The trick, then, is to essentially give the audience a wholesome batch of what they expect, along with sprinklings of something new—the “newsworthy” event in question. However, virtually every new mixture of media logic—which, after all, changes over time with new technologies as part of emerging “ecology of communication”—has some initial presentations in the coverage of certain issues and events. Ecology of communication refers to the structure, organization, and accessibility of information technology, various forums, media, and channels of information. It provides a conceptualization and perspective that joins information technology and communication (media) formats with the time and place of activities. Social media guide social change and social participation, including participation in street demonstrations, riots, and police work (Schneider and Trottier, 2011). Increasingly, social change is mediated and technology that powers it has produced profound social, economic, and political changes. Astute observers have discussed this process of personally digitized social and political networking as the “Logic of Connective Action.”

The kind of personalization of politics we are interested in has to do with citizens seeking more flexible association with causes, ideas, and political organizations. It is ironic that the very globalization processes that have become targets of so much political activism have also created the social conditions and global communication technologies largely responsible for expanding the available forms of that action. (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013)

And once the new combinations are set forth, widely accepted, and even institutionalized in future practices for journalists, on the one hand, and audiences, on the other hand, they basically become a kind of a gateway for how later events and issues will be set forth. That is what this book is about: how certain events funneled through media logic (new technologies and formats) become gateways to other mediated events. This book is about some of these gateways, and the implications and impacts for later events.

We may summarize some of the critical questions about the media syndrome that this book addresses. Who and what are most affected, including who gains/suffers from this? The case studies that are included focus in various ways on individuals, groups, organizations, and social institutions. I argue that massive media technology and information structures have affected our entire society, including how we think about problems and social issues, how political decisions are made, as well as how we relate and interact with each other.

I have selected several significant events in contemporary American history to tell the story about the nature and impact of media logic and information technology. I could have picked others, but my previous work on these guided my perspective. This will be illustrated by showing how the issues, information technology, and media coverage of each case and series of events was influenced by the major preceding events.

• The media-coerced resignation of Democratic vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton due to a history of treatment for mental illness in the 1972 presidential campaign.
• The Watergate scandal and impeachment process and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.
• On November 4, 1979, fifty-two American hostages were taken from the US embassy in Tehran, Iran, and were held—and abused—for 444 days. The ordeal, which involved a failed rescue attempt, contributed mightily to the subsequent defeat of President Carter, and the election of Ronald Reagan, and a new political agenda for the US, including stereotypes about “Arabs” and the Middle East.
• The development of “gonzo justice,” or the extraordinary use of punishment and sanctions to convey the moral resolve of decision-makers, including judges and presidents. Several spectacular criminal cases and a number of TV programs featuring harsh judges became very popular.
• The “missing children” panic in the mid 1980s was sparked by the disappearance of a few children, ultimately leading to massive federal legislation, “stranger danger” programs, and mandatory prison sentencing, culminating in the establishment of what I termed “formats for crisis.”
• The Persian Gulf War (i.e., the “First Gulf War”) officially began on January 16, 1991, following some five months of preparation after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Kuwait over a dispute about oil rights. While the war (“Operation Desert Storm”) lasted only forty-six days, government press censorship and control was rampant. Innovative bomb sight visuals contributed to spectacular and distorted media coverage…. US public opinion and understanding of the Middle East and Arabs culminated in violent reprisals against recent immigrants. This and other minor US invasions of Somalia, Panama, and Grenada promoted a cycle of fear, reaction, reflection, rejection, and lessons for the future, which I termed “war programming.”
• The Columbine (Colorado) High School shooting on April 20, 1999, received extensive publicity, and became the standard media scenario for subsequent shootings that occurred.
• The September 11, 2001, attacks on the US and the subsequent wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, which led to extensive media coverage and propaganda that promoted the politics of fear, particularly that orchestrated by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Digital technologies sparked new weapons (e.g., unmanned drones), and marketing systems contributed to near-painless warfare and inflated financial balance sheets that crashed in 2008. These changes, along with Internet blogs and extensive social media, contributed to selective information seeking and divisive politics.
• Surveillance and resistance. An abundance of fearful reports incubated in the expansive use of digital media coverage, promotion, resistance to, and attacks on governmental policies. Massive surveillance operations were challenged by individuals and organizations. WikiLeaks, led by Julian Assange, promoted revelations of confidential governmental and corporate electronic information about programs and policies. Bradley Manning and others turned over pirated national security and corporate banking documents that were as embarrassing as the illegal activities they revealed. Later, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract analyst for the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed massive governmental illegal surveillance of US citizens. Subsequent revelations opened discussion about the nature and impact of digital media, including spying on enemies and friends, the widespread data mining of Internet and social media communications, and new limitations of privacy. Also challenged was the capacity to control and protect citizens from the deadly—but very rare—disease Ebola, while many citizens rejected governmental guidelines to have children inoculated against common—but still deadly—diseases, like measles and the flu.

Each of these events played a part in the emergence of the media syndrome, albeit to varying degrees because of technological and format changes. However, the specific events contributed significantly to changing journalistic and news organizational practices that added to foundational perspectives and approaches that would influence future coverage of events. This is why mediation is very important in order to understand recent historical changes.

How Mediation Works

Any thoughtful person would acknowledge that the media—in all its forms—plays an important role in the contemporary world, but it has only been within the last fifty years or so that scholars investigated media somewhat apart from its content. Marshall McLuhan was one of best-known observers to argue that media per se warranted study—that media were important beyond the content or messages that they carried. Writing in the 1960s, he observed:

Political scientists have been quite unaware of the effects of media at any time, simply because nobody has been willing to study the personal and social effects of media apart from their content. (Gordon, 2003b, p. 419)

McLuhan was primarily interested in physical impressions and extensions of the senses. His important work contributed to the development of a research agenda on how communication is organized, including the formats and logic that essentially guide a wide range of media.

The old adage “you are what you eat” has a corollary with information: “you know how you know.” Let’s start with an example of ice cream. Imagine eating ice cream without a cone, a bowl, or a cup. In your hand? It just doesn’t work without the shaping form that connects the ice cream. And we can eat the cone or the package, too! Ice cream cones make ice cream portable and convenient to eat while sitting or on the move. We’ve had cones since the late 1880s, although they have been refined and made even tastier today. This was a prelude to contemporary “fast food,” but the cone itself has been used for other goodies besides ice cream; entrepreneurs adapted it to sell French fried potatoes, pasta, fish and more. The cone shaped our tastes and much of popular culture. It also influenced the architecture of ice cream stores; customers may sit, or more typically today, get it and go. Mobile ice cream! In fact, how we think about eating ice cream and practically everything else is influenced by the context we’re in—the familiar and available “packages” that help deliver the cool luscious tastes. True, ice cream has been around for a long time, before some of the familiar forms and packages existed, but the skill, experience, and expectations of what we will get when we actually order, say, an ice cream cone, vary over time, but do come to be expected. This example is essentially the crux of the argument I’m making in this book, but I’m concerned with information rather than ice cream: The form and format of the information we receive greatly influences what we perceive, how we approach the information, and ultimately, its significance and meaning. So, when the forms become standardized and expected, we have a better opportunity to enjoy our favorite flavor—ice cream or information.

The critical forms that I address involve media, especially the news media. I argue that the information that we expect, desire, and receive about certain events and issues reflects the shaping, packaging, delivery, and reception provided by communication form, especially information technologies. A major point is that what we claim to know about the world—and significant events and issues is reflexively—closely bound to—the communication forms and formats of media we use. Stated differently, apart from some ideological bias, what we take away is very much related to “how” the information is selected, produced (organized), framed, delivered, and received. Most of my focus will be on the news coverage of a handful of major “newsworthy” events and issues, spanning some six decades from the 1960s to 2015. This will not be the last word on the significance of communication forms and how they are shaped into standardized formats that routinize production of information such as news reports, but also are recognized and anticipated by audience members. Others will critique my modest suggestions, and add additional analyses as our information technology continues to change.

I focus mainly on the mass media, although in later chapters more individualized social media enter the analysis. I employ two basic and related concepts for understanding how we understand and interpret mass mediated information such as news, including exposes, scandals, and the like. Numerous scholarly books and publications document how these concepts have been developed and applied to many events and issues. The first concept is media logic, which is defined as a form of communication, and the process through which media transmit and communicate information. Elements of this form include the distinctive features of each medium, and the formats used by these media for the organization, the style in which it is presented, the focus or emphasis on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Eagleton and Watergate Stories
• Chapter 3 The Iranian Hostage Crisis, The News Code, and Mediated Diplomacy
• Chapter 4 Gonzo Justice
• Chapter 5 The Missing Children Problem: A Case Study in Media Sensationalism
• Chapter 6 The Gulf War and the Military-Media Complex
• Chapter 7 The Columbine Shootings and Terrorism
• Chapter 8 The Propaganda Project and the Iraq War
• Chapter 9 Consuming Terrorism and the Politics of Fear
• Chapter 10 Mediated Fear: Digital Booty, WikiLeaks, ISIS, and Ebola
• References
• Index