Page 143 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Media Studies 127

lives; you hear their voices and see their faces. Your news narrative is likely
to appear less impersonal. In the example above, the New York Times is
comparable to the perspective from the top of the building; it aims for a
big picture that misses detail and that especially misses the detail of the
lives of the Taliban. Instead, they appear as objects, small and in the
distance, and as a result, they are easier to depict and to treat as enemies.
The particular news strategy coincides with the national interest of pro-
moting the war in Afghanistan in a particular way that harms civilians by
bombing villages. The street - level perspective is more akin to what one sees
in the Globe and Mail . People ’ s faces, if you will, come into focus more
readily, and one gets to know them in person as it were. It is harder to treat
them as objects who should be killed because they have seen civilian rela-
tives killed by US bombing raids.
If frames both limit and expand what a news narrative can contain in
regard to information and texture, the way we see and the tools we use to
describe what we see also play a significant role in shaping and determining

the content of news narratives. Because we have pictures in our mind with
which we compare new data (objects, events, and people) that we encoun-
ter, we often pre - interpret the world around us. That makes our operations
in it easier. We know, for example, that a man in a suit is likely to be a
professional, so we do not have to waste a lot of time trying to fi gure out
what he is, time we would have to spend grasping an entirely new creature
covered in green slime with six arms. But those pre - interpretive categories
in our mind also lead us to prejudge the world at times. For example, if
we learn from our national media to think of Arabs using the category
terrorists because our news routinely categorizes Arab opponents of US
national interests in that way, we are more likely to not allow new informa-
tion about Arabs to disturb those categories and that picture we have of
the world before us. Our interpretations, the categories and images we have
in our minds, take precedence to new versions of those categories and
images that challenge their veracity and accuracy.
Words express ideas, and words in news stories evoke the ideas or catego-
ries with which they are linked in our minds. Words are tools for describing
the world, but they are infused with our assumptions, our presuppositions,
our framing perspectives, and our interpretations. To append the word
terrorist to Arabs is not to describe an object or a reality; it is to attach a
previous assumption or experience to a new one and to generalize from a
particular, limited example (Arabs who did commit terrorist acts) to a group
(all Arabs are terrorists). What words are used in the news is very important,