Monday, November 29, 2004
Media and Democracy
Critical media literacy requires starting with two basic questions:
- Choice of Topic: What topics are chosen for coverage?
- Representation of Topic: How are those topics represented through language?
What we end up with is a better understanding of how events are portrayed and constructed vis-�-vis the background assumptions held by different sources. That is, by recognizing bias (which is always present regardless of the amount of 'objectivity' in a report), we can gain a better understanding of particular viewpoints and (ideally) step back to examine the issue from multiple perspectives in order to gain a broader understanding of the world.
The recent coverage by the US media (and responses by US politicians) of the November 2 presidential election in the United States versus the November 21 presidential election in the Ukraine provides a simple case study.
A primary question worth examining is how the issue of election irregularities has been handled -- what stories are chosen for coverage and how are they represented? At issue is how the mainstream media, embedded within the structure of power, uphold an establishment view ("don't question too critically") of election irregularities in the US while they provide a liberal ("challenge status-quo power") critique of election irregularities in the Ukraine. It is an issue worth examining.
Below are excerpts from a column by Robert Parry looking at this very issue, followed by a column by James Fallows in the New York Times that highlights an argument about the need to critically examine electronic voting systems in order to bring about necessary improvements for future elections.
***
Big
Media's Democracy Double Standards
By Robert Parry (23 Nov 2004, Consortium
News)
The Washington Post and other leading American newspapers are up in arms about the legitimacy of a presidential election where exit polls showed the challenger winning but where the incumbent party came out on top, amid complaints about heavy-handed election-day tactics and possibly rigged vote tallies.
[...]
Of
course, the election in question occurred in the
In
the
[...]
But why the double standard? Why would Ukrainian exit polls be deemed reliable evidence of fraud while American exit polls would simply be inexplicably wrong nationwide and in six battleground states where Kerry was shown to be leading but Bush ultimately won?
Logically,
it would seem that
Instead,
the
To compound the irony, the Washington Post editorial is now calling on George W. Bush to defend democratic principles halfway around the world. In the Nov. 23 editorial entitled “Coup in Kiev,” the Post wrote, “For the Bush administration, the responsibility starts with stating the unvarnished truth about what has happened in an election” – the one in the Ukraine, of course.
full article -- 29 Nov coverage on Democracy Now!
Electronic
Voting 1.0, and No Time to Upgrade
By James Fallows (28 Nov 2004, New York Times)
The phenomenal reliability of the systems we trust for banking, communication, and everything else rests on two bedrock principles. One is the universal understanding in the technology world that nothing works right the first time, and maybe not the first 50 times.
[...]
By commercial standards, the systems are necessarily still in "beta version" - theoretically debugged, but not yet vetted by extensive, unpredictable experience - when voters show up to choose a president.