Meyrowitz, Mittell & Me
As part of this semester’s activities, I have asked the students in my Technology & Communication course at Alfred University to create and maintain blogs. Borrowing this idea from a course that Jason Mittell taught at Middlebury College, I have asked my students to create and post two entries per week (one as a response to the assigned readings and a second that is more open encouraging the students to comment on or criticize some media offering that they have experienced recently). In the spirit of the course, I’ve agreed to make my own regular posts. Hopefully, I can set an example for my students with my posts and then they can get a better sense of what I’m asking them to do by reading my comments and brief analyses. I also hope that by reading my students’ comments that I will learn a few things from them along the way.
Let me begin by saying that I also encourage my students to think of these two posts in tandem to try to apply the lessons of a reading to a media experience. Hopefully, this post will serve as an example of how this can be accomplished.
This week I have asked my students to read Joshua Meyrowitz’s essay “Images of Media.” This essay is an epistemological piece that asks media scholars to recognize how they define media because understanding what we consider media to be directly colors the way we approach their study. Shortly after reading this essay, I was doing a little blog surfing and (as I am apt to do) I popped over to Just TV to see what Jason Mittell was posting about for the day. On this particular day, a content analysis performed and reported by the Media Research Center (MRC), a right-wing media watchdog, raised Mittell’s ire. I’ll wait here while you go read the original post. Now you should trot over to see the original MRC report.
Now that you’re back, I’ll try to summarize and simplify the two sides to this debate. Mittell believes the news media typically chooses its content based on the conventions of the news media genre. In essence, he’s primarily seeing news media as what Meyrowitz would call a Language. In contrast, the MRC is viewing the media as what Meyrowitz would call a Conduit. In short, the debate is founded in two different epistemological positions. Mittell correctly notes that the interpretation of the MRC’s findings is colored by the underlying assumptions of the organization. However, Mittell’s findings are also colored by his assumptions.
It is important to note, that Mittell has not wrapped himself in the notions of objectivity in the same way as the MRC because of his chosen approach to research. What I mean is that the MRC has undertaken a content analysis presumably adopting the scientific method. Science carries with it the ideas of neutrality and objectivity. Mittell’s approach is critical/cultural and is admittedly subjective and vehemently non-scientific. This key difference notwithstanding, it still seems useful to recognize the different ways that the parties in this debate define media.
The MRC’s report is primarily a simple matter of calculating time devoted to the two different political parties on the morning news magazines. Had the MRC stopped its report by saying that more time was devoted to Democratic candidates for president, then I do not believe Mittell would have questioned the findings of this study. The aspect of the study that Mittell questions is the interpretive leap made between the original research question and the findings. Mittell is absolutely correct when he chastises the MRC for drawing conclusions without legitimate causal evidence. In other words, just because more time is devoted to one party over the other does not mean that a liberal media bias exists. In this respect, we cannot conclude that the news media are a conduit for liberalism based on the evidence gathered by the MRC.
I also agree with Mittell when he says that another possible cause simply could be that the Democratic candidates simply have better stories. However, I also believe that Mittell’s position does not fully consider the process of selecting news items. It is not that I disagree with Mittell’s position, but I do not think he carries his discussion out fully. Why does the media prefer to devote its time to the “best” stories? The answer to this is simple and we need to view the media as an Environment to fully understand what is happening here.
The Environment that we are discussing is commercial television. Whether we choose to believe it or not, news is a business. Newspeople do not keep their jobs if they do not attract a consistent and saleable audience. In this respect, there is a plethora of evidence that might show why the news media has devoted more time to one party over the other. It seems that each Sunday some pundit notes on This Week or Meet the Press that the Democratic candidates are raising more money and attracting larger audiences to their events. So, choices in news coverage also could be attributable to the sheer number of media events held by the various campaigns or parties (at least it seems like the Dems are debating every few days and these events will generate more media coverage). Or, we could attribute the difference to the public relations efforts undertaken by the various campaigns; let’s not neglect good old-fashioned strategy and the PR industry undoubtedly plays a role in news coverage. Finally, lets not oversimplify the role that the newspeople play. I use people as an acknowledgment that TV news content is typically created and chosen as a collective effort. Because of this, believing the argument of bias becomes a bit more unlikely. In short, commercial television programs, and more specifically morning news magazines, are created within a very inclusive environment. If we pause to consider how it all works in unison, then we get a better sense of how and why the news media select the stories they do. More importantly, we recognize just how much of the process the MRC’s report has glossed over to arrive at its conclusions.
Ultimately, the MRC is viewing the programs it is analyzing as conduits for a liberal voice. The assumptions of the organization have improperly colored their interpretations of the data that they have collected. In short, they simply go too far with the interpretive step (this is not uncommon for content analyses). Mittell sees the news media genre as a language that prefers certain narrative formulas and he is unquestionably correct despite omitting several other areas from his consideration of the topic. I have submitted that the environment constructed by commercial television is the overriding cause of the face-time inequity that the MRC has discovered. Are any of our conclusions necessarily correct or incorrect? The short answer is no, but I believe Mittell would agree with me when I say that complex questions require complex answers and. The MRC’s basic research question “Are the Democratic candidates receiving more face-time on morning news magazines?’ is not a complex question and has a simple answer — “Yes.” The problem with the MRC’s analysis is that they have answered a question they did not originally pose, “Why are democratic candidates receiving more face-time on morning news magazines?” and that one is a complex question. This is a question where the answers could range from the existence of a liberal bias to generic conventions to the mechanics of the business. Looking at the bigger picture helps us draw a truer picture of the cultural and industrial milieu that gives birth to news coverage. Meyrowitz’s metaphors are helpful because they motivate media scholars to view the complex understandings of what media are and the various positions that we, as scholars and critics, often take without recognition. In short, they encourage us to define the object of study and in the process recognize that a single definition of media will not hold.
