Change in media reporting

[marct]

Great points as usual, Marc.

Thanks, Tom. I seem to be on a structuralist jag recently...

I would add a fourth consideration in media affairs. As a military guy for most of my life--but one assigned to work with non-military agencies--I have long watched our military culture and how it affects our views and how we describe those views, both orally and in writing. We as a military see what we report as correct and anything that differs from what we see as correct is by definition incorrect and possibly delberately so. "We don't like CNN so we change channels to Fox because we like them more,' is symptomatic of this tendency.

Really good point, Tom. I've always suspected that one of the key friction points has been conflicts in the oral language, without people understanding why the differences exist and why they are necessary. I remember years ago talking with a bunch of anti-(Vietnam)war people in Toronto, and one of the comments made really stuck with me: (roughly) "the military uses 'sanitized' language to avoid responsibility for their actions." Hunh, what a crock! About a week before that little encounter, I had been having lunch with my great uncle, who was a WW I vet, and a bunch of his friends and they had slipped out of "sanitized" language for a minute or two, appeared to get very depressed and then started using it again.

But that friction with language comes out, especially when reporters quote people. Terms like "collateral damage", "friendly fire", etc. have a tendency to be taken by many of the civilian population as newspeak in the Orwellian sense. It's certainly not unique to military-civilian interactions, either . The way many people react to what politicians and corporations say is another great example of the phenomenon; phrases like "unavoidable readjustment in the economy", "rightsizing", "free trade", etc. are good examples.

Marc