Enough Already with "The Media"

In reading a recent academic article about media framing of the U.S. biofuels movement, I repeatedly came across assertions about "the media." This is like saying "the public." It doesn't really exist as some sort of unified "thing." There is no omnipotent "media" or a single general "public." This is akin to saying "all white people are..." or "all Russians are..." It is a gross over-generalization. It needs to change. 

The article Green dreams or pipe dreams?: Media framing of the U.S. biofuels movement, by W. Wright and T. Reid and published in Biomass & Bioenergy, examines the "contested terrain of biofuels discourse" across about 2.5 years of pertinent New York Times (NYT) articles. Again, one newspaper, even one as nationally influential as NYT, is not "the media."

Let's inject a little nuance into our conversation!  The NYT is not The Country Today. It is not similar to any of the dozens of regionally influential smaller market newspapers. It is not USA Today. To lump them together as "the media" fashions a sort of rhetorical black-hole where insinuations and assertions lose meaning or get completely inverted. Let's don't even start on what passes for "news" and "the media" on television and radio. The countless talking heads and wagging tongues of alphabet soup infotainment (MSNBC, NPR, Fox, ESPN, WB, etc.), trying to pass off rounds and rounds of "insight and analysis" has become a mind-numbing chorus of he-said/she-said polemics. These entities deserve a more subtle level of scrutiny.

Why am I ranting about "the media" on this blog about "place." First, because it's my party and I can cry if I want to. The two or three people who read it (hi, mom) don't seem to care. Second, because the authors of the Green Dreams article state their intent of examining the "contested territory" of biofuels. This sort of conceptual territoriality is relevant and fascinating. Places are constructed through social interaction. That is to say meanings are negotiated over time. Ideas are territorial in the nexus of mind/brain plasticity and can be mapped onto the social landscape, the marketplace of ideas, just as the meaning of "places" (as in physical spaces w/ attached meaning) can be negotiated over time and across various frameworks of meaning development.

An example is a recent New York Times Magazine story on Elizabeth Warren. The title of the profile was Heaven is a Place Called Elizabeth Warren. It is the conceptual territory that Warren embodies that is the titular "place" in which "the jilted left has found a new object of its affection." She is not a "place." Her philosophy, her intellectual approach, is the place.

Aside from the metaphysics of all this, my main point here is to encourage a more nuanced line of social negotiation when it comes to ideas put forth and contested regarding the realm of mass media. Just as the general public is not of one mind about anything and, for depth and accuracy of meaning-construction, should be segmented into various (and nearly limitless) categories, so too should the fields of media practice and media effects.

In the context of the particular study mentioned above, it is the realm of framing and frame analysis. Certain frames may develop through NYT discourse, and even be quite relevant in promoting discourse in regional newspapers and at rural coffee klatches nationwide, but these frames should not be generalized as simply those that "the media" present. The authors do acknowledge the limitations of generalization in their study but yet continue to talk of "the media" as if it were equivalent to The New York Times. This is not the case. The New York Times is not "the media." Never has been. Never will be.