Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

News Inversions: Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , ,

crime sceneThe more media coverage a crime story gets, the less likely that its crime category represents a serious threat to other citizens. 

A few years ago political communication scholar Doris Graber published a study of crime news in the city of Chicago. At the time her focus was on the reporting of the Chicago Tribune (Mass Media and American Politics, 1993).  But almost any major news outlet in any region would have probably yielded the same eye-opening results. She found what most of us sense but too easily forget:  The more media coverage a crime story gets, the less likely it is a crime category that represents a serious threat to other citizens. There is an inverse correlation between space and time given to a crime story and the frequency of that kind of crime in a city.  In her study the most reported category was murder, which in 1991 was 0.3 percent (925) of all the crimes documented in the city’s Uniform Crime Report.  But in the Tribune murders got 64% of the coverage. That added up to a lot of column inches. The same was true for assaults.  By comparison, more common crimes like theft got comparatively little coverage.

I doubt the passage of time and the presence of online media have changed this equation. By definition, news is the unusual. Think of CNN’s current preoccupation with global terrorism.  It is both a serious problem and seriously over-covered, at least in relation of other pressing world concerns. According to the Global Research Center we are about four times more likely to be struck by lightning than a terrorist attack.

There can be exceptions to this pattern, but it’s common because it is so easy to convert a single example into a rule. Our brains are hardwired to want to generalize to the whole from a few specific cases.  Rhetorically, this is the function of a synecdoche, a fancy word for the straightforward idea that we like to use a single case to stand for the whole. It’s one of the most efficient rhetorical tropes a news organization can employ. Using it one might conclude that the 1999 actions of mass murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School in Colorado point to what is ostensibly “wrong” with kids raised these days in the United States.  But perhaps there is no emerging pattern at all.

The truth is that seriously deviant actors engage in acts of unknowable causality, following tenuous strings of suppositions usually known only to them.

As with Columbine, there are always an abundance of experts ready to take the bait of television notoriety to speculate on what an event like this “means” to the nation. Most commentators cannot resist the synecdoche. It makes the world simpler. It makes for good television. And it saves the expert from the potentially embarrassing but intellectually honest assessment that a given case, even a mass murder, is perhaps significant of nothing. The truth is that seriously deviant individuals engage in acts of unknowable causality, following tenuous strings of suppositions known only to them. But to actually say that is to leave the third act of a traumatic episode unwritten.  And so we write social significance scripts based on mostly unrepresentative cases.

This explains the perpetual panic mode of the 24/7 “Breaking News” cycle. Everything covered is urgent. Everything represents an early warning of a bigger and ominous trend.

How do we counteract this compulsion to find meaning and and at the same time maintain our own sense of equilibrium?

Step back. Tune out. The world is not ending. The awful events documented and reported on a given day frequently make sense only as single aberrations.

More specifically, limit you time and your children spend in the presence of television news reporting. This is especially important for the nation’s population of seniors, who typically gorge themselves on video news.  We have solid evidence that, like most of us, older Americans generally over-estimate how dangerous their community and the world really is.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

100th Post: Not to Despair, But We Are Islands

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , ,
Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, Wikipedia.org
                Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Wikipedia.org

We our own islands of consciousness, forever separated from others.  We may share the substrate of a common culture and lineage, and we can build bridges to each other, but we can never fully inhabit another’s unique psychological space.

Climate scientists warn that it will be just decades until areas of South Florida will become a watery archipelago. The level of the sea rises about one inch a year in Miami Beach, inundating streets that some residents continue to believe are flooded by water main breaks.  Even in denial, they must sense that a chain of islands makes continuous connection with the rest of the community an insurmountable problem.

Interestingly, in the last six years communication scholar John Durham Peters has eloquently made the same observation about human communication (Speaking Into the Air, 1999).  We are, he says, our own islands of consciousness, forever separated from others.  We may share the same substrate of a common culture and lineage, and we can build bridges to each other, but we can never fully occupy the adjoining person’s world.  His analysis turns the iconic lines of John Donne’s prose poem literally and figuratively on its ear.

All of this is Peters’ way of reminding us that we have oversold our abilities to make things right through communication.  He notes that problems of connecting with others are “fundamentally intractable.”  The goal of doing so creates a “registry of modern longings” that can never be fully satisfied.  Disappointment is a natural part of the effort.

Our sensations and feelings are, physiologically speaking, uniquely our own.  My nerve endings terminate in my own brain, not yours.  No central exchange exists where I can patch my sensory inputs into yours, nor is there any “wireless” contact through which to transmit my experience of the world to you. . . .  In this view, humans are hardwired by the privacy of experience to have communication problems.

Of course the theme of humans physically together and psychologically apart is universal, reflected in everything from Edward Hopper’s lone figures in the painting, Nighthawks (1942),  to virtually any film or play that treats individuals and relationships in all of their complexities.  The tensions inherent in coupling and adapting are shot through the work of film directors, ranging from Woody Allen to Ang Lee.

This perspective only seems pessimistic if we believe in a kind of communication that is so stipulative or stripped of complexity as to be uninteresting. I can say with great accuracy that the Ketchup in our household is in the refrigerator, and know I can be understood.  But who cares?  The things that usually matter–feelings, values, aspirations and needs–all feed into making each individual their own special case.  Could it be otherwise when we engage with other living souls with different life histories, memories, fears and hopes?

Another part of our common over-optimism about communication is that we have sold ourselves on the belief that advances in technologies are themselves reasons to mitigate communication confusion. Our devices make it possible to talk or text through every waking hour.  But, if anything, opportunities for sending and receiving messages only increase the chances to see the differences between us that remain.

The trick here is to accept the challenges that human complexity produces without decending into a solipsistic view that the outside world is mostly a mental mirage. To fall into that trap is to deny the ecstasies that are still possible when words, images and music make sometimes durable bridges to others.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu