This book, so rich in content, is a testimony to the need for empirical, critical and constructive scrutiny of media. Each chapter opens a new window, a new angle; all of them important.
The problem some 50 years ago was what criteria an event had to meet to qualify as news, and we – my fine assistant Mari Holmboe Ruge and myself – came up with 12. When the news represents a distorted world image, the distortions are worth knowing. Recently I have added entertainment value as a news factor, in the form of ‘infotainment’.
I then focused on four: high status of persons, countries, actor-orientation (as opposed to nature, culture, structure) and something negative. That high status – class, gender, race, whatever – attracts attention happens almost by definition, and actor-orientation is built into the Indo-European sentence structure: subject–predicate–object; not only a smoking gun, but ‘who done it’. But negativism? Where does it come from? Media as we know them are Western efforts to mediate between the world and the reader/listener/viewer. But isn’t the West based on an idea of progress? Maybe, but also on apocalypse. Negativism both highlights the abnormal and warns of clear and imminent danger. Then, Aristotle enters.
He did us a colossal disfavour by dividing the human drama in two: tragedy or comedy; Shakespeare being the showcase. Either it ends badly or it is laughable; the former for people high up, the latter for the rest. What is missing? Muddling through, regular life, the fact that we generally manage. And if literature is tailored to fit Aristotle, then why not also the lesser fry among authors – the journalists? Maybe mainstream journalists are as afraid of peace as authors are of the human condition of happiness, tearing at it the moment it rears its smiling face? Or, even worse, they do not even recognise it when it is there?6
My basic concern was and is peace; and the four factors, with negativism up front, make peace journalism – as opposed to violence and war journalism – an uphill struggle. And yet it is possible: I have witnessed its increase in the last decades. But there are plenty of hurdles to overcome, like the strange idea that firing a bullet is somehow objective whereas saying or doing peace is not.
Happy reading – and please join the search for better media!
Versonnex, France, April 2011