Less babytalk. Less trivia.

The other day my local news referred to vegetables as "veggies" and bees as little "stingers." Assuming most viewers are adults, it would be good to not have the language cutesified.

Also, some very good things have been said by Glenn Greenwald and by Rachel Maddow concerning the whole Obama "bitter" flap. Not only is the coverage loaded with misinformation, as I noted, but of course the whole issue is stupid. Of course, the whole thing shows a disingenuous bit of circular reasoning: the media covers this stupid trivia about little things a candidate says or does that are not really very important otherwise, on the excuse that they may have the power to influnce the election. And of course they do have that power, because the media covers them obsessively, to the exclusion of actual news.

These two topics raise broader ones. I love media criticism, and I think the topic is vitally important. The fact that the Obama story here is so trivial raises a question of news values. One project which would be important would be to identify actual news values and interrogate them. For example, it has been commonly said for 40 years that negativity is a news value, and people have asked, why is bad news more important than good news? Or, if it is sometimes, when? Perhaps we should eliminate or at least refine this news value so that we do not overemphasize negative coverage. Of course, the local news have a habit of trying to be upbeat, which is just as disgusting. They still follow the formula that if it bleeds it leads, then produce "positive" segments for balance that are awful and do nothing to balance out the obsession with crime news.

A few days ago, for some reason I've forgotten, I had to look up standard western news values. I think those values have some serious shortcomings. I like Wikipedia's entry, on which I have based the following synopsis. They utilized three sources: Johan Galtung & Mari Holmboe Ruge's classic, "The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers, " from the Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2, pp. 64-91 (1965). This gave them 10 values. They added four more from Allan Bell's book, The Language of News Media. (Oxford, 1991), and a final two from Philip Schlesinger, Putting "Reality" Together (London, 1987), making a total of 16. I recite them below with my own explanations based on Wikipedia's, and put in my own order to reflect what I see as supercategories among them. I have put an asterisk on each of Bell's contributions and two on each of Schlesinger's.

Narrative structure:
Frequency (events at a convenient time versus other events or slow trends).
Unexpectedness (unusual versus everyday occurrence).
Unambiguity (simple background and obvious implications versus complexity).

Drama:
Personalization (individual actions versus no human interest).
Conflict (dramatic opposition versus none).
Negativity (bad news versus good).

Subjects important or culturally proximate:
Meaningfulness (culturally proximate subjects versus foreign).
Reference to elite nations (global powers versus other nations).
Reference to elite persons (celebrities and decisionmakers over everymen).

Relating to synergy or countersynergy:
Consonance (fit media's expectations versus unreadiness to report).
Continuity (inertia from being already in the news versus new subjects).
Co-optation* (related to major story versus not).
Competition* (endorsed by other news outlets versus not).
Composition (balances overall news output versus not).

Relating to the ease of production:
Prefabrication* (supplied verus requiring work "from the ground up").
Predictability* (pre-scheduled versus not).
Time constraints** (able to be covered quickly versus not).
Logistics** (nearby, accessibile and secure location versus not).

If one thinks about it, though, this list is plainly inadequate. Here are some I would add:

Exclusivity: (proprietary versus reported by others).
Currency: (recent, breaking, or imminent verses temporally distant).
Aesthetics: (compelling audio or video available versus words-only).
Uncontroversialiaty: (free of legal, security, or social restraints versus problematic).
Structure: (having a standardized narrative, like a legal proceeding or election, versus developing randomly).
Reproducability: (able to be repeated as a new story with small changes versus not).
Categorized: (belonging to a staple type like sports, weather, or crime versus miscellany).
Source-value: (known and considered important by frequent sources versus information scattered among those not frequent sources).

Another, broader project that I have had in mind for a long long time would be to gather up the various criticisms of media coverage and sort them out and evaluate them. Some, I think, would fall away as cases of a very intuitive but ultimately unsatisfying and unprincipled approach: if it does not reflect my values, it is biased. Without a set of neutral procedural and substantive criteria that identify how to present the news objectively, the tendency is to navigate between critics, covering things however intuitively feels fair. It's a start but it only goes so far, and explains why there is so much failure in objectivity in the present media output.

Wikipedia has a nice little entry on objectivity, but it highlights this shortcoming. It fails to mention Westerstahl's definition of objectivity, which I've always liked. More on this later.

Of course, the criticisms do not all center on bias. The problems of clutter, narrowcasting, entertainment values, horserace journalism, and stuff like the babytalk I mentioned above all pretty much grate on me. The local alternative weekly actually had a very nice cover story about a year ago, drawing together dozens of particular criticisms, to which I could have added a dozen more. I thought I had done a blog entry on it at the time, but I see that I never did, and have only my rough notes. This is something I want to come back to. It's a rich subject, important, and something I like to think about.

More later.