Back in November, Conan O’Brien officiated at the wedding of two gay men on his show. This received a decent bit of media coverage, it being the first time a same-sex couple was married on TV. My friend John McQuiston pointed out a great video showing the intros of many stations’ coverage of the story. John says CBS Newspath released a tease with the phrase “pushing the envelope,” and the phrase stuck. The clip illustrates the way that, despite the many media outlets available to us, norms of news reporting (and, according to John, general laziness) mean that we often hear the same message or framing of issues repeated over and over, reinforcing a particular understanding of events to the exclusion of other interpretations:
Comments 7
Anonymous — December 14, 2011
I'll echo several commenters on the YouTube video. Conan's PR team for his show probably sent out a press release and the local news producers got if off the wires and copy/pasted into their script.
It's still a singular view of the story, but is it worse or better because it came from the source?
I would be interested to see this comparison on several other stories too.
Nim — December 14, 2011
There are relatively few voices in the media. 6 media conglomerates control 90% of the media consumed in America. So really, it only take three or four companies deciding on a narrative to give the sense that they're all reading the same script. Because they are.
Anon — December 14, 2011
They sound like they're arguing about how to pronounce envelope.
Daniel Jimenez — December 15, 2011
Either that, or, um, a lot of TV news stations tend to just read copy as it's sent over on the AP wire.