media

Chrissy B., Dmitriy T.M., and Lindsay sent in videos regarding Brit Hume speaking on Fox News about the Tiger Woods scandal, arguing that he needs to convert to Christianity, rather than his current Buddhist beliefs, if he’s going to get back on the right moral track:

Transcript of the main point:

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith, he’s said to be a Buddhist, I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith, so.. my message to Tiger would be, “Tiger, turn your faith–turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a GREAT example to the world.”

It’s an interesting example of how many Americans treat Christianity as the default, “normal,” and the best religion for everyone. Can you imagine Fox News, or any other news outlet, intentionally giving air time to a person saying that Tiger Woods needs to convert from Christianity to Buddhism (or any other religion) if he’s going to change his behavior? Can you imagine the outcry if the suggested religion was Islam?

The Daily Show aired a segment that addressed this issue, and then a day later had another segment about Brit Hume’s claims that Christianity is under attack in the U.S.:

None of this, of course, even addresses the irony of suggesting that Christianity is the only religion that can help save you from infidelity, given the number of conservative Christian politicians who have been caught cheating on their wives in the past couple of years. But I don’t think irony is Hume’s strong suit.

UPDATE: Rosa S. of Newsy sent in this segment about the issue:

Hank M. sent us a link to this image that shows the proportion of news coverage in 55 outlets for various items throughout the year (click here for a larger image; to read more about the methodology and the news outlets, see Journalism.org):

Journalism.org puts out a weekly index as well, broken down by type of source (network TV, newspaper, etc.). Some of the results for Dec. 14-20 show some interesting differences. Here are the top-10 lists for newspaper and network TV, respectively:

The top three stories are the same, and clearly dominate both types of media outlets. TV sources seem to do more “human interest” or “entertainment” coverage of things like Tiger Woods’s scandal, the Goldman custody battle, and the missing climbers. (My mom and grandma were both distressed that I wasn’t aware of the missing woman in Utah or the Goldman custody case and said that I need to keep myself more informed of the world around me by taking the time to watch the news on TV so I’d know what’s going on in the world.)

Cable TV outlets had the same top 3 stories, but actually emphasized them even more than newspapers and network TV did, with health care getting nearly twice as much coverage as it did on the networks (radio had the same pattern):

Their database is archived and searchable, and it provides a rather fascinating view of what is considered newsworthy each week and how that depends on the type of outlet.

Also check out our posts on google searches for information about Afghanistan and Tiger Woods, the “dithering” meme,

When thinking about how media coverage affects public perceptions, many people think of it in terms of an “injection model”–that is, media outlets “inject” ideas into a passive public, directly affecting what they think (or, anyway, what everyone else thinks, since most people are convinced that they personally aren’t affected). Many researchers have argued this model depicts media audiences as having little agency when it comes to interpreting things they read or hear. People do ultimately decide what they think of issues, though the media play a large role in defining what issues are worth thinking about.

I have spent the last several days being mystified and annoyed by the number of news stories I’ve heard about Tiger Woods and his wreck and apparent affairs. I do not understand why this is national (and even international) news, and why news outlets from Fox to NPR found it worthwhile to have on commentators to talk about the fact that an athlete cheated on his wife.

Upon hearing my grumbling, my friend Larry (of The Daily Mirror) sent in this Google trends graph showing searches for “Tiger Woods” and “Afghanistan” during the last month:

The top graph shows searches for those terms; the bottom graph shows the frequency of them in news stories distributed by Google News. What was interesting to me is that news coverage has actually been higher for Afghanistan, with the gap growing during the days following the Tiger Woods story, but searches have followed the opposite pattern, with the enormous spike in searches for Tiger Woods in the last few days. It’s possible that TV media outlets have covered the Tiger Woods issue more than print media, so that could show a different trend.

But from what we see here, it appears that public interest isn’t being driven solely by media coverage, and any increases in news stories about Tiger Woods may be a response to an appetite for more information. That doesn’t mean media coverage doesn’t play a large part in framing public discourse–after all, we wouldn’t even know about the Tiger Woods story if it didn’t get some initial media coverage–but media outlets don’t decide what to cover in a complete vacuum, with the ability to get the public interested in any story they report on.

UPDATE: Larry sent in this image that contrasts searches for those terms with searches for “porn”:

Sigh.

Also see our posts on CNN questioning whether Jon and Kate’s divorce was getting too much coverage, which missing children get media coverage, the media shape reality, and coverage of Obama and Clinton.

Kate M. sent us a link to a story in the Times Online about the recent suicide of model Daul Kim. Kim had worked for a number of high-fashion companies, including Chanel. Her blog contained many posts about the pressure and loneliness of being a model. Kate points out that the links surrounding the story undermine any message that we should actually care about this topic:

Notice on the side the “Lingerie for Christmas” feature on the side, with a scantily clothed, very thin woman; it lets you “make your missus a pin-up.” Below that you can “dress her in exquisite baubles.” Women are sexy, thin, mostly naked playthings for you to dress up and play with at will. How could that possibly have anything to do with the thinness ideals models and other women are pressured to meet?

The “Ralph Lauren model dropped for being too fat” story refers to the woman we wrote about in this post, where her body had been photoshopped beyond recognition.

I recently posted about the de-gaying of the movie A Single Man in promotional posters and trailers for different audiences. James H. (of Town Creek Poetry) sent us an example of how the cover of the book Spice & Wolf was changed for the U.S. market (the original is the Japanese version; image found at siliconera):

So we move from a fully-clothed manga character to a cover with a photo of a naked woman with her head cut out of the image, removing all subjectivity. The publisher says they did so in order to try to draw in a wider audience than people who are already interested in manga, and apparently they decided that a naked woman is the way to draw the interest of U.S. readers.

I wish I could say they’re totally wrong and it would never work. But clearly Evony also thought it would be effective. I wish I knew how their sales have changed as their advertising became more boob-centric.

Both my colleague, my friend, and a reader (that’d be John L, Dmitriy T.M., and Jillian Y.) sent along this month’s cover of Newsweek.  FOX News and Palin both are calling it “sexist” and “demeaning”:

I have to agree with FOX News here.  Sexualizing a woman is a way to make her seem less important.  It’s, literally, to disempower her.  This magazine cover tells us that we shouldn’t take Palin seriously.   With her short shorts, sexy legs, pigtails, and friendly smile, it turns her into a political joke.

But this is about more than gender; it’s about the relationship between power and sex in our society.  Because we so frequently see sex as a power struggle, to be presented as a sexual object is to be presented as passive, consumable, inert (remember, only one person gets “fucked”).  While both men and women can be presented as sexual objects, because of sexism, this particular tool can be used more effectively against women than men.  (And when it is used against a man, it often has the effect of feminizing him, making an association with femininity/sexual subordination the very thing that disempowers him.  Ah the tangled web of sex, sexuality, gender, and power.)

Whether you think Palin should or shouldn’t be taken seriously is irrelevant here.  What is interesting is just how much Newsweek can do to influence the public one way or another, even if all they do is see the cover.

Images matter.

For comparison, I did a quick search for Newsweek covers featuring the last election’s Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates for comparison.  Compare:

For more examples of the sexualization of Palin, see here, here, and here.

And for more on the relationship between sex and power, see these posts: power one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,and, eleven.

(Sources: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The Daily Show calls itself “a fake news show,” but it often does what the “real” news shows won’t. It documents how what people on news shows try to pass off as “spontaneous and unrehearsed” (as the opening of Meet the Press used to put it) is really planned and scripted at Talking Points Central. The Daily Show will give a quick montage of clips in which different people on different shows all use the same unusual word or phrase.

Last night it was “dithering.” A series of right-wingers, culminating in Dick Cheney, all accuse President Obama of “dithering” on Afghanistan.

Slide to 3:37:

It was just like the old days, when The Daily Show would string together clips from Bush Administration figures and right-wing commentators all using the same key words. But then, the statements all came on the same day, so the central direction was obvious. (I mean, it was obvious to Daily Show viewers, not to viewers of “real” news programs.)

The popularity of dithering may be more a case of contagion than planning. Note the dates of the O’Reilly and Cheney clips, more than two weeks apart.

Dithering is not a frequently used word. Lexis-Nexis shows only 27 instances in TV news transcripts for the first nine months of the year. The first use in connection with Afghanistan comes on September 24 – on Australian ABC, but the speaker was from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. So it’s likely that dithering represented one idea of how to attack Obama. That idea took hold.

Over the course of the next month, dithering begins to reverberate. Republican senators use it in hearings in early October, TV news people bounce it back, and right-wing commentators start yodeling it loudly.

They are changing the rationale for why we are in Afghanistan. What’s really going on here is a dither, a big dither, indecisiveness. (William Bennett on CNN, Oct. 18)

And finally the Cheney quote on Oct. 21 that is echoed in every news story about that speech.

The White House must stop dithering while America’s forces are in danger.

Quite possibly, Cheney’s speech was written by someone at the American Enterprise Institute or someone else in that neo-con circle. Still, I don’t see the dithering as a matter of “talking points” distributed by the RNC. Instead, it’s an example of what I mentioned in another post – a word (dithering, issues) that spreads because it just sounds “right,” at least to certain people.

I expect that the dithering life cycle will be mayfly brief. Issues to mean problems was slower to catch on, and it may hang around for a good while.

Before Sociological Images was widely read (when it was just us and our friends), we used to occasionally title posts “Sigh.”  But these days, what with people following us on twitter, we must offer more imaginative titles.  But really, my instinct was to title this with good ol’ resignation:

Via Racialicious.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.