“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” is a saying attributed, perhaps in error, to Thomas Jefferson. Either way, one place where vigilance is needed is in the mass media, and how we read it. Our liberty can be influenced by assumptions, by how issues are framed and even by the latest fads. The New York Times of Tuesday and Wednesday this week provide a plethora of examples.
The lure of a good story
We might begin on a less serious note. Tuesday’s Times reported on the Tour de France cycling competition with a feel-good story about how in just a couple of days the Australian Green Edge team had gone from “laughingstock” to admired. The admired part was obvious: one of their riders is now leading the tour because the whole team did exceptionally well in a time trial.
The “laughingstock” comment referred to an incident on the first day of the tour when the Green Edge team bus attempted to go under the banner at the finish line and got stuck when the metal banner ruptured the roof-mounted air conditioning unit. What the Times left out of the story is that the bus, behind schedule, was directed to go under the banner by race officials. They hadn’t noticed that the banner had been lowered because an assumption had been made that all buses had passed.
In other words, while one can be sure they were subject to teasing, the error wasn’t Green Edge’s fault, and moreover, their being the “laughingstock” had little to do with the race itself. But that didn’t fit into the Times’ preferred story of an underdog triumphing.
Egypt
Unfortunately, the Times takes this style of reporting up to events of a much more serious scale. The situation in Egypt is changing quickly and its ultimate outcome is uncertain. But the Times has problems seeing the complexity and ambiguity of these events because it wants to frame them in traditional ways.
One such frame is the “plunge into instability” story. In the Western media’s eyes, the Middle East is always being plunged into instability. So the military’s intervention two years ago to overthrow a Egyptian dictator “thrust Egypt into an extended period of instability” according to a lead article on Wednesday. But one could just as easily have argued a kind of opposite, framing that action as breaking a logjam to allow democracy to start to grow.
And according to the same article, of course, the military’s current intervention will “roll back the clock” to two years ago, creating yet more instability. But one might equally argue that Morsi’s presidency might have something to do with the instability.
An editorial by Samer Shehata, an international studies professor, tut-tuts over the military removing a “democratically elected president” and wishes Egyptians had “patience” to wait for the next round of elections to vote him out. President Morsi is described in other Times stories as “democratically elected” with the new round of military intervention seen as threatening progress towards democracy.
In the U.S., we assume the military should have no explicit role in politics and that elections trump everything. But the whole point of the Egyptian protests is that Morsi hasn’t ruled as a man limited by the rule of law. He’s packed governing bodies and issued decrees that stretched democracy to its breaking point. The military acted two years ago to permit Egypt to move forward to democracy, and their current intervention seems to be an act in the same vein.
Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram has long been using a different frame, contrasting “revolutionary legitimacy” with “democratic legitimacy.” A country with weak and easily subverted legal institutions — or one like Egypt where they are just being formed — sometimes has to rely on legitimacy granted by “the street” or “the revolution” because there is simply no way to get to democratic legitimacy otherwise.
Times editors seem to be aware their frame doesn’t correspond with the reality on the ground, but it’s as if they can’t stop using it. An editorial on Tuesday frankly blamed Morsi for creating this crisis, but then objected to the military trying to solve it and wagged their finger at Morsi’s opponents for applauding the military. Their solution? Everyone should “finally work together.”
Raising questions
When journalists want to interject their own views into an ostensibly neutral news story, one way to do it is to write that some action “raises questions.” The same Times lead article says the military’s ultimatum raises questions if Egypt will “fulfill its promise to build a new democracy.”
This is passive writing, and it doesn’t tell us how Egyptians — on any side of the issue — actually feel. It assumes that these “questions” are legitimate and implies there is now an obligation by Egyptians to answer them.
Serving the reader
Overall, this is the prevailing tendency, whether its in revolutionary Egypt or picturesque rural France: to write the expectations-driven narrative in advance, and then forcing all the messiness of reality into said narrative.
It would be more of service to readers if journalists took them into a new world — to explain new ways of looking at issues and to reveal how things look to other people in other contexts. Instead, media too often puts its own views into the mouths of its subjects.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy.