Did you know that many Americans cannot locate the US on a world map? I recently had a video show up on my social media that proved just that, as an anonymous camera person asked seemingly random people to locate North Korea on a blank map, with several pointing to Canada, Europe, and even the USA.
Ho-ho! What silly people these Americans are... But leaving aside the editing tricks used in these ‘man on the street’ videos, how confident are any of us in our world geography? Just this past year, Yemen, Azerbaijan, and Sudan were part of major news events, but none of them were covered by my Europe-centric Inter Cert geography. I am not ashamed to admit that I regularly find myself reaching for Google Maps to (re? ) acquaint myself with a region that has popped up in my newsfeed.
Such was the case late last year when first Lebanon, and then Syria, came back into the headlines. Yes, both are in the ‘Middle East’, but where are they in relation to each other, and to the other countries in that region? And what exactly has happened in the years since they last came to our attention?
Attention deficit (dis )order
In media studies we have a term for the phenomenon of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ that happens with our processing of news. Researchers have observed that we only have the cognitive ability to hold a small number of issues in our mind: when we ask people to list the issues facing society, they will generally come up with a handful. Given time, and an appropriate prompt, we can all come up with more, but we are only actively conscious of a handful.
What’s interesting is that if we survey large groups, there will be significant overlap in what people consider to be those challenges. No surprise there, perhaps: we live in a shared society. But what drives those shared beliefs aren’t just the underlying conditions, but what Walter Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads,” or what we might think of as the narratives we build to understand the world. Those pictures - those narratives - are shaped by the media we consume on a daily basis, resulting in what is termed ‘agenda-setting’.
Seeing a once-off story about a topic, or perhaps something every few months, is not sufficient to propel it onto the news agenda. Instead it is those items we see day after day, week after week, that become issues. So it is that the war in Syria – once a daily news item – fell off the agenda as coverage trailed off.
Instead, such mentions of Syria as there were over the past few years were in relation to asylum seekers reaching Europe and Ireland. 'Syria', as such, disappeared, while the focus on how Syrian issues affected us, in the West, persisted.
Which brings us to another role of the media: framing. The media doesn’t just teach us what to think about, but also how to think about it. Are increased house prices a good news story for owners with increased equity, or bad news for those seeking a home? Is drug addiction a criminal justice issue? Or a health issue?
Manufacturing content
The social world is complicated. Did, as one Galway politician claimed in 2018, “the involvement of Isis and al-Qaeda terrorists [force] many Syrians to abandon their opposition to the Assad government”? As those same al-Qaeda groups (albeit renamed ) took power in recent weeks, were the celebrations – and the stories of those detained and tortured by Assad’s regime – an indication that we (in our role as a largely passive audience ) should cheer on these developments?
Without making light of a truly complicated and life-or-death situation, for many of us these issues can feel like a TV series we stopped watching years ago, only to catch a new episode, with some new characters, and some old faces who may have changed radically since last we met.
We are, then, as members of the public, largely at the mercy of the media (broadly defined ) in learning how to understand ‘the world outside’, as Lippmann put it.
The danger comes from a phrase coined by Lippmann, who held an elitist view of democracy as a necessary evil, endangered by the ignorance of the common citizen. Democratic regimes gain their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, but it is up to social elites, he argued, to manufacture that consent, ensuring the correct policies have public support.
That term would eventually give Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky the title of their famed 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, in which they documented the political-economic factors that shape the range of ‘elite’ media discourse in the US.
Of course today’s media landscape is more fragmented, but that’s a story for another day...
Dr Andrew Ó Baoill is lecturer at the School of English, Media and Creative Arts at University of Galway.
