In the news: What's in a face?

Laurence W. Britt in Rochester's City Paper asks a serious question about the MSM news: "Do you ever wonder how some stories in the news get covered extensively; others, seemingly more important, get little coverage, and still others get no coverage at all?"

Britt contrasts what he calls "Cold News" with"Hot News" (and, no, this has nothing to do with Marshall McLuhan's notion, or probes, of Hot Media and Cold Media from Understanding Media). Instead, he gives a few examples of so-called "Cold News" stories, including:

• The "lost" $8.8 billion allocated to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
  
• The attacks on Iraqi oil pipelines
  
• The "huge deficits in our trade balance, the weakening dollar, the federal budget deficit (now at record levels, with no end in sight), continual records in personal bankruptcies, an almost non-existent savings rate."
  
• "How unpopular America has become around the world"

All of these stories are, of course, undercovered by the MSM. Contrast this with the following "Hot News" stories which, as Britt points, are tremedously overcovered.

• The Laci Petersen trial;
  
• The Robert Blake trial;
  
• The Michael Jackson trial;
  
• The Terri Schaivo story;
  
• The runaway bride story [Jennifer Wilbanks];
  
• The missing teenager in Aruba story [Natalee Holloway];
  
• The new Harry Potter book story;
  
• The Carl Rove story

So why is the first group of "Cold Media" stories given short shrift while the second "Hot Media" group receives saturation coverage. Well, unfortunately it's not that hard to figure out, Laurence. The first group contains stories that are arcane, diffuse, multidimensional, require more in-depth knowledge of context, and are much harder to place within a TV news format (especially in a US TV news format, which just doesn't do "news" very well.) The second group is simple, one-dimensional, requiring only a simple manichean determination among audience members of right and wrong, good-versus-bad. The first group ("Cold News") raises issues of political controversy, and very effective spin machines and attack dogs in political circles (especially on the Republican side) make it uncomfortable for news organizations to pursue such stories, for fear of being labeled "liberal media" or some such thing. The "Hot News" stories (mostly) don't have to worry about that aspect, so these stories are usually pretty "safe" - news organizations can speculate endlessly and screw up royally on aspects of these stories and get away with it. Screw up on a "Cold News" story in this era of the blogosphere - or show incompetence in trying to turn a Cold story into a Hot one - and all hell will break loose tout suite (Dan Rather and "memogate," anyone?).

But the most important difference between Britt's "Cold News"/"Hot News" stories - at least for the cable news stations, is that the "Hot" stories all have a "face" attached to them. And usually a pretty female face. I've talked about this before, when I reminded anyone paying attention (all three of you) that Natalee Holloway (see right), the missing teenager in Aruba, was simply joining "a class of news figures anointed by the media (albeit fleetingly) as instant news 'celebrities.'" Their number includes Chandra Levy, Pvt. Jessica Lynch, "runaway bride" Wilbanks, etc. Still, it's not essential to have a pretty female face (though it really helps). If the face is famous enough (or can quickly be made so by a willing media), and the story is simple enough, then that story will have legs. Once you have your "face" all you do is slap it all over a news network, and attach a simple storyline to it, and voila - it's one for the water cooler! Court trials are great for this, providing the point of law at issue is simple (i.e., "Did Michael Jackson have sex with a small boy?" works really well; but "Did Worldcom's Bernard Ebbers commit serious fraud?" is less good, because i.) the face doesn't have much celebrity value and ii.) the issues are complex and multidimensional).

Media scholars have tackled this issue from multiple perspectives, among them semiotics and framing. Semioticians and their descendants in visual communication analyze the power of a face as a sign that connotes various (polysemic) meanings within dominant sign systems. Media ecology scholars from Neil Postman on note the tendency for television to emphasize the visual and affective over the rational. Cultural studies scholars, drawing on social constructionism and narrative analysis, note that the "story" that we're presented with, wrapped around a prominent media "face," is a complete media construct, very different from the "real" person living in the real world. Others, investigating this area from a framing effects perspective, posit that news, and the framing of news, can be considered along two different dimensions: the thematic and the episodic.

The difference between the two is this: Long-form journalism (mostly print news but also including some in-depth documentaries) tends to be thematic, emphasizing more background and contextual information (e.g., "What were the multiple interacting causes that led to the Iraq War?"; "What causes poverty in the United States?"). Television news, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly episodic, reducing issues to a sequence of isolated, disconnected episodes (e.g., "another three soldiers die in Iraq;" "Pvt. Jessica Lynch is a hero tonight;" "Here's a story of a young woman who fought her way out of poverty," that sort of thing). Episodic frames tend to emphasize individual agency and simple solutions. Whether talking about the Iraq war, the "war on terror", poverty, crime, corporate scandals, or whatever, episodic frames attribute social problems, and their solutions, to individuals rather than the system at large or the institutions that make up that system. In fact, a medium (such as television) dominated by episodic frames will tend to ignore the more complex issues altogether, shifting attention instead to "news" episodes that facilitate simple, manichean situations involving individuals, such as murders, celebrity scandals, and trials (especially celebrity trials). In such a system, dominated by visuals, the human "face" invariably becomes the main signifier around which an episodic story is wrapped. That's why editors today nearly always encourage their newsworkers to try and "personalize" a story. That's why you end up learning (or think you're learning) a lot about one person or one family or one soldier or one victim in a story, and very little about the deeper (thematic) causes of whatever it is the news is supposed to be reporting on. It's also why most people who watch a TV news bulletin can recall very little detail about what they watched 24 hours after watching it - because news bulletins typically fail to provide the "connective tissue" of meaning and context to the isolated news fragments they present. (One of the most prominent scholars doing work in this area of framing, btw, is Stanford Political Communication Professor Shanto Iyengar (see, e.g., Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues.)

Of course, spin doctors know all this instinctively - have done since they were about 10 years old, I think - but annoyingly, it always seems to be Republican spin doctors that make more hay from it. If you want a simple explanation for why John Kerry lost the election to George Bush last November, it's because Karl Rove et. al. put Kerry's face on a simple, manichean, negative story - well alright, two stories: Kerry the flip-flopper and Kerry the medal-hog with a dodgy military record. Forget all that stuff about ideology and policy differences. The Republicans beat the Dems to the punch in the "face" race, and that was that.

So that's where we are: news stories that have "legs" in our cable-drenched environment are those that are simple and easy-to-understand tales of right and wrong with a prominent "face" on them. And that's why Republicans are worried about the whole Karl Rove-Valerie Plame incident (here's some background and latest developments). Because it deals with a subject and person - Rove - that would normally be relegated to "Cold" news, and is pushing him uncomfortably to a "Hot" News zone. The thing Rove fears most is that his "face" will become solidly identified with "dirty tricks" and "liar." Of course, the "Plame Affair" is utterly inconseuqential compared with the epic tales of deceit and subterfuge associated with this administration's Iraq War policies. But that doesn't matter - well not to Bush and his cabinet anyway. All the stuff about illegal wars and WMD's and reconstruction corruption and Halliburton and Bechtel and 2,000 dead coalition soldiers and 25,000+ dead Iraqis matter not a jot - because these are "Cold" news stories and have all been safely neutralized. Nobody but nobody has had to resign or be impeached because of this stuff. But the "Rove-Plame" stuff could be much more important, could be ... it depends. Yes, the John Roberts nomination has attempted to bury the Rove story. But it might not. After all, Karl Rove now has a "face", and it's increasingly well-recognized.