A Scene of Where We Are:

1. A Scene of Where We Are: Reporting the World: Lecture 1

2. Five questions in this section: • Where am I (in the international information nexus) ? • How much information do I have? • What kind of information do I have? • How does it affect me? • Where do I want to go?

3. A worrisome picture of where we are • Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why -- though we want to know more about the world than ever -- the media is actually showing us less. • Karen Rothmyer: “Hiding the Real Africa,” Columbia Journalism Review • Ana Swanson & Jim Tankersley: “As U.S. Trumpets ‘America First,’ Rest of the World is Moving On,” The New York Times • Anjan Sundaram: “We’re Missing the Story: The Media’s Retreat from Foreign Reporting,” NYT

4. The paradox 1: Isolation in the age of globalization • Your life is affected more, but you receive less information about international affairs.

5. The paradox 2: Kind of information • You have more choice of information sources, but you get less balanced diet of information about international affairs. • Echo chamber • The network of homophily

6. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” -Anais Nin-

7. How does the news affect you? • After World War I, people thought news can manipulate people’s behavior directly. This was due to the propaganda war fought among European powers during the Great war. • This line of thinking is called the Big effect theory, the Bullet theory or the Hypodermic needle theory. • However, this incident gave people second thoughts.

8. The Invasion of Mars Incident in 1938 • CBS Radio was playing a audio drama based on the novel by H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898). • In one scene, a news reporter played by actor Ray Collins was choking on poison gas as the Martians overwhelmed New York. • Thousands of people rushed to share the false reports with others, or called CBS, newspapers, or the police to ask if the broadcast was real. Many newspapers assumed that this large number of phone calls, and scattered reports of listeners rushing about or even fleeing their homes, proved the existence of a mass panic. • “…about 12 million people were listening when Welles' broadcast came on the air and about 1 in every 12 ... thought it was true and ... some percentage of that 1 million people ran out of their homes.” Orson Wells (1915~1985, Actor, Director and Writer)

9. Did the national panic really happen? Does news affect you that much? • Fact Check: largely false. • Recommended reading: Why the myth of national panic persists. • Researchers found that the panic was far less widespread than newspapers had indicated at the time. They found the contemporaneous news coverage was “almost entirely anecdotal and largely based on sketch wire service roundups that emphasized breadth over in-depth detail” (Campbell, 2010). • Survey data showed few people actually fled. • They heard the news not from the radio but from friends.  Two step flow of information. • People were concerned about the World War Two. So preexisting perceptions matter.  Stimulus-Response Model.

10. The transition of media models. Moderate effect models: The news affects people’s decisions indirectly, in more complicated ways. • Agenda setting • Framing • Knowledge gap

11. Agenda setting • News, through repeated exposure, raise the relative importance of an issue or attributes in an individual, the public or other media’s mind. • “The media tells people not what to think, but what to think about.” • Agenda-setting theory was formally developed by Max McCombs and Donald Shaw in a study on the 1968 American presidential election. • "The World Outside and The Pictures In Our Heads", Lippmann argues that the mass media are the principal connection between events in the world and the images in the minds of the public.

12. Example of a classic agenda setting effects: MIP (The Most Important Problem facing the nation) ranking Media Agenda • Immigration • Terrorism and Security • Economy • Education • Environment Public Agenda • Economy • Environment • Education • Terrorism and Security • Immigration

13. Framing theory • Framing theory suggests that how something is presented to the audience (called “the frame”) influences the choices people make about how to process that information. According to the theory, the media highlights certain events and then places them within a particular context to encourage or discourage certain interpretations. • The theory was first put forth by Goffman, under the title of Frame Analysis. He put forth that people interpret what is going on around their world through their primary framework. • Often, frames compete and once a frame is dominant, it is difficult to advance a compelling counter-frame. (Reese & Lewis, 2009). • The requirements of frames are “organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (Reese, 2001, p. 11).

14. Examples of competing frames • Episodic v. Thematic frames • Strategy v. Policy frames • Ethical v. Material frames • Individual v. Societal frames • Terrorist v. insurgents • Human rights v. Competition frames

15. When you say, persistent and shared overtime..

16. Knowledge gap theory • The infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments so that the gap in knowledge between these segments tends to increase rather than decrease. • The direct effect of news cannot be found. But the conditioning variable (moderator) impact is found.

18. Let’s talk about agenda setting and framing of articles: • Hiding the Real Africa, Why NGOs prefer bad news. • What are the ways to tell a story about Africa, in terms of framing, agendas? • How is it told in the U.S. media? • Who is sponsoring such frames?

19. Theoretical frameworks of this course • Media Effect (Communication) Theories • Agenda setting • Framing • Gap theories 2. International Relations (Politics) Theories • Realism (power) v. Idealism (democracy) v. Critical studies (hegemony) • The end of history v. Clash of civilization 3. History • Traditional v. Revisionist • Universal v. Particular

20. About the level of objectification… • Man • State • World

21. For next class, • Please find out about Florence Nightingale, Crimean War and William Howard Russel. Ernest Hemingway and Spanish Civil War. • Required reading: Britannica, Florence Nightingale DW, Why intellectuals like Hemingway involved in the Spanish Civil War • Recommended reading: Guardian, Times and war reporting New Yorker, American soldiers in the Spanish War