Wasburn and Burke (1997)

[Linnea Micciulla]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your comments, Noriko!  I have also had a conversation with a
Russian friend who wondered why Russians expect their newspapers to be
filled with propaganda while Americans seem to believe that their newspapers
are filled with facts. (I suspect we are both referring to the same Russian
friend!) I can only guess a) whether this suggestion is true, and b) if
true, why. Perhaps the U.S. propaganda machine is especially effective (see
Altheide & Grimes in the Sociological Quarterly for more on that!). Or
perhaps comfortable lifestyles make people less skeptical or less
interested?  It would be interesting to conduct a study to see whether
wealthy Americans tend to be more or less skeptical about the news than
poverty-stricken Americans.  

There were a couple of things in the article that didn't make sense to me.
On p. 678, "Overall, data in the three tables indicate not only an absence
of the cold-war frame but also the lack of a framework used to tell numerous
stories incompatible with those told during the cold war." And on p. 683,
"If, in the foreseeable future, an explanatory framework comes to structure
Vremya news discourse... what might it look like?" This assumption of a
"lack of a framework" seemed quite odd to me.  How can there be no
framework?  There's always a framework - perhaps the cold war has been
replaced with a "cooperation" framework or a "capitalist" framework, or a
"benevolent American empire" framework, but I can't envision a lack of a
framework. I suspect that when a discourse analyst claims there is "no
framework" that simply means that a mainstream framework (which may be
invisible to the analyst if the analyst is embedded in it) has been adopted.

Thoughts?

Linnea

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 02:47:25 +0900,
=?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCP3k/ORsoQiAbJEJFNTtSGyhC?= <n_sugimori at YAHOO.CO.JP> wrote:

>Wasburn and Burke (1997) analyzed 1995 Vremya (Russian
>national television) newscasts and found that few traces
>of the cold-war framework in them. The authors wrote:
>
>To Vremya viewers, the political world must have seemed
>much more complicated than before the end of the cold war.
>It was now harder than previously for them to make sense
>of daily happenings in domestic and international
>politics. What had changed was the political spectacle
>offered by Vremya. As the philosopher of science Abraham
>Kaplan (1964) once pointed out, simplicity and complexity
>are not qualities inherent in a subject matter. Rather,
>the terms refer to the matter in which a subject matter is
>treated. The principle is consistent with the contention
>of Edelman (1988), and other s that media news accounts
>evoke a spectacle that is an ideological product, not a
>set of facts (p683)
>
>This article is clearly written and easy to read. It was
>easy for me to read probably because what the authors
>wrote was predictable from the viewpoints of most students
>of critical discourse analysis. But is it really true that
>it is harder for Russian people to make sense of daily
>happenings after the cold-war era? I wonder if it is also
>an image constructed by the media. Last year a Russian
>friend of mine said that Russian people did not believe
>what they had read in newspapers [during the cold-war era]
>because they had known they were full of propaganda. I don
> $B!G (Bt know whether what she said was really true in the
>1980s. This article has motivated me to look into some
>research on people
> $B!G (Bs perception of the media on the spot rather than
>assumed reflections.
>
>Best,
>
>Noriko