Discourse

"The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he's a the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. If you aren't careful, because I've seen some of you caught in that bag, you run away hating yourself and loving the man — while you're catching hell from the man. You let the man maneuver you into thinking that it's wrong to fight him when he's fighting you. He's fighting you in the morning, fighting you in the noon, fighting you at night and fighting you all in between, and you still think it's wrong to fight him back. Why? The press. The newspapers make you look wrong."

"The democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived. Leaders of the media claim that their new choices rest on unbiased professional and objective criteria, and they have support for this contention in the intellectual community. If, however, the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage” public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality."

"The media have long operated as agents of moral indignation in their own right : even if they are not self-consciously engaged in crusading or muck-raking, their very reporting of certain facts can be sufficient to generate anxiety, indignation or panic."

"Research on the effect that the media has on the public revolves around two interconnected issues. Does coverage of sensationalistic and violent crime create fear among the general public and does this fear influence criminal justice policy attitudes? Review of the research indicates that there are mixed results regarding the influence of the news media on creating an attitude of fear among the general public (Surette, 1998). In an early study, Gerbner et al (1980) hypothesized that heavy viewing of television violence leads to fear rather than aggression. Gerbner et al (1980) find that individuals who watch a large amount of television are more likely to feel a greater threat from crime, believe crime is more prevalent than statistics indicate, and take more precautions against crime. They find that crime portrayed on television is significantly more violent, random, and dangerous than crime in the "real" world. The researchers argue that viewers internalize these images and develop a "mean world view" or a scary image of reality. This view is characterized by "mistrust, cynicism, alienation, and perceptions of higher than average levels of threat of crime in society" (Surette, 1990:8). Further studies on the relationship between fear and television viewing indicate a direct and strong relationship (Barille, 1984; Bryant, Carveth and Brown, 1981; Hawkins and Pingree, 1980; Morgan, 1983; Williams, Zabrack and Joy, 1982, Weaver and Wakshlag, 1986). Conversely, Rice and Anderson (1990) find a weak, positive association between television viewing and fear of crime, alienation and distrust. However, multiple regression analysis fails to support the hypothesis that television viewing has a direct, substantial effect on fear of crime."

"The advertising industry almost exclusively underwrites mass media in the United States. Newspapers obtain 75 to 80 percent of their revenue from advertisers, general circulation magazines about half (Jhally 1990). All revenue for broadcasts such as television and radio programming come from advertising. Clearly, advertising is the economic lifeblood of the media (Kilbourne 1989)."

"The hypothesis that media violence increases aggressive behavior has been widely studied in experimental research looking at the short-term effects of exposure to violent media stimuli, as well as in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies relating habitual media violence exposure to individual differences in the readiness to show aggressive behavior. Although there is disagreement among some researchers as to whether or not the evidence currently available supports the view that media violence exposure is a risk factor for aggression (Huesmann & Taylor, 2003), most meta-analyses and reviews have reported substantial effect sizes across different media, methodologies, and outcome variables, suggesting that exposure to violent media contents increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the short term as well as over time (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003; Bushman & Huesmann, 2006; Huesmann, 1982; Huesmann & Kirwil, 2007; Murray, 2008; Paik & Comstock, 1994). Other authors have questioned both the strength of the evidence and its implications (e.g., Ferguson, 2007; Savage & Yancey, 2008). Ferguson and Kilburn (2009, 2010) concluded from their meta-analysis that there was no support for the claim that media violence increases aggressive behavior. However, they acknowledged that experimental studies using proxy measures of aggression did produce substantive effect sizes and were relatively unaffected by publication bias, and their conclusions have been vigorously disputed by others (Anderson et al., 2010; Bushman, Rothstein, & Anderson, 2010; Huesmann, 2010)."

"In the average American household, the television is turned "on" for almost seven hours each day, and the typical adult or child watches two to three hours of television per day. It is estimated that the average child sees 360,000 advertisements by the age of eighteen (Harris, 1989). Due to this extensive exposure to mass media depictions, the media's influence on gender role attitudes has become an area of considerable interest and concern in the past quarter century. Analyses of gender portrayals have found predominantly stereotypic portrayals of dominant males nurturant females within the contexts of advertisements (print and television), magazines fiction, newspapers, child-oriented print media, textbooks, literature, film, and popular music (Busby, 1975; DurMn, 1985a; Leppard, Ogletree, & Wallen, 1993; Lovdal, 1989; Pearson, Turner, & Todd-Mancillas, 1991; Rudmann & Verdi, 1993; Signorielli & Lears, 1992). Most of the research to date on the effects of gender-role images in the media has focused primarily on the female gender role. A review of research on men in the media suggests that, except for film literature, the topic of masculinity has not been addressed adequately (Fejes, 1989). Indeed, as J. Kate (1995) recently noted, "there is a glaring absence of a thorough body of research into the power of cultural images of masculinity" (p. 133). Kate suggests that studying the impact of advertising represents a useful place to begin addressing this lacuna."

"Presentations of police are often over-dramatized and romanticized by fictional television crime dramas while the news media portray the police as heroic, professional crime fighters (Surette, 1998; Reiner, 1985). In television crime dramas, the majority of crimes are solved and criminal suspects are successfully apprehended (Dominick, 1973; Estep and MacDonald, 1984; Carlson, 1985; Kooistra et al. 1998, Zillman and Wakshlag, 1985). Similarly, news accounts tend to exaggerate the proportion of offenses that result in arrest which projects an image that police are more effective than official statistics demonstrate (Sacco and Fair, 1988; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981; Marsh, 1991; Roshier, 1973). The favorable view of policing is partly a consequence of police’s public relations strategy. Reporting of proactive police activity creates an image of the police as effective and efficient investigators of crime (Christensen, Schmidt and Henderson, 1982). Accordingly, a positive police portrayal reinforces traditional approaches to law and order that involves increased police presence, harsher penalties and increasing police power (Sacco, 1995)."

"Republicans became increasingly mistrustful of the media in 2016 when Trump was campaigning for president and was sharply critical of the media's coverage of him. Between 2015 and 2016, Republican trust in the mass media fell 18 points to its historical low of 14%, where it remained in 2017. Following a seven-point boost last year, it has returned to 15%. For their part, Democrats have consistently been more trusting of the media than Republicans but rallied around the press and became even more trusting when Trump took office in 2017."

"A primary issue with the media’s inaccurate depiction of crime and the criminal justice system is that it socially constructs people’s perceptions about the nature of crime and how the criminal justice system works...One particular concern specific to fictional crime dramas, often referred to as the ‘CSI Effect,’ postulates viewers develop expectations for police and courtroom settings regarding the collection, evaluation, and presentation of physical evidence, including DNA evidence (Dowler, Fleming, & Muzzatti, 2006;Goodman-Delahunty & Tait,2006)."

"Gallup first measured trust in the mass media in a 1972 survey when 68% of Americans said they trusted it. Similar levels were recorded in 1974 (69%) and 1976 (72%), but two decades later, when Gallup next asked the question, trust had fallen to 53%. Although overall trust was at the majority level until 2004, no more than 21% of Americans dating back to 1972 ever said they had the greatest level of trust. Currently, 13% have a great deal of trust, 28% a fair amount, 30% not very much and 28% none at all."

"Never has the media been so influential in determining the course of war as during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which, as far as the Western media are concerned, has essentially become a battle over images and ideas. Israel has already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called hasbara, or information for the outside world (hence, propaganda). This has included an entire range of efforts: lunches and free trips for influential journalists; seminars for Jewish university students who, over a week in a secluded country estate, can be primed to “defend” Israel on the campus; bombarding congressmen and women with invitations and visits; pamphlets and, most important, money for election campaigns; directing (or, as the case requires, harassing) photographers and writers of the current intifada into producing certain images and not others; lecture and concert tours by prominent Israelis; training commentators to make frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel’s predicament today; many advertisements in the newspapers attacking Arabs and praising Israel; and on and on. Because so many powerful people in the media and publishing business are strong supporters of Israel, the task is made vastly easier."

"Widespread media coverage on any potential danger may bring about considerable increase in perceived fear."

"Most progressive developments in the media, of course, are driven by market considerations rather than social conscience. So, for example, the fact that 49 million women are size twelve or over is clearly the motive behind new, flesh-normalizing campaigns created by ”Just My Size” and Lane Bryant. These campaigns proudly show off unclothed zaftig bodies and, unlike older marketing to “plus-size” women, refuse to use that term, insisting (accurately) that what has been called “plus size” is in fact average. It’s a great strategy for making profits (I know they’ve got my ten bucks), but a species of resistance nonetheless. “I won’t allow myself to be invisible anymore.” These ads proclaim, on our behalf. But I won’t be made visible as a cultural oddity or a joke, either, because I’m not. I’m the norm.” The amorality of consumer capitalism, in its restless search for new markets, new ways to generate and feed desire, has also created a world of racial representations that are far more diverse now than when I wrote Unbearable Weight."

"The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cinema, the radio, has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas an images with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment."

"Western media’s idealization of an ultra-thin female body type has long been viewed as an important sociocultural risk factor for eating disorders."

"Americans remain largely mistrustful of the mass media as 41% currently have "a great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news "fully, accurately and fairly." This latest reading represents a four-percentage-point dip since last year and marks the end of improvements in back-to-back years after hitting an all-time low. Although trust in the media has edged down this year, it is well above the record low of 32% in 2016 when Republicans' trust dropped precipitously and drove the overall trust reading down during the divisive presidential campaign. Republicans' trust is still at a very low level and a wide gap in views of the media among partisans persists as 69% of Democrats say they have trust and confidence in it, while 15% of Republicans and 36% of independents agree."

"Remember that CNN, Time Warner, Disney, NBC, Fox News, and the rest are part of the same ideological system, serve the same clientele, and are owned by the same relatively tiny group of people whose interest is to keep things as they are. Memory is an inhibition, a possible threat to their hegemony, just as it is very dangerous for a critic to keep making connections between supposedly un- or nonpolitical institutions like the Supreme Court and the Constitution, and on the other hand, base commercial interests."

"Conservatives will never win (the American culture war) if they imagine themselves as combatants atop defensive battlements, hurling abuse on the mass media. We need to involve ourselves in the creation of pop culture, and thereby help change how that category is defined. That project starts by creating good content, whether in the form of books, films, TV, music or magazines. If politics is downstream from culture, and culture is largely shaped by entertainment, why are most influential conservatives ignoring the latter? We delude ourselves if we think everything we say or do has to go straight to politics."

"Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to such unedifying conversation as about kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, wars, food, drink, clothes, beds, garlands, perfumes, relatives, carriages, villages, towns and cities, countries, women, heroes, street- and well-gossip, talk of the departed, desultory chat, speculations about land and sea, talk about being and non-being, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such conversation."

"The focus of critique is essentially the cluster of relations that bind the one to the other, or the one to the two others, power, truth and the subject. And if governmentalization is really this movement concerned with subjugating individuals in the very reality of a social practice by mechanisms of power that appeal to a truth, I will say that critique is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth. Critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility."

"Constructive critique is a sign of the utmost intellectual respect."

"In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious. That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences."

"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

"Margaret Mead noted... that scientists at the frontier, where the terminology and imagery are developed, speak mostly to other scientists at or near their own level of understanding. In this way, scientific language has escaped from the realm of "natural language." This is the fate of "any language taught only by adults to adults - or to children as if they were adults. ...It serves in the end primarily to separate those who know it from those who do not." Since then, linguists and anthropologists have been reinforcing the point that the cure cannot come from simple "translation" but may lie in recognizing that a difference in languages reflects a difference in world views. Without making the mutual accommodation of these views a prominent part of the agenda, science teaching probably has to remain superficial. I refer here to the work of R. Horton on African traditional thought and Western science, and of J. Jones in... New Guinea; both... have studied the ways in which the traditional cultures of the new learners differ from the scientific cultures of the teachers, and how and to what limited degree these differences can be decreased."

"Functional discourse ... serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason."

"Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean."

"Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task."

"[Today’s jargon] was produced by philosophy and was in Europe known to have been produced by philosophy, so that it paved a road to philosophy. In America its antecedents remain unknown. We took over the results without having had any of the intellectual experiences leading to them. But the ignorance of the origins and the fact that American philosophy departments do not lay claim to them—are in fact just as ignorant of them as is the general public—means that the philosophic content of our language and lives does not direct us to philosophy. This is a real difference between the Continent and us. Here the philosophic language is nothing but jargon."

"What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite formal: it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used."

"The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin."

"More often than we are aware, it is the jargon which is the hurdle that a student cannot overcome rather than the mathematical concepts being introduced. After all, virtually every profession has realized the advantage of inventing sufficient jargon to ensure that it is held in respect by the layman! In teaching, however, our aim should be to pull down barriers, not erect them."

"Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement. ... Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring."

"Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists."

"Movies subjected to the harshest cuts or outright banning during this early period were usually Italian- or American-made horror movies deemed too graphic in their portrayal of violence for sensible human consumption. They became known colloquially as the 'Video Nasties.' In modern-day language, it could be called the 'Hellen [sic] Lovejoy 'Think of the Children' Classification.'"

"Like Rev. Lovejoy’s wife, we do need to think of the children. However, we need to think of all the children. The existence of gay and lesbian parents is a fact, not ideology. Proponents of anti-gay laws may be trying to 'save the children,' but the ultimate effect of such laws is to harm the physical and psychological well-being of millions of children currently raised by loving GLBT parents."

"In 'The Simpsons,' one of my favorite characters is Rev. Lovejoy’s wife. Whenever the citizens of Springfield discuss any controversial issue, her immediate and hilariously shrill response is 'For heaven’s sake, would someone please think of the children?'"

"The sentence 'how many kittens must die,' for example, could be delivered in the same histrionic, moralizing tone as Helen Lovejoy's signature line 'Won't somebody please think of the children?' on The Simpsons (1989-). Audiences laugh in response not because they despise kittens or children but because moral crusaders can be infuriatingly narrow in their interests as well as politically correct killjoys."

"'Won’t somebody please think of the children!' That’s the first argumentative refuge of scoundrels, cheats and liars, and despite being satirized fairly comprehensively by Lovejoy’s character for well over a decade, it’s still a surprisingly common — and depressingly effective — tactic."

"'Won't someone think of the children?' is the constant refrain of Reverend Lovejoy's wife in the cartoon series The Simpsons. Whatever crisis or panic grips the citizens of Springfield, she places the children at the centre of attention. The child, for her, is an innocent and helpless victim in constant need of protection."

"You could call it Lovejoy's Law: If, during an argument, someone begs you to ‘please think of the children,’ they’re probably . . . hoping to distract you from the worthlessness of their position. Because when we really care about the children, we don’t let people use them to manipulate us into accepting their politics. Instead, we engage in real debate."

"This cry has been deftly and devastatingly parodied by The Simpsons since its debut in 1989, as the trademark of Helen Lovejoy, the parson's wife."

"I know this national missile defense plan has its detractors, but won't someone please think of the children?"

"The welfare of children does not trump all other values and principles. When we 'think of the children,' we need to think about the society they are going to grow up in as well."

"'We need to do it for the children,' cry the politicos. 'Think of the children!' 'For the children.' That's the phrase politicians in Washington use to justify an action so irrational that it cannot be justified any other way."

"'Think of the children!' is a tried-and-true debate-stopper, but more often than not one that succeeds because of its ability to inhibit rational thought."

"Too many people these days are thinking of the children, or at least claiming to think of them. Keeping kids safe and virginal — protected from seeing the 'wrong' things — is the rallying concept so many people use to forward their agendas. Ban this, eliminate that, censor the other thing — it's all done in the name of protecting children. Not, heaven forbid, because anyone wants to force their morality and sensibility on the rest of us. Perish the thought."

"Unless society sticks to principles that require adults to be responsible regarding the welfare of children in their charge, the 'Think of the children!' reflex will suffocate order and justice."

"The 'not-in-my-back-yard' (NIMBY) phenomenon was typically, sometimes hysterically, reinforced by a cry of, 'What about the children?' Any difference, particularly a difference of lifestyle, was a threat."

"Moral panic has become in current media discourse the inevitable outcome of any story involving 'youth': in the blogosphere, 'Won't someone think of the children!' — the imagined battle-cry of the faux-outraged columnist — is in danger of becoming the new Godwin's law'"