Constructing the News: Burgers Not Latinos

One fundamental principle of media education is that all media is constructed. Let me put it this way. How many of you have ever played with Legos? When you opened up the box were they already put together for you? Did you always put them together the same way?

Well, think of media in the same way. All media – movies, news, a magazine ad, a TV commercial, a billboard or a web page – is constructed. There is not a wide-angle lens on the world where information comes to us unfiltered. Someone determines what we see, when we see it and how we see it, when it comes to commercial media.

This is most definitely the case when it comes to entertainment media and advertising. Entertainment media is all highly constructed and scripted, nothing is left to chance. However, news media can also be highly constructed. Ask yourself if you have ever been interviewed by the news media? How long did they talk to you and how much of what you said was actually used in the news story? Reporters don’t ask you which of your comments you want them to use, they decide on which words to use and how to use them.

In addition, news can be constructed based upon where the story is place in the newspaper or which story is the lead story on the 6 o’clock news. What is placed on the front-page communicates importance. Newspaper editors will tell you that a front-page story has more value that a story on page 8. This was reflected several times in the Grand Rapids Press in early April when the Press decided that a ridiculously large burger that the local baseball park would be selling this year was more important that anything else that was going on in the community.

Besides placement of a story, the other major factor is just determining what is even newsworthy that day. For example, in during Spring Break this year I had the fortune of being part of a youth media project with Latino students from the Grand Rapids area. They were learning about the importance of healthy relationships and how to prevent sexual and domestic violence.

After engaging is several exercises and lots of discussion about these issues the students then produced their own media in order to communicate the importance of what they were learning. They created a Facebook page, a MySPace page, news stories, skits, conducted interviews, created public service announcements, hosted a talk show and produced video profiles.

During the week the students invited the local news media on two different days to come and talk to them about this project. The Grand Rapids Press only sent a photographer, while WXMI 17 was the only news outlet to send a reporter. On Friday, April 10 the Press ran a very small picture with a brief caption. That same day the GR Press found it more important to have an article devoted to a local student who was participating in an American Idol contest. Apparently self-indulgent youth seeking to make a name for themselves are more important that local youth who are trying to improve themselves and the community. I also couldn’t help but notice that the American Idol student was White, while all the Yo Puedo students were Latinos.

This example of excluding minorities from the news is not new, particularly if it is a story that is not crime based. GRIID has conducted years of local news monitoring projects and the conclusions have all been consisted. Most local news stories feature White people throughout the community, even at higher percentages of the White census population. The only types of stories that minorities are represented in at a high percentage than the census population are crime stories. With crime stories, Blacks and Latinos are always represented as suspects in greater number than they are as positive agents in the community.

This disproportionately high representation of minorities in crime stories and limited representation in stories that deal with economics, education, health care or the environment has tremendous power to influence public perception. If the public rarely sees Latinos as agents of change in the community this will only feed into the discriminatory policies and practices that society will impose on people they do not know. This racial representation in local news coverage in the end becomes a form of racial profiling. The news agencies are profiling minorities disproportionate as criminals, similar to the way that police departments do.

Another recent example of how news agencies engage in racial profile was the complete lack of coverage of one of the best living Latin American poets. Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaragua poet was in Grand Rapids from April 8 – 13^th and read his poetry on two separate occasions, readings that were organized by GVSU.

Cardenal has written dozens of books of poetry, several books of essays and a recent book of his memoirs. Cardenal is also an ordained Catholic priest who was part of the Sandinista Revolution in the 1970s. After the Sandinistas overthrew the US backed dictatorship of Somoza in 1979, Cardenal became a part of the Sandinista government, where he was the Minister of Culture for several years.

The 1970s and 80s was a period when Liberation Theology was prominent through much of the Third World, particularly in Latin America. Cardenal was an advocate of Liberation Theology and was the target of significant criticism by the Pope. In the early 80s when the Pope came to Nicaragua, Cardenal greeted him at the airport. Instead of embracing Cardenal the Pope chastised him verbally and wagged his finger telling him to stay out of politics.

In addition to being a poet, priest and revolutionary Cardenal was one of the founders of a Christian base community on the Nicaraguan island of Solentiname, a community that still exists to this day. One would think that with such a prolific writer, a religious and controversial figure that the local media would have jumped on the chance to report on Cardenal’s visit to Grand Rapids. Apparently, Obama’s new dog and local road construction were more newsworthy.

Jeff Smith does media education and was influenced by a 1982 debate between Ernesto Cardenal and Dan Berrigan on the subject of revolutionary violence and non-violence.