Live notes from Otto Santa Ana’s talk “Contemporary Network Television News Reporting About Latinos: Successes, Failures, and a Range of Proposals to Correct Its Limitations.” All errors by natematias and schock.
Event link: http://cms.mit.edu/events/talks.php#020812
Live notes link: http://brownbag.me:9001/p/otto
“Otto Santa Anna presents findings from his forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Network News (Texas). In it he elaborates standard cognitive metaphor analysis (as is used for printed texts), blending cognitive science with humanist scholarship, to attempt to capture the full semiotic range of televised reporting. His review of a full year of contemporary network news stories about Latinos reveals both the high production values and journalistic limitations of network reporting. This critical semiotic analysis offers an explanation about how news viewers construct partial understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. At the end of this talk he offers a range of recommendations, from modest to radical, to address these limitations.
Otto Santa Ana, UCLA Associate Professor, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania. Santa Ana’s scholarship has focused on language that constructs social hierarchies, particularly how the mass media reinforce unjust inequity in their representations of Latinos. His first book, Brown Tide Rising (2002) offered a close study of newspapers. The American Political Science Association named it Book of the Year on Ethnic and Racial Political Ideology. Santa Ana has now extended his research to multi-modal mass media. His forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: The Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Evening News, (University of Texas Press) analyzes a year of network news imaging of Latinos. He maps out an explicit procedure by which news consumers build their understandings out of the multimodal stimuli of television news stories using recent cognitive science scholarship (Lakoff, Fauconnier) as well as humanist theories (Foucault, Calvin McGee, Barthes, Hadyen White) to explain how news viewers construct their skewed understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. Throughout the book, Santa Ana offers explicit suggestions to television news professionals.”
Otto Santa Ana is a professor in Chicano/Chicana studies at UCLA and has a background in linguistics. He argues that the social hierarchies that get repeated in television audiences, news, and print media are deeply structured in ways that often work against good reporting. He is also doing work on mass mediated political humor.
He begins by thanking CMS for the invitation, and with humor: a screen shot of ‘the juan percent,’ a poster making fun of Mitt Romney (check out @mexicanmitt).
Part One: Why Does Otto’s Abuela hate the evening news?
Otto’s Abuela (grandmother) hates the evening news. Why is that? To find out, he conducted a five year study of network news, conducted close reading of selected stories, and developed a theory for how people extract meaning from multimodal signs presented in television news (the text, the audio, the clips, etc). Drawing from that analysis, Santa Ana develops suggestions for how media can change.
Santa Ana sampled 12,140 news stories from half hour evening news shows during the entire year (365 days) of 2004, from ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN. Fox News didn’t offer access to their material. General news across 2004 were about war and politics, followed by a long tail of other national concerns. Of the television news stories they sampled, less than one percent were Latino-focused stories (only 96). This ratio (1:100) has remained unchanged for 20 years. Overall, his team found that there are few stories about Latinos, and that when there are, the topic areas are very skewed. Specifically, stories dealing with immigration, or with dead or injured Latinos, were popular. Latinos+mayhem was a ‘good story.’
Santa Ana thinks we should do more than just encourage newsrooms to shift priorities. Instead, we should increase the number of stories featuring Latinos. Why might there be so few? Newsrooms may be indifferent to Latinos, often thinking that Latino stories aren’t newsworthy. Another reason might be ignorance. Many news stories simply replay stereotypes, passing on incorrect information. Otto sent his students to the archives to find stories that COULD have been framed as Latino stories, related to the 17% of the general population that identifies as Latino. They came back early; the stories simply weren’t there. At this point, Otto presented a clip from an NBC news brief, then provided a frame analysis: For example, the reporter talks about Hispanics as “taking” rather than “finding” jobs, all Latinos are conflated (new immigrants and those who have deep roots here are not differentiated), and so on. In comparison, Otto then showed us an article from the Wall Street Journal, which was more careful to define its terms and clarify the issues.
Part 2: Research Methods
The next section was about Santa Ana’s research methods: social semiotics, multimodal metaphor analysis, and narrative analysis.
Otto showed us CBS footage from the indictment of Jose Padilla on suspicion of plans to set off a dirty bomb (an allegation that was later dropped, along with most of the original charges). He then analyzed the clip: rich story, high production values, poor journalism: a minimal verbal description of the allegations, visual reinforcement of the government claims, which are taken as fact. The clip presents the government source as an authority but it fails to portray Padilla’s attorneys. A rotating red globe blinks “terror threat” throughout the story. There is a visual merging that fades between Padilla and co-defendant Kifah Jayyousi, The basic message of this story is that Padilla is a gang member turned terrorist. Furthermore, the story glossed over the fact that he was being denied habeas corpus by saying that the Justice Department didn’t know what to do with him yet.
As an overview of the semiotic readings of the stories, his team found that the networks are uneven, and continue to use stereotypes, except when Latinos provide their own media images – for example, the trailer for “A Day Without a Mexican” was widely used and recirculated.
Part 3: Cognitive Processing of Multimodal Metaphors.
Following Lakoff, the claim is that metaphors organize our understanding of reality; we can use this to understand how the news acts on us via visual metaphor. We understand the world not in terms of logic, but through mapping semantic structure of concepts we think we understand and applying them to new information. “We use the familiar to ‘get a handle on’ the target.” A metaphor takes things we understand and maps their structure and relations onto an abstract notion. We tend to grab onto metaphors and believe that we understand something complex– love for example. We might not understand it, but we *think* we do. Key point: “Hegemonic common sense as a social operation is sustained through the cognitive operation of metaphor analysis”
In another study, Santa Ana mapped out 814 immigrant metaphors in 20 network news immigration stories. Positive metaphors related to people, victims, and workers. Neutral metaphors included impoverished, diverse, dying. Negative ones had to do with masses, animals, and criminals. This type of analysis is often done with text, but it’s much more difficult with visual metaphors – including key elements such as captions, images, graphcs, and juxtapositions. The method involved individual and small group coding, followed by conversation of the coding team and group consensus on visual metaphors.
If you look across platforms, metaphors have differential frequency. Most of the news stories about immigrants included visual metaphors. The most positive ones were often in text, while the visible ones, often the most powerful, were predominantly negative (immigrant as criminal). To provide an example, Santa Ana then dissected another short news clip. The text spoke of “illegal immigrants” and “undocumented immigrants.” The background music was in the style of police dramas. The 6 visual metaphors included a police tape, people behind chainlink fence, and people being frisked. The ratio of metaphors having to do with criminals on one side and immigrant on the other was 12:1. Of the two spoken metaphors, 1 was undocumented and the other was criminal.
In a visual centric society, the visual dominates. Otto modeled this with a system of scoring salience of metaphors: one unit for a spoken metaphor, two for text, and three for each visual metaphor. As an example, based on this model, he shows a weighted visual dispay of the salience of metaphors, and ‘criminal’ clearly dominates. Far more than the metaphor of ‘worker,’ which has a much more positive valence.
Extracting ‘informal scenarios’ from the dominant metaphors
After Santa Ana collected this data, his team created stories which model the data. In other words, they extracted master narratives from the dominant metaphors. The resulting scenario was one in which immigrants are inherently criminal, who are destructive and immoral, in contrast with upright and law-abiding. This is worrying and racist discourse. The ontology of immigrant as criminal sustains and legitimizes practices of power and domination. How do we understand these multimodal metaphors which come to us as text, voice, and image? Santa Ana proposes ‘multimodal cognitive blending’ to map multiple sources on to a single target domain.
At this point, Santa Ana directed us to a handout to lead us through different approaches to interpreting these metaphors. In the first stage, our brain blends metaphors into something like “immigrant as criminal.” We then filter this through pragmatic principles, as we add new information and judge its relevance. Finally, there is a norming stage, where we evaluate the information in terms of how we respond to a given genre and related social norms. He proposes that we can develop metrics that weight likely/unlikely readings based on the metaphors used in the media/text. Using the example, we arrive at a dominant normative reading: For many people, these norms influence people to read national interest over human rights, crime deterrence over sympathy for individuals, and national politics over objectivity.
Ideographs are shorthand tools for power. These words reinforce a particular political view, justify political action, and reinforce our political ideologies. They are keywords, or condensed forms of the norm.
Lakoff and others argue that metaphors invoke entire narratives. Barthes’ approached this in term of the theory of myth: a subset of signs that function as ‘repositories for rarified meaning.’ Myths establish meaning by evaporating and condensing meaning down to the core. Myth is not learned as a complete story, so news readers recall the larger narrative simply through key terms that invoke them, without necessarily recalling or even having read/engaged with the ‘original’ text. A minimal reference amplifies a full story type (Barthes, van Leeuwen, Northrop Frye). News stories act as this type of myth. A single fragment can invoke a full emotional resonance. The full structure of the myth is often hidden in the broader political discourse. Often, people can become offended when the entire myth is exposed, because they don’t quite think of it that way.
What myths do immigration stories fit into? Otto thinks it’s the Western. You have the lawman and the bandit (the immigrant). The story has two conflicts. The immigrants are in conflict with nature. But there’s also a narrative of conflict between the government (in the character of the president) and the immigrants. The police and border patrol officers are the heroes. Of all the story-types his team evaluated, only one cast the immigrant as protagonist. The immigrant as Voyager. The genre: feminine voyage, where the protaganist learns about herself by sacrificing her illusions. This is juxtaposed with the Western narrative.
Part IV: recommendations
Santa Ana argues that modest proposals of change are irrelevant. Instead, we need a wider change: swap out journalistic criteria for excellence for narrative-based criteria. But, he’s not optimistic: it’s anathema to the values of corporate journalism. So, it’s up to us: focus on innovation and creativity and remediate news stories. The student examples he showed compiled a wide range of footage from the Mayday 2007 LAPD attack on immigrant rights protesters in Macarthur park, linking TV clips, google Earth, and footage from the ground, in a Knight News Challenge proposal for “Global Positioning News Service.” The project goal was to aggregate all video from an event, geolocate it, and provide an interface for people to explore news events from multiple camera perspectives.
Ultimately, Santa Ana wants to teach the power of news media to a new generation and create alternatives that can be remediated.
Questions:
William Urrichio: the trick is how to convert people to be more active readers. One of the great problems TV has, is what’s visualizable. News producers, when you ask them ‘why aren’t you covering the economy,’ they say it’s hard to show. Similarly, they have an iconography of the criminal that they can apply to ‘the immigrant.’ So how do we create alternative iconographies? The second question is about the context of reception. People will say that their personal relationships modify the way that they encounter news texts. So how do we problematize reception? Third: what about context? You didn’t have access to Fox. Local news came up once, it must be a very different space for representations. Latinos are distinctive in US Broadcasting because there are robust broadcast national forms. While it may not be the case for African Americans. Does this ‘let TV stations off the hook?’ because they feel they don’t need to address a community that is already served?
Santa Ana: I’m most concerned about the people who live in the Macarthur Park area. Recognizing themselves, and being able to tell their own stories of what took place. This project, called the ‘Media Melee’ project, is focused on those voices. In terms of what’s visualizable, we looked at a range of stories and many did visualize health, welfare, life and society. Print media brings in an individual to tell the story. The network news does this but rarely follows through. If it follows through, for example Sabina Estrada from Michoacan but who hasn’t seen her husband for 10 years, who works as a gardner in LA, that was an interesting story with rich subjectivity. In stories on economics, people would come away with richer stories. Regarding ideographs, McGee did focus on liberty, bill o frights, things like that. I found it more compelling to focus on terms that have powerful metaphors associated with them. We see powerful differences, for example in the use of partisan terms ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented;’ journalists need to recognize this and look for a middle ground. They rarely do that. I proposed “unauthorized.” These terms are partisan and are always galvanizing. There’s an overlap between conceptual metaphors and ideographs. Barthes would write a book about 5 metaphors, we are doing 26.
Fox: denotative and connotative meaning, that type of understanding often constitutes aversive racism: ‘i think i understand what’s going on through my experience.’ In other words, personal experience masks an approach to understanding broader or systematic racism. Much of this takes place unconsciously. This is different than recognizing a persuasive argument. The question is about what you’ve previously called ‘insurgent metaphors,’ in Brown Tide Rising. Have you done research on the efficacy of these insurgent metaphors, in light of hegemony? Is it throwing a stone against the wall? Creating new insurgent metaphors is a great starting point for replacing repressive metaphors, but how can we make them more powerful?
Sasha: Thanks for a really interesting talk. I like the GPNS and helped compile footage from many different videographers, and provided a copy to the students working on the project as well as to the ‘We’re Still Here’ documentary team and to the legal team. I think it’s important not to focus on tools or platforms: social movements generate alternate frames and narratives across every platform they have access to, in processes of transmedia activism. Sometimes it can happen very rapidly, as in the case of the Occupy Movement, which has been able to put inequality back into the realm of accesptable political discourse. But it usually takes a long time – decades – as movement actors make media in every way they possibly can. Regarding the Macarthur Park example, I and many others were actually surprised when the evening news gave so much coverage to the police brutality. It’s because so many reporters from the mass media were harmed – there’s a Fox news reporter, married to an LAPD, who was hit, and her camerawoman had her wrist broken; there were several others hurt or arrested. So Fox News that night looked like the front page of Indymedia. It was wall to wall clips of police attacking innocent people. Perhaps this is a counterfactual example that proves the case of the normal narrative of protest policing?
Santa Ana: It’s true that for the first 24 hours you had that kind of coverage. Reporters were asking what happened, because reporters were attacked. But unfortunately soon after that the standard narrative began to reassert itself. Within a few days it was back to the story of police as the agents of social order. Even later, when the LAPD’s own commission found wrongdoing, and when the 13 million dollar lawsuit against the LAPD went through, and the judge ruled on the case, even though much of the money didn’t make it into the hands of the people who were attacked, the master narrative reasserted itself. And it was a national story.
Sasha: So we won the legal victories but lost the frame war.
Santa Ana: Yes.
Molly: I’m looking at how does the myth of the middle class male hacker in the basement, who is a superuser, is a myth that’s used to generate legislation that breaks the net.
Santa Ana: That seems very true. I haven’t looked at this area myself but it’s really interesting.
Rogelio: Your work on Brown Tide Rising, and looking at Prop 187, you looked at metaphor within legislation. Are you doing that in your next work?
Otto: I’m focusing on the political humor at the moment. DREAM Act work would be really important, as an avenue to explore this. Four years ago I had an undergraduate group looking at legislative languages versus media language on the marches. We looked at Senate testimony and Congressional records. It was striking how different the discourses were. The student I worked with most closely took this work with them to Sacramento. The attorneys use the term ‘Alien,’ using old English law. The term ‘illegal’ is primary among those who want more restrictive policy. Undocumented was used sparingly at best in the Congressional record. The older terms such as ‘Subject’ in the sense of British subjects popped up.
Jim Paradis:Thank you. We were talking earlier about the distributed nature of some of these phenomenon. I’m thinking about agency in news. Myths are carried both by the generators and the receivers. You and Rogelio were talking about legalistic sources of language. News is incredibly complex, it’s generated at many different levels. We focus on the talking head, but there’s a vast apparatus behind the head. Have you connected with that apparatus, seen the dark matter that’s infuencing the way the news gets created. There’s something about how legal thinking generates certain terms: criminal, illegal, etc. How much does the legal industry feed the process by which people create news stories? Or to what degree is it the project managers and editors? Are there approaches to these areas?
Otto: Another question that’s very embedded in an anaysis further than what I talk about. I have friends who are journalists. I’m working with the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and advocacy group trying to work on representation of Latinos and racism in newsrooms across the country. The socialization process of journalism is insular, and the ethos of a journalist inhibits interaction beyond a certain pale. Colleen Carter wrote an article that’s a marvelous ethnography; she’s a journalist who became a professor and a linguist. The social process is an extended apprenticeship with elders, and they teach you the ethos of journalism. When you violate that, you’re scorned and criticized, as she was. It’s very restrictive, and gives me little reason to hope that we’ll be able to change that culture. Classics from the 1960s all talk about the same kinds of socialization processes.
Kellian: Back to your point that we all acknowledge we’re creating myths. I work on 19th century journalism in Latin America. You could argue that in the history of journalism there were paradigms other than ‘objectivity.’ There have been other ways of thinking about writing news. Digital media is arguably shifting away from objectivity toward the idea that the perspecive of the writer is more important. Some of the ideas that disappeared with journalistic objectivity are coming back in. My questions: you focused on the visual, perhaps that is based on the ethos of objectivity? Is that intentional? Part two is, I’m familiar with the changes in the digital, but less so in TV. Have you seen any shift? Is it really so difficult to move towards having people recognize that there’s storytelling? Is TV news shifting based on the shifts in online news?
Otto: what we do is chop up al the images. We take out all the heads and the framing, cut up the sequence. You have multiple shots / perspective. All the shots that take place from one geographic standpoint are strung together. A person can see the clips from multiple perspectives. We have 5 stories being told with this data, and you get to see all of them. Not so much objectivity as inclusivity. As for changes, I can’t speak to that. I stopped watching news to write the book. I asked for an office with no windows so that I could write my book. For the last two years, I haven’t looked at the news at all. I know there have been significant changes; there is a lot of effort to try to tweak things. But I haven’t looked at it systematically.
Q: I just wonder if there’s a kind of opening towards understanding the role of the writer or newscaster in creating the story.
Sonny: I spent time in 07 and 08 observing production practices of CBS news just before broadcast. They work right up til the last minute, even things that we might assume are set in stone. I wonder if some of the visual tropes they’re using, that come from stock archives and databases – are they motivated by the compressed production schedule? Maybe we could audit the tagging procedures, and have some new stock imagery instead of the standard spinning threat globe every time. On to the question: doesn’t ‘narrative taking hold’ just mean repetition? Do we have to teach narrative as well as myth? Teach them that repetition isn’t really a story, that’s mythmaking. How can journalists give consumers a sense of the arc of the story?
Otto: great questions. It would be wonderful if there were a greater effort to focus on this. We’re often talking about 2.5 minute stories; there’s lots of room for alternative stories. What I’m doing with the 22 stories is quoting them in terms of myth and in terms of narrative. The format of the arc is very short, with rare exceptions. As to the newsroom challenges, you’re in a better position to answer than I. Would it be possible for alternative framings to be set up? The producer determines how to stack the stories, what will be the best lead; i think creating alternative narratives can be addressed. I’d love to talk to you more about the tagging of stock images. There are certainly alternative sets of cataloging. I saw three of the news networks use the same peice of footage of the ‘dead immigrant in the desert.’ People die every day in the desert, but they all use the same stock image.
Molly: they all have the overweight hacker in the basement.
Nathan: Thanks for a fascinating talk. There are three kinds of recommendations I got: one was change the narratives and myths. Another was the diversity of topics people were covering. If all the news covers is immigration and border, have we improved? And the third was, increase the number of stories. Do you think that if newsrooms covered more stories, we’d have a greater diversity of narratives?
Otto: the answer to the empirical question is no. There was a bulletin put out seven years ago, three of the networks signed it. They put more good looking latinos in front of the camera. They increased employment (although they were then fired). There was no change in the number of news stories. The decision is made by the news director. The stacking process and decisions are made earlier in the day, and things fall into place. The National Hispanic Media Coalition put out a briefing: you didn’t follow the MOU. Of course the networks didn’t pick it up. Thank you all, this is marvelous.