Media Effects Article Response

Media Effects

Some Dared Call it Torture A comment on the article by Charles M. Rowling, Timothy M. Jones, & Penelope Sheets

Nicole DiCenso October 22, 2014

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The article, “Some Dared Call it Torture” discusses the theme of disagreement regarding the processes by which news coverage aligns with the communications of political leaders (p.

1043). More specifically, the research in this article focuses in on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of 2004. After the news of this event broke, United States journalists labeled the scandal as “acts of abuse” rather than torture (p. 1043). The authors of this article, Charles M. Rowling, Timothy M. Jones, and Penelope Sheets identify what they believe to be the cause of this phrasing, the Bush administration framing the matter to their advantage and other political members not challenging the remarks. Throughout their research piece, the authors further delve into the causes of this trend. First they examined whether the White House did or did not label the acts of abuse. Next they examined whether the label was ever challenged by the Democratic Party.

Lastly they examined how serious and widespread the actions were conveyed to be and whether the US core values were questioned (p. 1044). Before discussing their findings, Rowling, Jones, and Sheets introduce their readers to the terms that help support their discoveries.

The most prominent terms in this article are indexing, cascading activation, and cultural resonance. “Journalists, in covering an issue, ‘index’ the range of opinion allowed in news columns to that expressed by official sources” (p. 1044). Essentially, journalists decide what to present and what to keep quiet about based on who and where their information is coming from.

Going along with indexing, framing is “to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, casual interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (p. 1045).

To frame a story is to realign the general concept in order to distort it into what you want to be presented. Additionally to indexing, cascading activation is a major theme in this article’s research. Cascading activation is a model that “portrays a framing hierarchy in public discourse”

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(p. 1045). It begins with the executive branch on top, followed by congress, then policy experts, ex-government officials, and finally the press (with the general press as a dependent variable).

This model argues that “frames that originate at the highest level have the greatest potential to control broader public debate and opinion” (p. 1045). The executive branch views and opinions will then trickle down the rest of the hierarchy. Finally, the authors discuss the term cultural resonance which they say is the “key determinant of whether, to what extent, and what kind of frame contestation with emerge in political and news discourses” (p. 1045). “Culturally resonant frames are messages that are especially attuned to the cultural schemas habitually used by large numbers of citizens to process information” (p. 1045). The authors also offer the three main pieces of cultural resonance that pertain to social identity: minimization, disassociation, and reaffirmation. Minimization is downplaying the seriousness and/or the scope of an unusual behavior and characterizing it as either an isolated incident or placing the blame on the actions of a few but not the whole. Disassociation is the act of taking measures to removes those who commit the deviant act from the groups. Lastly, reaffirmation is “shifting attention away from the deviant behavior toward events that portray the group in a more positive light” (p. 1047). After establishing the terms that support their research, the authors of this article present their hypotheses and the methodology they used to reach their conclusions.

The three hypotheses the authors use to conduct their research are as follows: 1) White House and military officials will consistently and broadly emphasize these national identity themes throughout the period in which the scandal dominated political and news discourse; 2) Congressional Democrats will offer significant challenges to minimization, disassociation, and reaffirmation frames articulated by the administration; and 3) the US news media will largely echo rather than challenge the minimization, disassociation, and reaffirmation frames offered by

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the Bush administration (p. 1048-1050). In order to prove their hypotheses, the researchers conducted three analyses. The first was to read through coded speeches, interviews, press conferences, and press releases by members of the White House and the US military between the time the Abu Ghraib photos were released and the day after (p. 1050). Total, they looked at 113 texts from four different sources. For each text, they counted the number of times the speaker used “torture,” “abuse,” “mistreatment,” or “scandal,” to describe Abu Ghraib while also examining whether the speaker emphasized minimization, disassociation, and reaffirmation within a communication (p. 1050). The second method the researchers used to conduct their analysis was to examine an additional 287 texts; however, these were drawn from statements made by Senate and House members on the floor of Congress (p. 1050). The search terms and time periods were the same, as well as the specific content that they were looking for. The final analysis was of the news coverage of the event, specifically on CBS News and in the Washington post, again with the same parameters. After coding through all of these texts and sources, the researchers were able to evaluate their results based on the three goals they had when beginning this study which were to: identify the primary sources that journalists drew upon when covering the scandal, determine whether patterns emerged across types of sources in the emphasis on identity-related themes in messages about Abu Ghraib, and asses the valence of sources’ claims about the events (p. 1051).

The authors of this article calculated their results in two stages. In the first, they “documented that the abuse label dominated in US news coverage which they inferred was due to the word ‘torture’ being rarely employed by political leaders” (p. 1052). The term was almost completely absent from White House and Military discourse. However, torture appeared in about a third of Democratic speeches who wanted to show the Republicans in a bad light proving their

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first and second hypotheses. The second stage was to explore the extent to which minimization, disassociation, and reaffirmation frames were communicated by White House military officials, the degree to which these frames were contested or echoed by Congress, and whether or not press coverage mirrored the range of this disclosure (p. 1053). Without going into too much detail regarding the actual statistical results of this stage of the study, their research evidenced that their first hypothesis proved that minimization, disassociation, and reaffirmation frames were employed constantly; that the Republicans echoed the White House with low percentages of using harsher terminology when describing the Abu Ghraib scandal; that the Democrats would be more likely to contest minimization over disassociation and reaffirmation; and finally that the press selectively echoed the White House and largely excluded the Democrats, constantly publicizing and agreeing with the identity-protective frames employed by the administration (p.

1057). All in all, the research done by the authors of this article managed to prove all three of their initial hypotheses.

It is relatively difficult to argue with an article like this considering how concrete the evidence is. I find it astonishing yet entirely believable that the press would only mimic the ideas of those who had the most power rather than disseminating the wide range of views throughout the political scheme. As we discussed in class, it makes complete sense that journalists would use the same terminology as those in charge rather than diverge from it because they want to have the continuous support and inside scoop from officials. If they were to publish something that went against what those in power were saying, the journalists would be chastised and taken out of the loop. Is this ethical? I don’t think so. However, at this point in the game and considering the culture we live in, there is really no other way to go about it. Although I think people would still watch the news if they were getting both sides of a story instead of one that has been framed,

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news outlets wouldn’t last because they would stop getting stories to report on. One of my favorite pieces of outside sources I found when conducting my report on this article was a YouTube clip of an interview between former President George Bush and an Irish reporter. It was more difficult understanding the article and its research without seeing firsthand what they were actually talking about; this YouTube clip has George Bush using minimization, disassociation, and reaffirmation within the first 50 seconds. The main thing I learned from this piece is that if you want the real and true story, don’t trust your news outlets.