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April 2010 Anthropology News

ANTHROPOLOGY AND JOURNALISM

Anthropology has long had a complex relationship with news media. Increasing collaboration between anthropologists and print, broadcast or online journalists offers great potential for making our work more accessible, as well as boosting public understanding of and engagement with anthropological research findings and perspectives. However, it also poses challenges in balancing the goals, priorities, timelines and communication styles of journalism and anthropology, which have distinct methodological, ethical, theoretical and expository traditions.

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Anthropological Engagement with News Media

Why Now?
S Elizabeth Bird U South Florida Perhaps there was a time when we anthropologists could do our jobs without serious consideration of the media. In small, isolated communities, dependent on interpersonal relationships, the narratives that mattered were sacred myths and accumulated wisdom. The arrival of mass media into such communities was viewed with interest but not a little horror, conceptualized as representing a corrupting, alien force that would change culture forever, and not for the better. Serious anthropological engagement with media, especially in our own society, was long rare and discouragedand in some quarters still is. I was reminded of that about five years ago, when a co-author and I submitted a paper to a well-known anthropology journal. It was an interpretation of a popular film, drawing on ideas from visual anthropology and cultural media studies. After a long wait, we received a brief, vitriolic response from the editor, dismissing our work as hopelessly ignorant and lazy, and declining to address the paper at all. Anthropologists, we were informed, study ethnographic film, not popular media, and they do not do content analysis. Ethnographic work on the effects of media might be acceptable, but the narratives of popular media are of no interest. I tell this tale not from bitterness (the paper was quickly published elsewhere), but to offer a small illustration of our disciplines traditional reluctance to engage with the narratives that increasingly have come to construct the world, not just in the west but globally. This reluctance is certainly changing, but even so, the main focus of anthropological work on media has been on entertainment genres, whether on the global reach of Hollywood, the role of television in family life, or the maintenance of diaspora connections through digital media. News and journalism have been relatively neglected. For instance, in the introduction to The Anthropology of Media (2002), Kelly Askew explains why anthropologists must become more knowledgeable about media: CNN, Hollywood, MTV, and other global media now present and represent cultures to the majority of the world. Yet it is striking that none of the essays in the collection address news or journalism, except peripherally. This neglect is important because news is the one popular genre that claims to describe reality for the public. And in spite of the fact that almost everyone denies they are influenced by the media (although others are!), today most of what people know about the world is mediated in one way or another. As the late Roger Silverstone wrote in his final book, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (2007), the news media both construct a world, and are constructed within and by that world. And of course the world is plural not singular. The world as it appears on Al Arabya is different from that on CNN. For anthropologists, steeped in the notion of ethnographies as narrative constructions, this should be an obvious point, and yet often we dont act as if it is. We develop sophisticated critiques of our own ethnographic narratives, but rarely treat news accounts in the same way. a range of interesting, anthropological questions. As Silverstones characterization suggests, key issues cluster around the nature of the narratives that become news. This question is not primarily about accuracy or truth, both of which can be argued about forever, as anyone who has actually participated in an event covered by the news can attest. The interesting questions are different: Which stories are being told and which are not? Whose stories are being told, whose are not, and why? How do journalistic routines and values vary across cultural contexts, and how does that produce different kinds of news? How does the choice of images take the story in one direction or another? How does the story then become part of the common-sense reality in specific cultural contexts? High profile issues like war illustrate these questions dramatically. We all know, for instance, that the story of the Iraq war is deeply contested. If we have a lot of time, we can scour the Internet, sift through multiple accounts, and reach a conclusion. Most people have neither the time nor the resources to do that; they have little choice but to attend to the stories that predominate. It matters how CNN (or Fox, or the BBC, or Al-Jazeera) frames the narrative, because those stories are the tools from which we construct opinions and action. Throughout the world, people argue, fight and die for stories in which they believe. So tries, even in nations that ostensibly supported the war, the story was framed in distinct ways; audiences in the United Kingdom, for example, saw many more images of dead children and civilian damage, which helped frame the discourse very differently.
Opportunities for Engagement

C O M M E N TA RY Vital Questions

I believe the time is right for more anthropologists to engage with news mediawith their creation, reception and (yes) content although such engagement may take different forms. For some of us, the news media are a subject of study in their own right, posing

it is important to dissect and interpret them: the use of language, the choice of words, the images, the entire frame of the news coverage. For instance, in the early years of the Iraq war, the US press presented a sanitized narrative of a hightech, liberating operation with little collateral damage. In other coun-

Even in a field already occupied by media scholars from other disciplines, anthropologists have much to offer, especially in terms of crosscultural difference. Occasionally, anthropologists have touched on these questions. Two decades ago, Conrad Kottak (Prime Time Society, 1990) contrasted television news in Brazil with news in the United States. He showed how both focus on civics, the nationstate and international affairs, but that the balance is different and culturally specific for each. He also identified a particular theme in Brazilian news: stories about the United States that focus on some unwelcome aspect of technology in US society, such as reproductive technologies. He argued that this theme confirms Brazilian stereotypes of US society as technologically advanced but lacking in humanity. He didnt go on to ask why these stories are structured in this way, and what that might tell us about Brazilian world views and senses of cultural identity, but these issues are ripe for deeper anthropological analysis. Ethnographies of journalism and news reception are rare partly because the very pervasiveness of news makes them hard to do, but anthropologists are well positioned to try. Even those anthropologists not interested in media as a primary focus of study could profit from a more sophisticated understanding of the framing power of news. Many of us work on pressing social See Engagement on page 9

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April 2010 Anthropology News orientation of most journalism, then we could actually see our apparent irrelevance to news media as a sign that we are doing what we do well. Im not suggesting that we shouldnt continue to explore new ways of engaging news journalism and to experiment with fast-time communication across a variety of old and new media. But I dont think we should convince ourselves that these experiments will radically improve the public visibility of anthropology or that they will quiet our inner doubts about what makes the anthropological voice a distinctive presence in the choir of public debate. As for our current relationship with news journalism, I think it is a productive division of labor, one in which the informational overload, sound-bites and fast-time intensity of contemporary news media make the kind of detail-oriented slow-time work we do all the more vital. Dominic Boyer is associate professor of anthropology at Rice University and visiting professor at the Goethe Universitt Frankfurt. He has done fieldwork with German news journalists since 1996 and is currently writing a book on the transformation of news journalism in the era of digital information and communication technology. opportunity. The journalists scramble to observe people firsthand and to describe both ordinary and extraordinary events in ways that illuminate larger issues is the closest of any mainstream media endeavor to ethnographic practice. A more nuanced awareness of potential points of contact can lead to more powerful ethnographic writing, more informative journalism, and productive collaborations between social scientists and others who seek to describe the human condition. Maria D Vesperi is professor of anthropology at New College of Florida, Poynter Institute trustee and former St Petersburg Times reporter and editorial writer. Her publications include Anthropology off the Shelf (2009), edited with A Waterston, and When Common Sense No Longer Holds in The Anthropology of News and Journalism (E Bird, ed, 2009).

New Delhi and to other Indian metropolitan areas. Like ethnography, reporting is inefficient. Dozens of pages of interviews, notes and background materials will be boiled down to a single 500-word story. Ethnographers may accumulate enough field notes, interviews and other materials to fill boxes, yet they will write only a few articles and perhaps a book. Finally, for anthropologists unhappy with the word fiction, the trope of journalism recognizes a distinction between the practice of reporting (getting and assembling facts, interviews and background materials) and writing (preparing a structured narrative account of the people and events to which these materials refer). Extending this distinction allows anthropologists to restore the empiricism of the practice of ethnography while acknowledging the constructed nature of the ethnography as a written document. Since Geertzs introduction of fiction as a trope for ethnography, and his call to attend to the fact that whatever else they may be anthropologists are writers, a good deal of anthropological writing has become more engaging. Foregrounding thick description of people, their artifacts and their dialogue, this writing is often much like the New Journalism of the 1960s and 70s or the enterprise reporting of the 1980s and 90s. I find comparisons between journalism and ethnography to be particularly useful in undergraduate teaching, where many students find themselves struggling to overcome the absolute separation of fact and fiction drilled into them as part of their junior high school curriculum. Indeed, problematizing the notions of fact and fiction, and of objectivity and bias, are important lessons students can carry with them far beyond the anthropology classroom. Mark Allen Peterson is associate professor of anthropology at Miami University. He is the author of Anthropology and Mass Communication (Berghahn 2003) and co-author of International Studies (Westview 2008). His book Connected in Cairo is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. In 198789 and 199497 he was a journalist in Washington DC.

continued from page 5 issues such as poverty, health disparities, education, migration, disasters and more, in our home countries and elsewhere. All these issues are defined by media; news shapes reality into acceptable stories that foreground some concerns and dismiss others. Its very clear, for instance, that news stories tend to present issues as stories about individual experiences, rather than about systematic failures. How the public responds to key social issues is intimately connected to how they learn about them through the media. Yet although it is quite common for anthropologists to rather unproblematically use newspaper archives to trace local events and histories, it is much less common for them to do careful media content analysis to develop a picture of how issues are framed for the public. The inclusion of media content analysis in multi-sited ethnographies grows ever more crucial. Anthropologists came late to the field of media studies, and even later to the study of news and journalism, but we still have an opportunity to pursue serious engagement today. Like ethnography, journalism creates narratives about reality; others in this commentary series address the complicated ways in which the two endeavors are both alike and different. Journalists must write at a speed most of us would find terrifying, and by necessity they draw on familiar formulae and established conventions, such as emphasis on conflict, timeliness and the out-of-ordinary. If we understand better how journalism works, not only will we better understand our mediated global cultures, but we will also become more adept at working with journalists to tell anthropologys stories more effectively. S Elizabeth Bird is professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida. She is the author of For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids; The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World; and the new edited collection The Anthropology of News and Journalism (Indiana U Press).

Engagement

Division of Labor
continued from page 6 decisions about the relevance and expression of information are made within seconds. News journalists would be the first to tell us: news journalism has become informationally overloaded and treadmill-like in the digital era and thus often relatively inattentive to forms of knowledge circulating outside its core conduits. Anthropological ethnography, like a great many other potential sources for journalistic representation, exists on the margins of the journalistic imagination today not because its virtues are unappreciated, but because it is felt to be too detailed and context-sensitive to operate efficiently within contemporary news cycles. This is a loss for news media and public culture, we are right to feel, but I dont think we should view this as a sign of the irrelevance of anthropological knowledge. Put another way, why not be happy that a craft of slow-time translocal epistemic work continues to exist, indeed to thrive, next to the fast-time circuits of news journalism? If what makes the analytical and representational methods of our craft distinctive is precisely that they do not conform to the temporality and bare-facts-

continued from page 7 to understand how news is actually produced. Media is often a conflated reference to fictional representation through films, broadcast entertainment and advertising, rarely specific to the craft of news gathering and reporting. Journalism is different from other forms of cultural production, and content analyses of newspapers and magazines cant get at an individual reporters intentions and goals. Barry Dornfelds Producing Public Television (1998) is among the rare book-length, participantobservation-based efforts to treat the production of popular non-fiction. Until recently, journalism has been largely ignored by anthropological researchersa missed

Differences