Making Distinctions: Murdoch, WikiLeaks, and DSK

Murdoch's News Corporation headquarters in New York with Fox News poster in the window © Mitchell Hall | Flickr

I did not have the time to prepare a post while teaching with Daniel Dayan “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” in Wroclaw, Poland. This was unfortunate because there were news events during the period of the course that seemed to be a series of case studies on our topic. As we were examining theoretical material, which illuminates the roles media play in such cases, media were playing important roles, from the Murdoch scandal, to the terrorist attack in Oslo. Today, I will reflect on Murdoch and, more broadly, the tasks of making distinctions and coming to actionable judgments in the media. Oslo will wait for another day. I draw on the ideas of Eviatar Zerubavel, a distinguished sociologist of cognition and student of Erving Goffman, to make sense of our ongoing seminar discussion and the debate between Daniel and me.

The Murdoch presence in America has long concerned me, particularly Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. While Fox is a strange mix of opinionated journalism and political mobilization instrument, as I have already examined here in an earlier post, the Journal has been a distinguished business newspaper with a conservative slant on the news, with the slant increasingly prevailing over the news in recent years with Murdoch’s ownership. I was struck by Joe Nocerra’s analysis in The New York Times. Concern with factual reality has diminished. Editors went beyond improving reporter’s copy from the stylistic point of view to ideological “improvement.” Political and business news reported was re-worked to confirm the political positions promoted on the editorial page. Note the problem in these cases is that strong distinctions between journalism as a vocation and other vocations are ignored became fuzzy, in the terms of Zerubavel.

Such willful ignorance is also present in The New York Post, another Murdoch enterprise that I see in my daily life. I read it only late at night, picking up a discarded copy on the train when I have . . .

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DC Week in Review: DSK and the Presumption of Guilt

Jeff

As I reported last week, Daniel Dayan and I had a nice lunch in Paris on the terrace of a little restaurant at the Palais Royal. He ate blood sausage. My wife, Naomi, and I had couscous with chicken. I followed Daniel’s recommendation and ordered mine with olives, a dish that was his grandmother’s specialty back in Morocco. We discussed what proved to be the theme of last week, looking at North Africa and the Middle East from the point of view of Europe. But of course, we couldn’t and didn’t ignore the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, then raging in Paris. The following evening, he extended his side of the conversation in a crisp essay, which we posted on Monday. Here I continue my side of the conversation.

My first response came in the form of an email I wrote him upon receiving his piece:

I don’t agree with you on all points, centered on two issues: the way the distinction between private and public moves (the most general issue), and how the presumption of innocence necessarily varies from one institutional sphere to the next, from the judiciary to the police to the press, for example. Consider the case of a child molester and how the presumption is enacted or not by different people placed differently in the society. This is an empirical and normative issue. More soon. Again it was great seeing you and great receiving the post.

In the case of a child molester, the police look for a suspect and attempt to confirm guilt, while in court there must be a presumption of innocence. Before, during and after a trial, the press and the general public judges, independently of formal legalities, and explores whether they think justice is done by the police and the courts, sometimes in a sensational way. The spheres of public activity and the press are different from the professional activities of the police and the courts. And quite clearly, when the issue is child molestation, the public and the press are predisposed, often without regard to the solidity of the evidence, to believe the police, given the nature of the crime . . .

Read more: DC Week in Review: DSK and the Presumption of Guilt