{Part 2 on a series looking at presidential speech-making.}
{While words don't necessarily translate into action, a president's words nonetheless reveals a great deal about how they communicate with and see the world, as well as their policy goals. In an age of 140-character policy announcements and 24-hour media, this week we take a look back at the news coverage surrounding President Obama's 2011 Tucson shooting address to highlight the differences (and the inherent, possibly surprising similarities) in how presidents choose to communicate. For instance, note the emphasis on emotional appeals and appeals to patriotism. Sound familiar? It's a tactic most presidents have used to bolster their more rational arguments and to persuade the audience in the moment. However, one may feel that they more saturated with emotional appeals now in 2018 than in the past.}
The January 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona at a constituent meeting by suspect Jared Loughner that killed six people and wounded thirteen others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, prompted President Obama to give a memorial speech eulogizing the victims in the wake of the shooting as is common in times of national crises or tragedies (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2 & 6; OPS, 2011; Pol 304 Lectures). However, the subsequent resulting news coverage of the speech produced diverse framings of the story, a product of constraints on journalists from multiple actors in the political information system as well as editorial favoring of certain themes that may or may not then be used to produce a slight ideological slant based on the news sources’ either mass or niche audience (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2, 4, & 5; Pol 304 Lectures). In this paper, I will analyze the framings of the Tucson speech in the context of these journalistic constraints that necessarily lead to manifestations of the four informational biases in four articles by the Washington Times, CNN, FOX, and the New York Times, with a brief conclusion examining the implications of my findings for the informational needs of democracy.
To begin with, I will examine the similarities between the four articles in terms of the general informational biases of fragmentation, personalization, dramatization and authority- disorder bias manifest in the language and construction of the reports concerning President Obama’s speech (Bennett, 2007, p. 40-41). In all of the articles, there was a common thread of dramatization and personalization biases rooted out of the officialdom bias (the President as a federal official having the power to define a situation), with the President’s speech being highlighted in highly emotional and patriotic terms (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 4 & 5; OPS, 2011). In each report, the journalists’ language is highly patriotic, with such themes touched upon in the classic authority-disorder bias plot as (very easily) constructed from the President’s speech: the villain (suspect Jared Loughner), the heroes (both the surviving victims of the shooting, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the fallen), and the need for national unity and healing in the wake of the shooting (Bennett, 2007, p. 43-44).
Patriotism aside in the context of a national tragedy or crisis, the articles began to diverge from the transcript of President Obama’s speech that called for national unity (including remembrance of the victims, touting those who survived as heroes, and calling for a less divisive political practice) among numerous broad themes, to emphasize particular aspects of the speech (OPS, 2011). Before we get into that analysis, it is important to note that the transcript itself of the speech was largely taken in emotional terms, and the investigation of the shooting was largely left out, perhaps contributing to the fragmentation biases each news organization presented in their reports on the speech (OPS, 2011).
Looking first at the news articles that seem to have more of a political lean, one can see the more obvious signs of journalistic choices in taking the bits and pieces of the story and putting them into a coherent, summarized narrative. While all articles had common threads and elements, certain articles more heavily featured an emphasis on one story narrative over another, as hinted at in the content of the title and opening paragraph (Pol 304 Lectures). Starting with the FOX (“Obama Urges a National Dialogue of Healing at Arizona Memorial Service”), New York Times (“Obama Calls for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics”) and Washington Times (“Obama: May Good Come of Arizona Tragedy”) news articles, we see immediately in these titles the differences in aspects of the event being covered compared to the CNN article. With the FOX, New York Times, and Washington Times articles, the aspect of the speech that is the most emphasized is from the perspective of, as FOX puts it “tempering the political discourse now polarizing the public square” and in memory of the shooting victims “usher in a new era of civility in their honor” (FOX, 2011, p. 1; NY Times, 2011, p. 1).
Whereas those reporters focused on the political partisanship side of the story narrative, in which the shooting is portrayed almost as a byproduct of a toxic political system with powerful partisan figures clashing together on a daily basis as a backdrop, in the CNN article, the focus from the outset is the strong invocation of a standardized theme of hope or healing (Bennett, 2007, p. 41). However, there are implications hinted at in all of the articles, with the New York Times article manifesting it the most with the following line: “While the tone and content [of the speech] were distinctly nonpolitical, there were clear political ramifications to the speech, giving Mr. Obama…a chance to try and occupy a space outside of the partisanship or agenda” in which the President was noted as “setting aside a partisan health care debate to honor the lives of the victims” (NY Times, 2011, p. 2).
The Washington Times article pushes a bit further with an authority-disorder bias despite the underlying skepticism (and slight ideological bias in use of this bias to implicitly call the President out on the quality of his leadership), saying that President Obama was “under high expectations to calm the [partisan] tensions” as “healer-in-chief,” but to the journalist perhaps failed in “keeping his distance from an often acerbic debate over whether heated political rhetoric by supporters of the tea party movement (perhaps hinted at by the mention of Sarah Palin’s assertion of the media’s “blood libel” or charges that her rhetoric could have helped motivate the shooting) played any role in the attack on the Democratic lawmaker” (Washington Times, 2011, p. 1). Going further into the article, further ritual adversarialism of journalists towards elite actors “not telling the whole story” is seen when the journalist talks about a “raft of evidence” concerning how the suspect was supposed to have targeted Giffords and then contrasting it with a line from the President’s speech that “…none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack” (Washington Times, 2011, p. 2; Pol 304 Lectures). Similar skepticism is hinted at in the FOX article, even with its “national healing” narrative focus, with the line that “Obama bluntly conceded that there is no way to know what triggered the mass shooting” and that a Pima County Sheriff (not mentioned in the other articles) was applauded after he attributed the motives for the shooting to “extreme political rhetoric, bigotry, and hatred” (FOX, 2011, p. 1-2). However, for the most part, while the other articles emphasized the authority-disorder bias as well by standardized mentions of need for healing and national unity post-crisis, the Washington Times especially makes heavy use of this particular slant (CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011, NY Times, 2011; Washington Times, 2011).
Although, to a degree, the other articles touched upon similar storylines as well, illustrating the varying degrees of the four informational biases as commonplace reporting characteristics resulting from a variety of factors, such as journalistic dependence on elite sources like the President (officialdom bias) for verifying and approving particular realities and tellings (Bennett, 2007, p. 41, 196-197; Pol 304 Lectures). However, the CNN article exhibited the highest degree of most of the informational biases to me, especially in respect to the officialdom bias, even more than the New York Times, which highlighted the President in a more positive light (CNN, 2011; NY Times, 2011). In fact, looking at the CNN article, from the outset, the focus is on Gabrielle Giffords and the First Family’s visit to her hospital (as first mentioned in the story highlights) and her “opening her eyes” and almost seems to dip the furthest into what could be termed “soft news” that only marginally informs the public about political issues, especially in the context of a national crisis (CNN, 2011, p. 1; Graber, 2011, p. 113-125). Throughout the rest of the article, the journalist chooses to heavily lean on the personalization and dramatization biases, citing the President’s comforting Scripture passages regarding standing against evil along with the happy and miraculous recovery of Representative Giffords (CNN, 2011). Essentially, the CNN article was dismissive of the other aspects of the President’s speech, and it isn’t until the bottom of the fourth page that the suspect, Jared Loughner, is mentioned briefly in one line and the outside details of how many perished in the shooting and where is given a few paragraphs before the Jared Loughner line (CNN, 2011, p. 4-5).
Sprinkled throughout the report and until the end is the use of language such as “hope”, “tragedy,” and “Gabby opened her eyes,” with the journalist turning Giffords into a recognizable symbol of a hero surviving against all odds and the victims (as in Obama’s speech) as innocents who represented “the best of America” (CNN, 2011). While readers may have gained some passing knowledge if they read far enough into the CNN article about the outside circumstances surrounding the shooting vaguely hinted at in the President’s speech, such as who was killed, who survived, the suspect, where the shooting took place and the Westboro Baptist Church’s planned picketing of a shooting victim’s funeral (although most only read the first paragraph, necessitating the inverted pyramid structure in which the journalist puts the most important and succinct “facts” first), ultimately they would come out confused about the event as a whole (Bennett, 2007, p. 191; CNN, 2011). Thus, the CNN article manifests the fragmentation bias as well, focusing more heavily on the human drama and tragedy aspects it picks up from the speech that the media generally utilize as easily communicable frames to complement their need for summarization and simplicity (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2).
All in all, when taking a look at all of the articles together, all of them manifest significant fragmentation bias, with CNN heavily focusing on the President’s visit to recovering Representative Gabrielle Giffords (CNN, 2011). If we regard the goal of news to report the relevant “who, what, where, when and why” circumstances of events, the articles, depending on the news source the audience member attended to provided a similar, yet different story narrative (Pol 304 Lectures). The audience either got a narrative of the speech focusing on the authority-disorder bias (can the president fulfill his duty to be “healer-in-chief” and reassure a nation?), the standard hope and healing narrative in which Representative Giffords was especially utilized, or the partisanship narrative, in which the aspects of the speech highlighted in the article focused on the toxicity of partisan rhetoric (i.e. political conflict), even while some articles mentioned that the President was trying to be as nonpolitical as possible in his speech (CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011; NY Times, 2011; Washington Times, 2011). The latter political partisanship theme to me especially was indicative of ritualistic journalistic adversarialism in which individuals such as Sarah Palin, the President, the shooting suspect, various individual Congress members and even the Westboro Baptist Church spokeswoman are featured as players in the stories by all four news organizations (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2, p. 196-197).
Simultaneously, the latter characters are critiqued by the journalists for their possible roles in the conflict as well as positioned more personally in order to produce an overriding conflict narrative (i.e. attribution of responsibility for political rhetoric especially in the FOX, New York Times, and Washington Times articles) rather than focusing on the underlying institutions or processes at play behind the speech and shooting (Bennett, 2007, p. 196-197).
In essence, the articles covering President Obama’s Tucson Memorial Speech may have provided some hints towards underlying systemic problems (maybe political rhetoric and certain political movements, etc.), but as a whole, the journalistic tendency to summarize based on limited information and produce an interpretation of an event (a story) that people can easily connect with, probably left those same people with very incomplete understandings as to all of the themes that the President chose to utilize in his speech as well as the relevant actors involved in and surrounding the event (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2; CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011; NY Times, 2011; OPS, 2011; Washington Times, 2011). For example, while the articles necessarily covered the speech, there were differing degrees of coverage, with many articles sandwiching in between the President’s quotes mentions of outside figures, such as Sarah Palin and other necessarily positioned characters maneuvered in to seem adversarial and create that formulaic political drama narrative (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2). This perhaps signals that the news media are perhaps not fulfilling their needs to inform citizens about underlying processes and issues that may impact their critical decision-making processes about their democracy in the long run, a criticism especially echoed by Bennett (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 1-2; Pol 304 Lectures).
Nevertheless, one needs to consider the pressures exerted on journalists by influences from the rest of the political journalistic system and that some of the articles I examined above are exercising some degree of hopeful independence from elite narratives in the variety of outside information they pulled in and resulting diversity in some narrative frames (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 1-2, 5; Pol 304 Lectures).
Works Cited:
Bennett, W. Lance & Graber, Doris A. (2007). News: The Politics of Illusion (6th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman.
CNN Wire Staff. (2011, January 13). Obama: ‘The Hopes of a Nation are Here Tonight.’ Retrieved April 1, 2016, from http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/12/arizona.shooting.victims/.
Cooper, Helene, Zeleny, Jeff, & NY Times. (2011, January 12). Obama Calls for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/us/13obama.html?_r=0.
FOX News. (2011, January 13). Obama Urges a National Dialogue of Healing at Arizona Memorial Service. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/12/obama-visits-rep-giffords-ahead-memorial-service.html.
Graber, Doris. (2011). Media Power in Politics (6th ed.). Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
McDougal, Stephen. (2016, January-April). Pol 304 Lectures: Media and Politics. Lectures presented at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse.
Rowland, Kara and Washington Times (2011, January 13). Obama: May Good Come of Arizona Tragedy. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from https://uwlax.courses.wisconsin.edu/d2l/le/content/3163152/viewContent/19978729/View.
White House Office of the Press Secretary. (2011, January 12). Remarks By the President at a Memorial Service for the Victims of the Shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/12/remarks-president-barack-obama-memorial-service-victims-shooting-tucson.
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