| Number 262 | July 9, 2004 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, As I was reading over some old articles that I had written for these pages, I suddenly noticed how much I use “quotation marks.” I find them amusing, for some reason that I cannot possibly explain. That’s part of why I use them so much, but by far the larger part is that it is one of the ways I like to remind readers – without going on and on about it – that every word you read is a choice. Careless writers use words carelessly, but that doesn’t diminish the effect they have on the reader. I don’t think I’m a careless writer – and you’d likely agree if you were to witness how much I obsess over every word – so I use Q-marks very carefully, and in a particular way. Journalists and editors in the corporate press often use them in quite a different way, so I thought it was worth saying a word or two about that difference. Understanding this usage will be another tool in your media literacy toolkit. If you’ve been reading the Notes for a while, you should have a quite a number of tools in there by now. I said last week that I would have something for you this week on the State of the News Media 2004. But the quotation marks piece got too long, and the Star Tribune ran a perfect follow-up to my piece on infrastructure, and, well, you know how it goes. Next week, maybe, I’ll get to the media thing. Sorry for once again leading you on. Election note: The best thinking I’ve seen recently about the upcoming nationwide multiple-choice test (a.k.a. the “presidential election”) is the new essay, “The Lizard Strategy; or How to Defeat Bush Without Losing Our Souls,” by Twin Cities activist Ricardo Levins Morales. It’s sort of a cousin to the other piece on the subject that I have recommended, which is “Election Plan?” by Michael Albert, from last year. Both of them can be found on the “Election Watch” page of the ZNet website. Go to http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm and scroll down to “U.S. Elections.” To get to the Albert piece, click on “More.” OK, that’s it for now. More next week. Nygaard |
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In his recent strategy paper on the upcoming presidential election – “The Lizard Strategy; or How to Defeat Bush Without Losing Our Souls” – Twin Cities activist and artist Ricardo Levins Morales made this comment in talking about the John Kerry campaign:
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Last week I talked about the need for investment in the nation’s bridges and other infrastructure. Apparently inspired by Nygaard Notes (HaHaHa), my regional paper, the Star Tribune, ran an article this week headlined “Crystal Clear is Costly for Small Towns; Outstate Areas Need $6.9 Billion in Water System Improvements, Foundation Says.” It was kind of an odd article for a “newspaper,” since the foundation report on which it was based was released a year-and-a-half ago, but the information is important, and underlines what I was saying in last week’s Notes, when I reported on a study that was done a mere 10 months ago. The Foundation, called the West Central Initiative – since it focuses on that region of Minnesota – reported on “the current and future needs for water, wastewater, and storm sewer repair and replacement for the incorporated cities and one sanitary district within WCI’s nine-county service area.” The Star Trib tells us that “many small Minnesota towns are struggling to find the money to keep their water clean,” since “many systems” rely on infrastructure “built by Depression-era work programs” that now, after 70 years or so, “are crumbling.” As the report says, “The results of ignoring this situation could be disastrous.” How disastrous? “Possible consequences of delaying action, the report said, could be sewage backups, lake and stream pollution, flooding, building moratoriums, inadequate water supplies for drinking and fire protection, declining property values and people leaving town,” says the newspaper. I’m sure there have been similar studies done in your state and region. Your elected representatives should know about them. Those “Depression-era programs,” by the way, were public programs such as the Works Progress Administration, which the Library of Congress recalls this way: “The Works Progress Administration (WPA), an ambitious New Deal program, put 8,500,000 jobless to work, mostly on projects that required manual labor. With Uncle Sam meeting the payroll, countless bridges, highways and parks were constructed or repaired.” As were – ahem – water treatment systems. Maybe you want to call your elected representatives and ask them what they know about the infrastructure needs in your area and what they plan to do about it. Ask them if they might be willing to put some unemployed people in your area to work making our country more livable. It’d be interesting to see what they say, don’t you think? |
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When one is reading the Mainstream Corporate For-Profit Agenda-Setting Bound Media, one will often find quotation marks – or their functional equivalent, the adjective “so-called”– around or preceding “words used in a special way” (as my Merriam Webster Concise Handbook for Writers puts it). These marks should usually be a red flag to alert you to the use of propaganda. Whether it is intentional on the part of the reporter, or simply an expression of internalized propaganda-induced beliefs, is not important. The effect on the reader is the same. Here are three examples from recent press reports that will illustrate what I mean. First Example: “The So-Called Trust Fund” An Associated Press article appeared in my local paper, the Star Tribune, on June 15, about a revised forecast for the Social Security system that was done by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The article said that “Social Security’s long-term prospects are better than previously thought.” The article is filled with inaccuracies and misleading statements – as are practically all articles about Social Security in recent years – including that the program will become “insolvent” in 2052. As the CBO and every other credible report makes clear, the program will become “insolvent” only if Congress takes no action at all between now and the year 2052, an option proposed by no one. But the final paragraph is the key one here. After noting that the new projections show that 2019 is the year that the system will “start paying out more in benefits than it collects in payroll taxes,” the AP writer says: “Analysts say that date is probably [highly] significant because the insolvency projections count on funds owed the system by the government in the so-called trust fund. Those funds, however, have been spent and must be repaid.” We’ve been over this before. OF COURSE “those funds have been spent.” As I explained ‘way back in Nygaard Notes #15 (“Economics of Social Security for Beginners”), it’s just like when you deposit money in your savings account at the bank. The bank does not keep your money in a vault – the bank loans it out, which is how they make money. But when you want to withdraw “your” money, you will be able to. Similarly, when the Social Security trust fund invests in treasury bonds – in effect, loaning the money to the non-Social Security part of the government – the government uses that money to build roads, to pay clerks, to attack small Third-World nations, or whatever government does. And when you – or the Trust fund – redeem your bonds, you will get back the money you put in, plus interest. That is the truth about the “so-called” trust fund, and you needn’t worry about it unless the U.S. government goes bankrupt (in which case your retirement funds will not be your biggest problem.) The propaganda reinforced here by the reporter is that the Social Security system is unsustainable and the government cannot be trusted with your retirement funds. Second example: “Liberation” The Denver Post published a major story on the death of Ronald Reagan that was reprinted on the front page of the Star Tribune on June 6. Under the heading “Nation Wanted Change,” the Post listed a number of foreign policy initiatives undertaken during the Reagan years, including that “The CIA and the Pentagon squared off against communist ‘liberation’ movements and confronted Soviet offshoots in Central America, Afghanistan, Poland and other ideological battlegrounds in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Asia.” Notice that the word “liberation” is placed in quotation marks, but the words “communist” and “Soviet offshoots” are not. We can’t know the intention of the reporter in doing this, but we can imagine the effect on readers, which is to reinforce the official history of the Cold War era, and the doctrinal system which underlies it. In that system, “communism” and “the Soviets” were real threats, justifying any and all covert and overt force by our heroic leaders, and any talk of “liberation” was no more than fantasy. In the case of Central America, the “deep propaganda” we are to believe is that the indigenous national liberation movements were actually pathetic puppets of the Evil Empire, just two days drive from Harlingen, Texas, and thus our covert wars against them were justifiable self-defense. In this sense, the pages of the daily newspapers may be seen as the real “ideological battlegrounds,” albeit rather one-sided ones. Third example: “Social Justice” Social change advocates like to cite the adage, “Give me a fish and I'll eat for a day; teach me to fish and I'll eat for a lifetime.” It’s a simple sentiment, meant to differentiate between charity work and social change work. Let’s look at the Star Tribune of June 20th, in an article headlined “Fundraising Group Back on the Giving List; the Community Solutions Fund Was Reinstated ‘With Some Reservations’ in the State Employees Fund Drive.” The lead paragraph in the article said, “The Community Solutions Fund, the ‘social justice’ fund-raising group for 47 charities, has been reinstated in this fall's Minnesota state employee giving drive.” The article concerned efforts by state employee relations commissioner Cal Ludeman to prevent state employees from participating in the CSF fund drive, something they had been doing for the past 20 years or so. Ludeman (and his ilk) accuse the Fund of engaging in “advocacy,” which Ludeman says is not “charity.” (Those quotation marks are mine; neither “advocacy” nor “charity” were in Q-marks in the Star Trib article, tellingly.) In the Individualist and Competitive (i.e. “right-wing”) ideology of people like former Republican gubernatorial candidate Ludeman, charity is quite narrowly defined, and amounts to giving poor people an occasional fish. The director of CSF points out, in contrast, that “the fund plays a vital leadership role by addressing the root causes of social problems. It is an integral part of our work in serving individuals in the community.” In other words, they teach people how to fish. Teaching people how to fish, in Ludeman’s original ruling, violates a law “requiring each affiliated agency in the drive to devote ‘substantially all of its activities directly to providing health, welfare, social or other human services to the individuals.’” By placing the phrase “social change” in quotation marks, the Star Trib implies that the phrase is somehow suspect, or that the reporter wishes the reader to know that he would never use such a phrase. Since the concept of “social change” is a kind of marker that one can use to differentiate between a Social and Cooperative ideology, on the one hand, and an Individualist and Competitive (IC) ideology, on the other, these quotation marks serve as a subtle indicator of the ideology of the reporter. Put it this way: nobody who is involved in or supportive of social change would put that phrase in quotation marks. Ludeman would like the law to reinforce his IC ideology, which says that “charity” is OK, but addressing the root causes of social problems – i.e. “social change” – is not. The real story here is that there are social forces at work in Minnesota that forced a state official to reverse what was, in essence, an anti-social change ruling. By placing the very phrase “social change” in Q-marks, the reporter obscures this very important story. He probably didn’t mean to. There are many good reasons to use quotation marks, and I don’t mean to imply that you should be suspicious every time you see them. But they should make you think. By learning to decode the daily press in this way – that is, by thinking about these “words used in a special way” – we can draw extra, and often important, meanings from a reporter’s choice to use quotation marks. That’s a “special way” of reading the papers that can serve political activists well. |