POPPI MAY KNIGHT





Freelance Filmmaker and Writer.

Based between London and Barcelona.

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Decline in Violence or a Rise in Peace: the Relationship Between the News and Reality



Introduction

For many, it’s likely the purpose of either watching, reading or listening to the news is to learn about events in the world from an objective source which they trust. This essay will investigate various theories about what makes news and reality in order to show that, in fact, there is not such a linear relationship between the two but rather the news has the power to shape, twist and even distort reality. So, what does this mean for how we perceive reality and to what extent can, or should, the news reflect reality?



What makes news?

As a foundation, Lewin’s system of “gatekeeping” can be used to address the question of whether the news reflects reality. The premise is that “gates” ‘are governed by impartial rules or by “gate keepers”’ that have the power to decide whether something is “in” or “out”’ (Lewin 1947, 145). In The Structure of Foreign News, Galtung and Ruge found that gatekeeping is a systemic process, with decisions that create ‘discernible patterns of omission and inclusion’ when it comes to what makes news (Lynch 2010, 542). They developed eight factors that hypothesise how events become news. In short, these are the frequency, the amplitude, unambiguity, whether it is meaningful (or relevant),expectation (or prediction), but also the unexpected (when paired with something meaningful, for example), as well as the longevity andcomposition it might have in the news (Galtung and Ruge 1965). What these factors suggest is that ‘negative events, befalling elite individuals in elite countries, are news stories’, while ‘positive processes, benefiting non-elite groups in non-elite countries, are non-stories’ (Lynch 2010, 542-3). Therefore, a violent attack in America is more likely to be news, particularly in the west, while a success story about a business in India will go unreported, for example. Subsequently, more sudden, largescale, tragic events in familiar countries tend to dominate the news, rather than uplifting stories of positive progression from the rest of the world. So, what does this say about our reality?



What makes reality?

‘Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,’ says Pinker in The Better Angles of our Nature (Pinker 2011, xxi). He argues that though not totally eradicated, ‘violence has declined over long stretches of time’ (ibid.). This alleged decline (or at least changing character) of violence is in line with the continuous transformation of moral values throughout history, an idea which has been developed by thinkers such as Nietzsche. Pinker uses the dwindling of violence to examine human nature suggesting that ‘we started off nasty and that the artifices of civilisation have moved us in a noble direction, one in which we can hope to continue’ (ibid. xxi-xxii). This idea can be traced back to Nietzsche who recognised human nature as aggressive and cruel, instincts which he describes the ‘advent of society’ taught the “animal man” to be ashamed of (Schacht 1989, 887 & Nietzsche 1887). For Nietzsche, when man found himself imprisoned within society, it led to what he calls the ‘internalization of man’ when ‘those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backwards against man himself’ (Nietzsche 1887, 56-7). This allowed him to view that ‘our humanity has a history and a genealogy’ which ‘remains capable of further transformation’ (Schacht 1989, 892). Today it’s difficult to wholeheartedly agree with these arguments since there is a better understanding of what drives individual acts of violence. However, this notion of transformation remains an interesting way to think about both human nature and reality in that neither have a permanent form.



Pinker thinks about violence in a very literal sense, focusing on more direct forms such as murder, war, genocide, and missing out forms of violence which are less raw. To understand violence more broadly we can use Galtung’s theory. He would argue that Pinker’s perspective of violence is narrow because for him ‘violence is that which increases the distance between the potential and the actual, and that which impedes the decrease of this distance’ (Galtung 1969, 168). Beyond viewing violence as only physical harm, we can see that Pinker does not consider how virtual, psychological, systemic, and other forms of more indirect violence, might be prevalent, and perhaps more sinister, in today’s world. Therefore, it is not convincing to say there is less violence in its totality.



Relationship between the news and reality

Where then, does the news sit in our reality? Pinker believes the media distorts our sense of danger, probing it to appear as though we live in more violent times than we do. He describes how ‘the human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age’ (Pinker 2011, xxii). This corroborates Galtung and Ruge’s mapping of what makes news regarding the type of events that tend to prevail; however, the dominance of these negative stories does not reflect the more peaceful reality Pinker believes we live in.



Pinker’s view of modern times is an optimistic one which many scholars are sceptical of. Ward suggests that rather than progressing towards peace, ‘our ever-evolving technology means that greater violence may occur in the future,’ and he is not persuaded that ‘human violence and authoritarian politics are not still enormous problems’ (Ward 2018, 116). By comparing the two perspectives and considering the various forms that violence can manifest it’s not so clear as to whether or not we are in a more peaceful age. However, let’s say that, hypothetically, Pinker is correct, reality is less violent then ever before, if this is true, why does our news seem predominantly negative? Galtung and Ruge list several reasons to explain why the news that we would consider negative is dominant. They suggest that negative stories enter the news more easily because of the frequency criterion, that it will probably be more consonant with ‘some dominant pre-images of our time,’ ‘more likely [to] be consensual and unambiguous’ in that the interpretation of the event will be negative and, finally, that negative news is more unexpected than positive meaning that it is less predictable (Galtung and Ruge 1965, 69-70).



Therefore, news can be classed as negative because it consists of predominantly negative stories, but also because we perceive it as consisting of predominantly negative stories. Note that negative news does not necessarily mean violence as Pinker regards it, but it might be negative subjectively or from Galtung’s broader view of violence. The negativity bias can help to explain this. Essentially, the negativity bias is the principle that negative events are more salient than positive events, manifested as a result of a greater potency or steeper gradient of negativity (Rozin and Royzman 2001). What the negativity bias suggests in terms of the relationship between the news and reality is two things. Firstly, that negative news stories are more attractive, for reasons such as those mentioned by Galtung and Ruge, which news reporters and journalists are surely aware of and therefore are likely to perpetuate. Secondly, that even if reality is the most peaceful it has ever been and positive news is predominantly reported to reflect this, we are still more prone to hang on to the negative ones. This corresponds to Pinker’s view that the media fuels perceptions of violence. Whether or not we agree that there is a decline in violence, many of us in the west do not live in a reality where the type of direct violence we see on the news exists. Nonetheless, as a result of the negativity bias, these types of violent events can have a lasting effect on us and change how we see or how we act in the world, based on something we may never experience. However, the negativity bias can be aroused by other forms of negative news too.



InThe Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard explores the Gulf War as ‘a hyperreal scenario in which events lose their identity and signifiers fade into one another’ (Patton 1995, 2). This relates the ideas he developed in Simulacra and Simulation, about how reality is no longer the precursor for what we know. Instead, a culmination of signs and symbols have developed to the point that ‘it is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real’ (Baudrillard 1981, 3-4). This highlights the difficulty of determining what reality precisely is. He describes the Gulf War as though it were a performance, a war ‘stripped bare’ and then ‘reclothed’ with ‘artifices of electronics’ (Baudrillard 1995, 64). Therefore, the essays discuss how the war was, in a sense, constructed through media to serve ‘a variety of political and strategic purposes on all sides’ (Patton 1995, 10). Baudrillard’s theories contribute another perspective to the question of news and reality because for him, we live in a simulation where media representations have replaced reality to the extent that we don’t know what’s real or true.



In relation to Baudrillard’s theories, Christians comments on how post-modern thinkers speak out against the totalising conditions of knowledge, such as universal reason and essentialist theories of human nature, that were fostered in the Enlightenment era and questions what ‘still counts as legitimate knowledge’ (Christians 1997, 5). Essentially, post-modern thinkers’ question where we get knowledge from and what we assign as the truth, so, how can we claim that something is true? Chouliaraki discusses truth-claims relating to television news and new post-television genres of news stating that ‘since the early days of the profession […] the voice of the journalist functioned as a guarantee for the truth-claims of the camera’ which is capable of manipulation (Chouliaraki 2013, 144). She wonders how post-television journalism will manage to convince audiences that their story is real because ordinary witnessing and ‘the inclusion of new voices’ will override objectivity and replace it with self-expression (ibid. 143-9). With this in mind, we can think about post-television journalism in a broader sense and look at how social media is an ‘explosive breeding ground for misinformation’ (Ovadya 2018, 43). The idea behind this is that in the digital environment, news can be distributed almost instantly alongside the event, by real people in ‘a ‘participatory realism’ which engages with distant suffering from the perspective of a dispersed but involved collectivity’ (Chouliaraki 2013, 163). Therefore, the authoritative figure of the journalist is replaced by the chattering effects of the online world. This may be resourceful and offer diverse perspectives, while simultaneously having the potential to deceive people into ‘believing falsehoods, sometimes systematically distorting people’s worldviews,’ or even lead to a ‘distortion of reality itself’ (Mathiesen 2019, 161 & Ovadya 2018, 43).



In terms of how to perceive reality and whether the news should reflect it, let’s consider whether the ends justify the means. In this case, the endsrefer to audiences receiving news and the affect this might have on them. Whereas the means is the process of “gatekeeping” and other decisions that grant a story as newsworthy. Rosling explains that as a result of our instincts ‘our brains often jump to swift conclusions without much thinking, which used to help us to avoid immediate danger’ (Rosling 2018, 14-5). He says that journalists are aware of this, that ‘human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking’ and so ‘they set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people, views, or groups’ (ibid. 38-9). As discussed, negative events are generally more successful in becoming news, so what effect does this have regarding the ends? Taylor found that negative events have stronger determinants of moods compared to positive ones ‘insofar as negative events have been equated with positive events […] negative effects still have a bigger effect on mood’ (Rozin and Royzman 2001, 305).  According to Rosling, things are better than we think but the media leads us to have an ‘overdramatic worldview’ (that things look as though they’re getting worse) (Rosling 2018, 13). He proposes the remedy of ‘factfulness’ meaning that we should remember that negative stories are more likely to reach us and, therefore, to control our instincts, such as the negativity bias, we should ‘expect bad news’ (ibid. 74).



Galtung also proposed a remedy of sorts for negative news, but rather than in terms of how we interpret the news, it is in how it is communicated - the concept of peace journalism. The premise of peace journalism is that journalists should be better trained and report on ‘long-term development’ rather than ‘events’ (Galtung and Ruge 1965, 85).  Galtung argues that the state of conflictlessness will never be achieved, ‘in fact, we are going to have more conflict in the years to come, not less. There are three main reasons for this: (a) the world breakdown of homogeneity; (b) the breakdown of the international feudal order; and (c) our reaction to the future’ (Galtung 1970, 13-4). Interestingly, some of Galtung’s arguments that support his view of increasing conflict are the same arguments that Pinker uses to support his view that violence is in decline. Perhaps their opposing views arise due to their differing stances of what constitutes violence. ‘Since violence is largely a male pastime’, says Pinker, ‘cultures that empower women tend to move away from glorification of violence’ (Pinker 2011, xxvi). On the contrary, Galtung notes how female emancipation could make for a rockier future, ‘when a man and woman are both pursuing careers independently, then the problem of conflict will easier arise’ (Galtung 1970, 15). Galtung formulates ‘a mini-programme to meet the challenges arising from increasing conflict’, which includes a science of conflictology and democratic management of conflict (ibid. 16). Moreover, the concept of peace journalism is an important tool to manage topics of conflict, violence and negativity in the news by offering a more nuanced, broad, in-depth portrayal of reality.



Conclusion

The relationship between the news and reality is therefore not a mirror image and the news seems to distort, rather than reflect, reality. Perhaps the two can never be in unison because of the changing nature of reality which can also be changed in turn by its representation in the news. Due to the numerous factors a story must adhere to before becoming news, it is therefore already a distortion. Furthermore, many events we see on our news are not likely to be ones we encounter and hence not reflective of our reality, though they might be cherry picked fragments of someone else’s. On this note, though our reality may already be distorted by the media, we should consider that the news, whether television or post-television, is susceptible to fake news and misinformation. Therefore, we cannot necessarily accept our reality or news to be true.  



Subsequently, if we are to believe that we belong to a more peaceful world than ever before, then the news does not reflect this reality. Hence reporters of the news, whether journalist or citizen, should make a more concerted effort to represent ‘reality’ as ethically as possible and have a more harmonious relationship. If we consider the consequences negative news has on both on our minds and how we view the world, it only perpetuates a negative perception of the world and out-dated instincts to look out for danger. However, even if we are destined for more conflict the news should communicate this better and give greater visibility to non-elite people and nations, to positive events and culturally distant zones, for example (Galtung and Ruge 1965). Therefore, the news has the potential to reflect a greater level of reality though maybe never in full.