Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Red Frames on the Green Revolution

WEDNESDAY 17 JUNE 2009
   Truthout Original
Red Frames on the Green Revolution: Iran Through a Lethal Media Scope
Tuesday 16 June 2009
by: Cynthia Boaz, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    If the international consensus about last week's election results in 
Iran is that they were a) indeed fraudulent, or b) a coup attempt, and the 
pro-democracy elements in that country emerge victorious, it will mostly be 
in spite - not because - of mainstream media coverage of the events. Since 
2002, there have emerged a series of democracy movements in Iran, 
spearheaded primarily - though not exclusively - by university students and 
women. These people are for the most part technologically and strategically 
savvy, especially when compared to the hardliners and mullahs that make up 
the ancient regime in Iran. They have studied the nonviolent struggles in 
Chile, South Africa and Serbia. They understand the dynamics of civil 
resistance and the power of simply withdrawing individual complicity in 
oppression. These are the people whose "tweets" and Facebook "status 
updates" the world is getting live via digital media from inside the country 
(despite the regime's attempts to shut down all electronic communications). 
They are citizen journalists in the most genuine sense of the term. And yet, 
for most reporters and producers in American mainstream media, they might as 
well not exist.
    The gap between the mainstream media's frames on the story emerging from 
Iran and the news being instantaneously communicated in bits and pieces from 
inside the country is surreal. And here's why we should care. A media 
"frame" helps form the cognitive structure around our perceptions of 
reality. It determines what parts of a news story we find most significant, 
and it helps us draw subconscious - but often deeply embedded - conclusions 
about the meaning behind the events in a story. Because media tend to be so 
obsessed with violence, the context and significance underlying the series 
of events like the ones unfolding in Iran often are misinterpreted. Because 
the wrong (or less interesting) but often more sensational elements of the 
story are emphasized while others are downplayed, erroneous or incomplete 
conclusions emerge. And often these conclusions have the consequence of 
creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. When Iranian pro-democracy activists, 
say, catch a glimpse of a CNN streaming headline that says something to the 
effect of "Ahmadinejad Victorious in Iranian Elections" or that refer to 
Mousavi as "the defeated challenger," they may conclude that the regime's 
attempt at (what is appearing more and more obviously to be) a coup has 
succeeded. This will in turn dampen their enthusiasm and morale, which may 
cause some in the movement to give up their resistance, and worse, may cause 
others to turn to violent means - a last, desperate resort - to fight back.
    Although occasionally media frames are consciously manufactured (witness 
virtually anything on the Fox News channel), conventional wisdom suggests 
that the major culprit is the inability or unwillingness of reporters to 
engage in serious investigative or assiduous on-the-ground reporting. For 
example, when in doubt - where information is sparse or of questionable 
veracity, and official (government) forces are being challenged by 
nongovernmental forces, media tend to default to the perspective of the 
officials, regardless of regime type or ideology (W. Lance Bennett calls 
this the "authority-disorder" bias). This can be extraordinarily frustrating 
for members of a nonviolent pro-democracy struggle, who, in addition to 
everything else, find themselves in the midst of an uprising having to try 
to unspin erroneous media coverage coming from all directions.
    Other types of media bias that help shape public perceptions of civil 
resistance - and all of which are being used to report the story from Iran - 
are fragmentation, dramatization and euphemism.
    The fragmentation bias involves covering the story in isolated, 
seemingly unrelated pieces. At its worst, a story is completely removed of 
its larger historical or political context. As they are being reported now 
by most mainstream media, stories from Iran are fragmented. They suggest 
pandemonium, isolated acts of extremist political violence and a regime 
struggling to "normalize" the situation. When taken together (and especially 
with the corresponding photographs), these smaller stories paint a picture 
of a country in chaos, prone to violent theocratic extremism and awash in 
repression. While each of these taken out of context may have some veracity, 
the reality is much richer and more potentially encouraging. The Green 
Revolution is not just a series of ad hoc protests against a political 
theft, it is a story of widespread resistance to ongoing oppression. It is 
not the repression and violence that is most interesting about the news 
coming from Iran, it is that people continue to resist despite the 
repression.
    Stories coming from Iran in the last few days are also characterized by 
what Bennett calls the dramatization bias. Dramatization of a story occurs 
when the news is encapsulated in short, sensationalistic bits intended to 
provoke an emotional response on the part of the news consumer, but in the 
absence of serious analysis of the policy issues, institutional interplay or 
larger social setting. Dramatization, which thrives on confusion and 
skepticism, tends to produce conclusions that bend toward the cynical. For 
example, a dramatization bias might cover a massive protest against rigged 
votes as a "spontaneous mass uprising," suggesting that it is not part of a 
larger, systematic strategy and leading the media audience to conclude it's 
a one-off - just a temporary and reflexive response to immediate political 
events. This kind of conclusion could create the global perception that 
there is nothing - no movement or struggle - with which to demonstrate 
solidarity.
    Finally, the use of euphemism plays a dangerous role in the way civil 
resistance is covered, especially when the resistance takes place in a 
non-Western country. The terminology used to describe the images of 
thousands of people on the streets often (erroneously) connotes improvised 
and anarchic action, when in fact, most of the movement itself (though not 
necessarily the regime opponent) may be strategic, organized and 
disciplined. For example, a headline next to a photo of a massive 
demonstration in Tehran on the MSNBC web site as of this writing simply says 
"Huge crowds in Iran," a statement which, while technically correct, is 
incomplete. A "crowd" connotes any large group of people congregated 
together for no specific reason. What is happening on the streets of Iran is 
much more sophisticated than a convergence of "crowds." It is a massive, 
nonviolent, civilian uprising that everyone (including Ahmadinejad and his 
supporters in the Guardian Council) - save most of the American mainstream 
media - seems to take seriously as a potential force for real change in 
Iran.
    The Iran news story is not yet a story about successful repression, much 
less the apparent clear-cut preference of Iranians for theocratic autocracy. 
It's about courageous, massive resistance to an attempted coup, and 
responsible democratic media would do well to recognize - and report - it 
that way, both on behalf of those who are resisting and those who are 
observing.
�

 perche' non non mi stupisceh?...
#_2) Perche`inebrianti, ingeriti insieme a Prosac, sono in conflittoH!
G.