Monday, January 25, 2010

Agenda-setting on Planet Fox

Wow, things sure look different through the clear ammonia-based air of Planet Fox, don't they?

Here's the front page from a bit earlier in the day. Don't you wonder why your Lamestream Media were ignoring these?

First up, "Heat's on U.N. climate doc" -- right, that's "doc," not "dog," though we have no idea whose idea it was to call him a "doc" (that's a job description, not a title). And he's not going to resign even though Rupert Murdoch thinks he should. You can tell how heavily the heat's on by the age of the sidebars; the first link under the mainbar is to a 5-day-old story.

Is "'Blame Bush' wearing thin?" We report, you decide!

Hard to see how the Italian official could be adding insult to injury. The Haitians are the ones who were injured, but he's not adding any insults to them; he's insulting the Americans, who weren't injured. This is exceptionalism writ large; foreigners simply aren't allowed to go around questioning our good deeds. (Don't you ungrateful Iraqis come complaining about how we're treating your country. If it wasn't for us, you'd all be speaking Arabic.)

And speaking of which -- "un-veil" ban proposal! HAHAHAHAHAHA! The real point of this one, though, is the sidebar. Packaging is often a good clue to the framing process; you can tell a lot about how you're supposed to read a story from the kinds of stories it goes with. And on Planet Fox, a story about French secularism and religious practice is the same kind of story as ... a guy who tried to blow up an airliner full of civilians. Glad we got that straight.

None of this is an accident. It's a carefully arranged set of instructions for how to interpret the world. Fox doesn't tell you what to think. It just helps you think the right way about the things it tells you to think about.

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1 Comments:

Blogger John Cowan said...

Well, I suppose anyone with a Ph.D. can be called "Doc" in a headline.

If you are running a tabloid.

10:11 AM, January 26, 2010  

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