443191 2013
JOU14110.1177/1464884912443191McDevitt et al.Journalism
Article
Social drama in the academicmedia nexus: Journalism’s strategic response to deviant ideas
Journalism 14(1) 111–128 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884912443191 jou.sagepub.com
Michael McDevitt University of Colorado, USA
Marco Briziarelli
University of Colorado, USA
Brian Klocke
State University of New York at Plattsburgh, USA
Abstract This article applies ‘social drama’ – adapted from the anthropology of Victor Turner – to portray a performance of media ritual in control of critical academic discourse. Insights from newspaper coverage of a controversy surrounding Ward Churchill allow us to trace theoretical connections between strategic ritual at the occupational level and media ritual in cultural practice. We observe a fractal-like structure, such that ritualistic punishment of deviant ideas as a cultural response is encoded in textual production. We discuss implications of social drama as media ritual for the prowess of US journalism in patrolling boundaries of acceptable ideas in the academic-media nexus. Keywords intellectuals, journalism, media ritual, September 11, social drama, strategic ritual American journalism operated under the weight of formidable expectations in the years following September 11, tasked with protecting the national grieving process (Fritch et al., 2006), negotiating collective memory (Schulz and Reyes, 2008), and affirming Corresponding author: Michael McDevitt, Journalism and Mass Communication, 1511 University Avenue, 478 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0478, USA Email:
[email protected]
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innocence within a reassuring binary of good and evil (Coe et al., 2004). Considerable risks accompanied newsmaking, a condition reminiscent of Tuchman’s observation that every story is accompanied by ‘dangers for news personnel and for the news organization’ (1972: 663–664). A strategic orientation in news media would likely take heed of anti-rational and absolutist rumblings in the post-9/11 climate (Giroux, 2006). Suspicion of the intellect is not entirely irrational, as Richard Hofstadter wrote in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963: 45): ‘Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question’. Media sociology was the last thing on Ward Churchill’s mind when he sat down, within hours of the 9/11 attacks, to knock out an intentionally caustic essay: ‘Some people push back: On the justice of roosting chickens’ (2001). The University of Colorado professor nonetheless triggered a dynamic rich with implications for how journalism protects core cultural beliefs in the academic-media nexus. Here we consider journalism’s tactical engagement with academia during moments of high drama, when the profession aligns itself with populist sentiment in media ritual. Churchill’s broadside languished in a remote corner of the internet until January 2005; then, suddenly, news attention swarmed around his description of World Trade Center victims as ‘little Eichmanns’, representing the ‘technocratic corps’ of ‘America’s global financial empire’ with its resultant ‘crimes against humanity’. From an organizational perspective, journalism should be well-equipped to cope with incendiary ideas, as suggested by Tuchman’s strategic ritual. Through routines such as balancing opinions and providing context, objectivity is deployed to ‘anticipate attack’ and to ‘deflect criticism’ (1972: 661). In the nation’s civil religion, however, American innocence represents an absolutist belief, dangerous territory for news that conveyed critical perspectives on the meaning of 9/11 (King and deYoung, 2008). Consequently, routine protocols appear inadequate. Use of quotes might fail to sufficiently distance reporters from reviled sources; vetting of intellectual positions might imply tolerance when journalists instead sense a need to show allegiance to an offended public. Applying Tuchman to the control of deviant ideas would seem to require a culturally enhanced strategic ritual. Contemporary studies applying strategic ritual describe journalists devising elaborate practices to inoculate reporting, such as boundary work (Frank, 2003), paradigm repair (Cecil, 2002), and factism (Vultee, 2010). These adaptations, however, fail to capture the aggressive response to Churchill, as we show later. These perspectives are also not entirely satisfying for our purposes because of the need to connect professional, selfprotective ritual to strategic performance more broadly conceived, at the cultural level. This article examines journalism’s engagement with subversive ideas from the perspective of media ritual. We hope to capture journalism’s ideological agency in the academic-media nexus, an area largely neglected in theory concerned with the hegemonic control of dissent. The Churchill affair suggests a performance of ‘social drama’ (Turner, 1980) in protecting the ideology of American innocence. We consider first the vulnerability of intellectuals to sanction in the academic-media nexus. Textual analysis subsequently shows how social drama aptly conveys the performance of Denver newspapers in response to Churchill. Insights from the Churchill case allow us to trace connections between strategic ritual in news construction and the cultural imperatives
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of media ritual. We observe a fractal-like structure, such that ritualistic punishment as a cultural response is encoded in news text. Finally, we consider the value of a crosslevel analysis in accounting for journalism’s dramaturgical agency in policing dissent in the academy.
An ‘unstable accommodation’ Conceptions of the intellectual abound in social theory, reflecting what Barrow (1990: 10) describes as an ‘unstable accommodation between intellectuals, capitalism and the state’. Whether as priests, teachers, philosophers, or specialists in law, intellectuals offer ‘some especially salient set of normative prescriptions for human and social conduct other than ritual as such’ (Parsons, 1969: 17). Intellectual discourse can be deeply offensive to citizens, particularly during moments of national grieving. Commenting on Churchill’s essay, Fritch et al. (2006: 201) write: Understandably, Americans do not wish to see evil in themselves, and certainly not in the victims of 9/11. They/we resist the very possibility of a (reasoned) account of the tragedy; perhaps this is why we remember the Twin Towers but conveniently forget the Pentagon.
Criticism of intellectuals is not rooted entirely in populist resentment. Said (1993) chastized faculty for sheltering themselves in campus sanctuaries, cushioned by instrumentalism in the topics pursued. Outside the academy, accusations of elitism resonate with particular force when circumstances make salient contradictions between scholars’ self-proclaimed critical function and their desire for privileged status (Robbins, 1993). Molnar (1961) maintained that faculty routinely negotiate between patronage and autonomy, in most case at the latter’s expense. Still, episodes of defiance do occur, and in the present study we consider circumstances in which subversive ideas seep out of the university field and into the space where journalists and academics interact.
Encounters in the academic-media nexus As knowledge workers, journalists, pundits, religious leaders, academics, and independent scholars, among others, are all reasonably classified as ‘intellectuals’ in their accrual of cultural capital (Rowe, 2005). Our theorizing, however, rests on a distinction between journalists in mainstream media and critical academics affiliated with US higher education. Journalists produce news in strategic ways, to deflect criticism from elite sources but also from typical consumers of media (Hallin, 1986; Tuchman, 1978). By contrast, Shils suggests that it is ‘practically given by the nature of the intellectuals’ orientation that there should be some tension between the intellectuals and the value-orientations embodied in the actual institutions of any society’ (1969: 30). Journalism operates at an intellectual deficit in encounters with the academy, yet has the upper hand in shaping how academic labor is presented to the public (Bourdieu, 1996). US scholars have yet to take up the academic-media nexus as a backdrop for journalism in ideological control, but Rowe and Brass (2008) have explored this space in Australia. Universities increasingly seek brand identity through marketing of higher
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education, even as faculty enter the public realm at some peril. ‘There is a pattern of criticism in the media and public sphere of universities for being “out of touch”, disconnected from the “real world” outside the ivory tower, complacently and indulgently oblivious to “ordinary people’s” needs and priorities’ (2008: 677). Absent the pall of blatant anti-intellectualism, faculty labor is still subject to co-opting by way of decontextualization (McGlone, 2005). Ideas understood as provocative in journals or conferences are potentially blasphemous when rendered by journalism (Hoover and Clark, 1997), particularly when media exercise dramaturgical agency as a ‘moralistic and moralizing force’ (Kunelius, 2009: 345).
Dramaturgy of suspicion Dramaturgical possibilities for stirring populist mistrust subsist in any culture preoccupied by an enemy from within. Arthur Miller, for instance, conceived The Crucible (1953) – a dramatization of the Salem witchcraft trials – as an allegory to McCarthyism. In media ritual, the ideological power of journalism arises from its capacity to mobilize resentment through depictions of the subversive intellectual. Mediatized rituals, according to Cottle, ‘are those exceptional and performative media phenomena that serve to sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities on the basis of symbolization and a subjunctive orientation to what should or ought to be’ (2006: 415). This leads us to social drama as a ritual dynamic that might effectively represent journalism’s narrative form and ideological agency in portrayal of academics as subversive, treasonous, and dangerous (Cloud, 2009; King, 2009; Said, 1993). Turner developed social drama while documenting the symbolism of crisis resolution in the Ndembu villages of Zambia. A social drama is comprised of ‘discernible inaugural, transitional, and terminal motifs, that is, a beginning, a middle, and an end’ (1980: 149). In Turner’s four ‘acts’, the first is a rupture in relations; a breach makes evident a deeper division of interests and loyalties than what appears on the surface. Once visible, [a breach] can hardly be revoked. Whatever may be the case, a mounting crisis follows, a momentous juncture or turning point in the relations between components of a social field – at which seeming peace becomes overt conflict and covert antagonisms become visible. (1980: 49)
In the second act, a crisis expands ‘until it coincides with some dominant cleavage in the widest set of relevant social relations’ (1980: 142). The third act is a redress and re-establishment of social relations. Mechanisms of redress can range from interpersonal advice to judicial machinery to fully fledged performance of public ritual. Turner emphasized the liminality of social drama, its betwixt-between subjectivities and indeterminacy of outcome; the redressive phase can break down, returning to crisis. The final act occurs as reintegration – return to the status quo – or recognition of schism and separation, an alteration in social arrangements. The heuristic value of social drama is evident in the range of cases to which it has been deployed in media studies, including mayoral politics (Ettema, 1990), a Christian/ feminist conference (Hoover and Clark, 1997), stadium construction (Bishop, 2001), and
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apology discourse (Kampf, 2011). None of these applications conveys a summoning of suspicion directed against academics, but this literature offers insights about the dramaturgical agency of media in the control of ideas. The Christian conference, held in Minneapolis in 1993, took up the rationale of feminist theology. The unprecedented controversy was explainable in part by conservative critics recognizing how symbols used at the gathering could be deployed to discredit its leaders. However, Hoover and Clark suggest that when the newsworthiness of an event corresponds to ritual structure, conflicting factions evanesce into a larger drama, which transcends ‘the practical realities and actions of the various constituent parts’ (1997: 155). We would add that a correspondence of a situation to ritual structure does not spontaneously evanesce into a larger drama, but is enabled by the dramaturgical agency of journalism. Ettema’s study of ‘the Cokely affair’ in Chicago represents the most explicit effort to link journalism sociology with a cultural understanding of social drama. Steve Cokely, an aide to the mayor, made anti-Semitic remarks in speeches to black nationalists during the spring of 1988, triggering a press rite of discord and healing. In mediation of social drama, Ettema refers to both representation and attempted resolution. Media ‘provide the enactment with its particular symbolic form – its imagery and plotline – and they assemble an audience to witness, and perhaps become involved in, the performance’ (1990: 312).
Methods The present article builds on previous studies that investigated how the Colorado press responded to Churchill. A tenured professor at the University of Colorado (CU), Boulder, Churchill appeared in hundreds of news accounts in 2005 as sympathetic to the 9/11 terrorists. Coverage fixated on one passage in the 5,567-word essay and the ‘little Eichmann’ analogy in particular. We describe below the social drama that unfolded. The first study proposed idea rendering as a form of ideological gatekeeping (McDevitt et al.), whereby journalists pull apart a concept, trope, or other rhetorical element from its connective tissue. De-contextualization isolates and magnifies deviance by tearing away the contextual fabric that makes an assertion worthy of deliberation. We anticipated that local news outlets would be vulnerable to rendering to the extent that proximity amplifies perceptions of deviance and danger, as suggested by structural pluralism (Hindman, 1996). The proximity hypothesis was confirmed in a content analysis of 200 newspapers articles published during the first month of the media frenzy, in January/February 2005. For example, 4.8 percent of Colorado articles conveyed Churchill’s premise that citizens are in denial about suffering caused by US military excursions in the Middle East, compared with 26.5 percent for the non-Colorado press. We interviewed 12 reporters and editors in a second study to document how Colorado journalists made sense of their contributions to Churchill coverage (McDevitt and Klocke, 2008). Transcripts revealed pervasive denial of complicity in de-contextualization. Several reporters blamed editors, and most respondents described readers as eager to see Churchill punished.
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We shifted to textual analysis after recognizing elements of ritual. Rendering, for example, might function to purify deviance and to thereby mobilize the public as witness to some kind of punishment. With Cottle’s typology of media ritual in mind (2006), we adopted social drama for guiding the analysis. Turner emphasized that social drama does not refer merely to genres of storytelling, gossip, and rumor. Social drama embodies social action, a perspective that resonates with cultural approaches to textual analysis, particularly when that method integrates non-media actors. Culture as text itself ‘can have moments of “deep play” … beyond the direct producers’ and audiences’ attentions’ (Fürsich, 2009: 245). Our evidence addresses the following research question: In alignment with other institutions, how did the Denver press contribute to social drama in portraying Churchill’s dissent as deviant, requiring some kind of intervention (i.e. redress)? The Rocky Mountain News closed on 27 February 2009, but the Rocky (circulation 340,000) and The Denver Post (also 340,000) boasted the largest circulations in the Rocky Mountain region as the drama unfolded. Using LexisNexis Academic, we retrieved articles and commentary on Churchill, excluding items fewer than 100 words, from print versions of the Post and Rocky. The study period begins with the essay published online on 12 September 2001 and ends with coverage on 15 July 2009 in response to a ruling against Churchill’s reinstatement following a regent vote to fire him. The search yielded 413 items (news accounts, opinion columns, and editorials). Figure 1 maps the time span, major events, and coverage associated with breach, crisis, redress, and separation. The chronology that follows recognizes a reverberating dynamic in the representation and performance of social drama, rather than a linear progression.
The case of Ward Churchill Act I: Breach Churchill hammered out an essay within hours of the 9/11 attacks. An ethnic-studies scholar and Native American activist, he would later describe the polemic as his ‘gut reaction’ to motives for the attack. King and deYoung (2008) argue that the essay’s theme was not unique in claiming that the attacks were a result of US foreign policy; several authors by early 2005 had challenged the frame advanced by President George W. Bush, of ‘a monumental struggle of good versus evil’ (Bush, 2001). What does separate the Churchill counterframe from all others that began emerging in 2005, however, is its transgressive nature. In Churchill’s narrative, it is not just US political leaders and their policies, or, for that matter, the nation-state who are responsible for the September 11 attacks but all ordinary Americans who like ‘good Germans’ gleefully ‘cheered’ the devastating effects of those policies. (2001: 127)
Churchill apparently did not breach norms in the academic culture – or in the online world of leftist activism – however incendiary the Eichmann comparison was to so many. His invective sat like a delayed explosive for more than three years, illustrating how the transgression required journalistic agency for the breach to become visible to a large
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Figure 1. Number of Churchill articles per week in Colorado newspapers during social drama
audience. This is shown in Figure 1 with the breach phase accompanied by no news coverage.
Act II: Crisis In January 2005, with Churchill scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in New York, a professor of government forwarded the essay to an editor of the student newspaper. The frantic coverage that ensued fixated on Churchill’s little Eichmanns reference. Churchill confronts the idea of American innocence while assigning collective guilt to the ‘technocratic corps’ (stockbrokers and others) of empire, far removed from the consequences of their actions that result in the ‘starved and rotting flesh of infants’. He ends the passage with: ‘If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.’ A firestorm leapt across media venues, from an initial Associated Press story on 26 January 2005 to cable news networks, newspapers in Colorado and New York, and talk radio. A Rocky editorial stated flatly: ‘The University of Colorado employs an apologist for mass murder as a professor of ethnic studies, but we can’t say we’re terribly surprised’ (28 January 2005). The media glare forced Churchill to issue a press release on 31 January to explain that he is not a defender of the 9/11 attacks, and that he was not characterizing children, service workers, and firemen who died as little Eichmanns. Churchill’s effort to re-situate the reference in a banality-of-evil thesis appeared futile against a tide of de-contextualization (McDevitt et al., 2006).
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On 1 February Hamilton canceled Churchill’s appearance, citing death threats. That same day, according to CU President Elizabeth Hoffman, Colorado Governor Bill Owens made ‘a short and threatening phone call’ telling her to ‘fire Churchill tomorrow’ (Cardona, 2009: B-01). Two days later, CU regents authorized an examination of Churchill’s writings and speeches (Figure 1). On 21 February CU launched a review of instructors’ files to identify faculty who had not signed ‘loyalty oaths’. Contributing to a leitmotif of crisis, the Rocky and Post produced 81 news accounts during the initial month of the frenzy. Including commentary, the papers published an average of four items per day.
Act III: Redress Judging by the heft of news attention, the crisis dissipated soon after a faculty committee found Churchill guilty of research misconduct in May 2006. Crisis and redress overlap to a great extent, as the examples above illustrate. On the other hand, the shift from crisis to redress is distinct in that it could be seen as a blending of the symbolic with the pragmatics of punishment, as the governor, regents, and others manipulated ‘the machinery of redress’ (Turner, 1980: 152). We did not see in the Churchill case the reflexivity observed by Ettema. In a liminal moment, Chicago ‘journalists spewed out all sorts of hypotheses and considered many modes of explanation that they would ordinarily exclude from political reportage’ (1990: 327). By contrast, results from our first study suggest that the Colorado press was unwilling to pursue redress through deliberation (McDevitt et al., 2006). Content analysis revealed a persistent pattern of reporters extracting ‘little Eichmann’ from its banality-of evil context. Denver newspapers did, however, appear to enter a liminal phase, as evident in the loosening of professional norms associated with a restrained objectivity. The staggering volume of coverage, rampant de-contextualization, and strident commentary reflected opportunism, if not a predatory instinct. As discussed below, these practices are not comfortably contained within a conventional understanding of strategic ritual. The Rocky was known as the more conservative of the Denver dailies, and it devoted more resources to the Churchill affair, publishing 56 news articles during the first month; the Post published 25. The attention the Rocky gave to the controversy at key moments suggests a de facto intervention into the academic field, or at least a concentrated effort to influence how CU would proceed. An abbreviated timeline, while not suggesting causality, shows the interplay of Denver newspapers and CU in redress leading to separation: • 29 January 2005: Post editorial: ‘If Churchill is so out of sync with the chancellor and the campus … why is he chairing an academic department at the University of Colorado?’ • 31 January 2005: WC resigns as chair of Ethnic Studies. • 2 February 2005: Rocky editorial calls for firing WC. • 5 February 2005: Post offers legal grounds for firing. • June 2005: Rocky investigates charges of research misconduct, judging WC guilty. • 16 June 2005: Rocky reports that CU is expanding its investigation to include allegations discussed in the paper’s two-month investigation. • 24 July 2007: Regents vote to fire WC.
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Act IV: Reintegration/separation In our reading of the drama, the final act commences with the regents’ vote. There was a bit of drama still to unfold, however, when a jury ruled that the regents had, in fact, fired Churchill in retaliation for ideas expressed in the essay. A Denver district judge ultimately denied Churchill’s request for his position back. Issued on 7 July 2009, the ruling argued that reinstatement would give the impression that CU tolerates research misconduct. Social dramas embody social action, and in the Churchill case the modes of separation were conducted by academic and judicial institutions. Nonetheless, the symbolic structuring of crisis and redress imply that media had unambiguously classified Churchill as an enemy from within, suggesting that symbolic separation preceded – and perhaps facilitated – actual separation. Three years prior to the ruling, a Rocky editorial apparently put CU administrators on notice: ‘Unless University of Colorado officials harbor a secret death wish for their institution, Ward Churchill will never teach another class in Boulder’ (17 May 2006). As early as 3 February 2005, editorial cartoons marked a transfiguration of the treasonous professor into an object of mockery. The Post portrayed a dwarf Churchill, suspended from a playground swing, his motion propelled by tantrum; a bubble caption contains no words, but a garbage can spewing fumes (Keefe, 2005).
Encoding of social drama Up to this point, we have described media ritual primarily at the level of culture and ideology. Ultimately, we want to comprehend how social drama also works at an occupational level, within the logic of defensive ritual. Following Ehrlich (1996), we believe that a cross-level analysis is overdue in scholarship of media ritual, which tends to follow one of two tracks: strategic protocols and tactics in organizational sociology, or media performance on behalf of cultural imperatives. A cross-level approach allows for the possibility of journalism acting somewhat autonomously in policing ideational dissent, in ways that serve its strategic interests. One can imagine religious and secular institutions responding to intellectual provocations in instrumental ways, supportive, suppressive or both, depending on their motives and epistemological orientations. In the case of media, social drama provides journalism with a symbolic form for representing dissent without deliberating with it, distancing reporters from transgressive ideas. This cross-level heuristic, however, begs the question as to how social drama – conceived as a cultural construct – is encoded in the micro context of news production. The Churchill drama suggests three elements of encoding: projection of ritualistic punishment, reification of a punitive public, and subsequent rendering of academic labor to clarify deviance.
Projection Tuchman described newsmaking as social action ‘cast into the future in order to accomplish acts that will have happened, should everything go as anticipated’ (1978: 41). In media ritual, projection encompasses a dynamic of journalistic cue taking and cue
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giving. The former involves an intra-journalism norm for anticipating story arc (i.e. narrative structure) and story potential (i.e. magnitude). Cue giving refers to relationships between journalism and other actors invested in social drama. By providing ritual ‘its imagery and plotline’ (Ettema, 1990: 312), media establish a symbolic structure primed for exploitation by opportunists. Table 1 illustrates the cue-taking/cue-giving dynamic; we duplicate the initial 10 leads from both newspapers. Crisis components are shown underlined; redress and anticipated separation are indicated in bold. In the Post’s first lead (28 January 2005), two congressmen demanded an apology from a professor (redress) for ‘comparing victims … to Nazis’ (crisis). Atmospherics of crisis are conveyed in boilerplate descriptions of Churchill as ‘controversial’ and ‘embattled’; in standardized extraction of the Eichmann bit; and in references to a ‘firestorm’ (RMN, 2 February) and ‘threats of violence’ (DP, 8 February). Churchill is met by ‘wild’ applause, declaring he would ‘never back down’ (DP, 9 February). A fractal encoding emerges, such that Turner’s symbolic structure is already present, implicitly, in the initial wave of text. Many of the leads can be read as a microcosm of what would transpire in the years to come. Media sociology accommodates the premise that social drama can arise organically in textual encoding without purposeful coordination, due to journalists internalizing cultural norms for legitimate and deviant discourse. Table 1. Encoding of social drama in initial wave of newspaper leads (2005) The Denver Post
Rocky Mountain News
28 January Two Colorado congressmen demanded Thursday that a University of Colorado professor apologize for comparing victims of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack to Nazis.
27 January University of Colorado professor has sparked controversy in New York over an essay he wrote that maintains that people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were not innocent victims. 28 January For a man who has weathered anonymous death threats telephoned to his home, the latest turmoil is comparatively tame.
31 January Regents at the University of Colorado have called a special meeting Thursday over concerns about a professor who likened victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to a manager of the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews. 2 February Hamilton College in New York has cancelled the panel discussion featuring University of Colorado ethnicstudies professor Ward Churchill, citing dozens of threats to the college and members of the panel. 3 February The Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians said Wednesday that University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill is an associate member of the tribe but not a full member, which requires a person to have at least one-fourth Cherokee blood.
29 January Hamilton College will likely expand the size of next week’s panel featuring controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, in the wake of heavy public criticism concerning his upcoming appearance. 31 January The University of Colorado Board of Regents has called a special meeting Thursday to discuss the views of Ward Churchill, a professor who says people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were not innocent victims.
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Rocky Mountain News
3 February A University of Colorado regent says the board won’t fire controversial ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill when it meets today, despite urgent calls for his termination from lawmakers at the Capitol and Gov. Bill Owens. 4 February University of Colorado regents on Thursday apologized to ‘all Americans’ for remarks an ethnic-studies professor made comparing victims of the 9/11 attacks to a Nazi leader.
1 February Embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill resigned his chairmanship of the school’s ethnic studies program Monday.
6 February Top state and University of Colorado officials say more radical comments by professor Ward Churchill calling for the United States to be put ‘out of existence’ and saying that more ‘9/11s are necessary’ should be included in a review of whether to fire the controversial professor. 8 February Citing threats of violence, University of Colorado officials canceled a speech scheduled for today by controversial professor Ward Churchill. 9 February Met by wild applause Tuesday night from hundreds of supporters, controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill strongly attacked Gov. Bill Owens and the CU Board of Regents and said he would never back down from his comparison of some 9/11 victims to Nazi Adolf Eichmann. 10 February University of Colorado officials reviewing Ward Churchill’s writings and qualifications will find questions about his scholarship and accuracy dating back at least eight years.
2 February Europeans stole a continent from American Indians, and they treat the rest of the world the same way. That’s the theme to which University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill has returned repeatedly in writings over the past 25 years. 2 February Gov. Bill Owens called on Ward Churchill to quit Tuesday as the embattled University of Colorado professor returned to the classroom for the first time since he became the center of what has become a political firestorm. 2 February Will the real Ward Churchill please stand up? Almost everything about Churchill seems to be in dispute – from whether he really is an American Indian to the value of his scholarship. 3 February The United Keetoowah Band Cherokee says University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill is not a member of their tribe.
3 February University of Colorado regents seem united on one thing: They abhor what ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill had to say about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Note: underline – crisis; bold – redress/separation
Fractal encoding implies a narrative structure that transcends the individual intentions of reporters and editors. In some respects, the same structure is observable when zooming back, from leads to stories to aggregate patterns. The volume of coverage during key moments reflects Fürsich’s observation that text ‘takes on a life of its own’ in moments of ‘deep play’ (2009: 245). We should look, then, for meta-textual evidence that might
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capture journalism’s instinctual response to deviance exposed. Returning to Figure 1, the temporal distribution of articles resembles ‘news waves’, signifying peaks in volume tied to important events (Carter et al., 2011). An initial crest corresponds with commencement of crisis and redress; separation corresponds to a final crest associated with the trial for wrongful termination.
Reification Reification of a punitive public aligns media with populist sentiment, distancing journalists from academic dissent while casting audiences as active participants in social drama. By representing a public unwilling to engage substantive ideas, yet justifiably angry, journalism legitimizes an anti-deliberative response along the way. MacGregor describes this process as channeling a public mentality ‘that is condoned through the anti-intellectualism of its techniques’ (2009: 231). In the Churchill case, reification of a post-9/11, offended, and wounded public provides a subtext for the initial wave of leads (Table 1). Leads that incorporate redress or anticipated separation refer to legislators demanding an apology, regents calling a special meeting, and Hamilton canceling a panel – actions at once redressive and non-deliberative. This conception of reification is in some respects compatible with the protest paradigm, whereby journalists deploy micro-descriptive depictions of public opinion to convey consensus (Boyle et al., 2004). Reporters describe bystanders of street protests as symbols of public reaction to protestors, similar to how a chorus performed in ancient Greek theatre (McLeod and Hertog, 1992). The protest paradigm, however, is not designed to explain control of intellectual deviance – i.e. deviance as an abstraction – because of its reliance on the portrayal of unruly behavior. From our dramaturgical perspective, depictions of the citizenry are ultimately in service to idea suppression.
Rendering Rendering entails destruction of the internal cohesion of an argument through decontextualization, thereby distilling deviance in pure form for the purpose of ritualistic punishment. Turner explains that rituals are ‘designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interests’ (1972: 1100). Purification of deviance thereby summons ‘a mobilization of energies’. In media ritual, journalism contributes to purification through rendering. As evident in the content analysis described earlier (McDevitt et al., 2006), the Colorado press had trafficked in contextomy, which entails de-contextualization followed by re-contextualization in violation of an author or speaker’s intent (McGlone, 2005). Contextomy can be seen as functional in control of the intellect. An argument – crafted with dynamic interconnections among ideas – is rendered as an object of deviance, reconstituted for ease of packaging, and prepared for public consumption in ritualistic sacrifice. In interviews conducted for the second study, reporters insisted that the Eichmann reference was the only newsworthy aspect of the essay. This perception could be explained as a conflation of de-contextualization with essentialism – a seemingly
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virtuous effort to get at the nut of a story. Almost immediately in news coverage, the essay faded from view, as if Churchill’s breach was some kind of gaffe. A Post lead on 4 February 2005 reports that regents apologized ‘for remarks’ made by an ethnicstudies professor. To summarize: the fractal structure of encoded text functions as an implicit script, projecting into the future a performance of media and non-media actors in social drama. Reification and rendering further guide newsmaking in the cultural work of social control.
Discussion This study is confined to the interplay of mainstream news media and critical academic discourse that challenges core, cultural beliefs. For example, news outlets such as The Nation and Slate contextualized Churchill’s ideas and defended the principle of academic freedom. We should also note that many intellectuals, inside and outside of higher education, criticized Churchill’s abrasive style and substantive ideas. With these limitations in mind, the academic-media nexus could be viewed as a liminal space, where journalists encounter ideas and discourse hovering between accepted expertise and deviance. Academic dissent is consequently combustible in news practices depending on the ideological climate. While the public might judge a great deal of academic labor to be subversive, disloyal, or even dangerous, in most cases this work fails to meet conventional criteria for newsworthiness in mainstream media. The Churchill affair is thereby instructive by revealing a strategy of idea suppression through social drama. Beyond the academic-media nexus, media ritual can more generally represent a tactical response to obtrusive dissent, enacted by journalism when provocations are not easily or simply ignored through routine gatekeeping. This might occur, for example, when individuals or institutions – usually ignored or assumed to be in allegiance with normative belief – are exposed by media as guilty of a breach.
Strategic ritual as a cultural construct Journalism’s instinctual alignment with normative ideology is a reoccurring theme in approaches such as news waves (Carter et al., 2011), indexing (Bennett and Livingston, 2003), and cultural approaches to framing (Lewis and Reese, 2009). Similarly, we assert that news media demonstrate ideological allegiance through ritualistic performance. We believe the present study, however, represents the first attempt to capture, in observable practice, what is meant by a self-protective instinct in journalism’s response to ideational dissent. We are not arguing that ‘news as strategic ritual’, Tuchman’s foundational insight, is somehow flawed or inoperative in cultural practice. Instead, we are concerned with those practices, not identified by Tuchman, that arise as a strategic response to ideational deviance. Rendering, for example, arguably entails a more adversarial tactic than the protocols identified by Tuchman (e.g. balancing partisan views, relying on verifiable facts). A culturally enhanced strategic ritual more aptly describes textual encoding in the punishment of intellectual dissent.
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Journalism’s strategic orientation in social drama helps to explain a simultaneous fixation on, and yet distancing from, subversive ideas. From an instrumental perspective, textual encoding of social drama crystallized a rational strategy in response to risks and rewards presented by Churchill. Fractal encoding could be viewed as tactical in the short term, guiding reporters and editors in the day-to-day treatment of deviant ideas, while a strategy becomes visible across time, in the progression of social drama. The first element of encoding, projection, constitutes a dynamic of cue taking within journalism – and cue giving to other actors – such that plotlines, themes, and events are aligned in internal coherence. Reification portrays the demos as spontaneously engaged while rendering ensures an impression of the public justifiably outraged. Thus, we view mediatization of social drama as journalism at work in maintaining cultural hegemony by foreclosing on deliberation. Projection, reification, and rendering guide journalism in a culturally conscripted performance, such that the logic of newsmaking conforms to the logic of social control. Churchill’s incendiary ideas consequently found burning material in professional incentives at play in textual production. We are not advocating a blending of Tuchman’s strategic ritual and Turner’s social drama, but rather retaining a productive tension across levels of analysis. This allows for a dialectic consideration of the extent to which journalism is an autonomous agent of idea suppression within a larger, cultural context. For example, one might propose that marginalization of dissent in strategic ritual requires an organizational, journalismcentric perspective, even as social drama provides a symbolic structure for exploitation by non-media actors in recognizing a breach, amplifying crisis, and pursuing forms of redress and separation. Media ritual protects (and might enhance) the ideological status of journalism within a larger, cultural dynamic of mobilized sentiment and symbolization (Cottle, 2006). In this view, journalism provides added impetus to idea suppression beyond cultural expectations for that function. If so, our description above, of media enacting a conscripted role, would instead characterize the performance as opportunistic. News media would then act as a regressive force against a culture’s capacity for tolerating dissent. Future research should consider whether media ritual embodies a distinct form of social control in response to critical academic discourse. We have in mind strategic professionalism, which refers to practices of encoding that exploit ideas in ways that enhance the cultural capital of journalism while policing intellectual labor. Strategic professionalism incorporates the instrumentalism of media ritual as described above, but also presumes that the craft of textual encoding renders ideas in ways that effectively exploit reservoirs of anti-rationalism and anti-elitism (Hofstadter, 1963). The textual encoding of media ritual, on the other hand, could apply beyond the academic-media nexus to breaches committed by other journalists, pundits, religious leaders, and actors more broadly categorized as intellectuals. For example, leaving higher education behind, consider normative medical practice. White (2009) chronicled the moral panic that accompanied coverage of Dr Jack Kevorkian, an early advocate of physician-assisted suicide. In our reading of the study, anticipation of ritualistic punishment (projection) appeared operable in amplifying deviance of Kevorkian and his ‘suicide machine’.
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Textual encoding of media ritual is also recognizable in responses to public figures not conventionally viewed as intellectuals. Social drama might describe what Bill Maher experienced shortly after the 9/11 attacks when, as host of the ABC talk show Politically Incorrect, he argued that the hijackers were not cowards. Suggestions for redress, following the breach, included the White House press secretary warning that all Americans ‘need to watch what they say and watch what they do’ (Telnaes, 2004: 28). We would argue, nonetheless, that journalism’s strategic response to breaches in the academic-media nexus is distinct in some respects from how media might subject a nonacademic to frenzied coverage. While many remarks and sound bites are raw material for contextomy (McGlone, 2005), rendering as the control of ideas is more systematic when an extracted bit is embedded in a body of academic work, or situated within an entire intellectual paradigm. Higher education is also distinct from other contexts in which breaches arise in the thematic projection that might occur, as when media ritual circulates memes of the dangerous, subversive, and treasonous professor (Cloud, 2009). Redress in the academic-media nexus implicates perhaps most clearly what is at stake in populist challenges to intellectual autonomy. Who draws the boundaries for acceptable discourse? What journalists might consider a breach occurs regularly in seminars, conferences, and published papers. Journalism’s ideological agency is evident in its capacity to transform an abstract provocation into a socio-cultural breach, and to rapidly marshal a crisis. The Churchill case suggests that a crisis atmosphere justifies a journalistic intervention into university affairs as one form of redress. In the Colorado drama, Churchill was destined for separation, and we mean this literally, with his job and tenure stripped away. Journalism’s hand in the resolution was evident in a ritualistic structure in which symbolic separation preceded the legal outcome. Ritualistic representation of populist sentiment constitutes, we believe, a largely unrecognized yet formidable expression of journalism’s cultural authority in the policing of deviant ideas. Kunelius argues that while elite sources retain control over expert knowledge, largely setting the agendas of public life, journalists ‘control the genres that frame the style of the flow’ (2009: 343) Echoing Bourdieu, he predicts escalating tension between expert systems and media as journalism exercises dramaturgical agency. The domain in which media and the academy meet, consequently, represents a nexus ripe for future explorations into how journalism exercises cultural authority by fixing public attention on intellectual provocations.
Implications for the academic-media nexus While not directly concerned with ritual, Brass and Rowe (2009) describe a shift in the academic-media nexus, a reconfiguration marked by risk management; an increasing self-consciousness in promoting university brands; and ‘media policies’ to regulate faculty comment. The nexus is thereby structured by a synergy of defensive practices, with university risk avoidance supported by the objectivity norms that distance journalism from offensive ideas. We consequently propose the following as a research question for future study: To what extent has strategic practice enveloped the nexus, bonding media and university tactics in ways that ensure ideological gatekeeping?
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Coupled with Posner’s decline of the public intellectual (2001), strategic communication could be interpreted as universities avoiding interaction with the public on ideologically charged issues because the risk of backlash is too great to justify foreseeable benefits. To the extent that journalism mediates the relationship between the public and academics, this interplay brings unacceptable risks. One might reasonably speculate that if faculty could communicate more directly with citizens, without fear of exploitation, a healthier relationship with the public would be possible. The Colorado case might represent a tour de force of media prowess, but journalism is incapable of predatory ritual independent of other institutions. Churchill’s essay challenged the absolutism of American innocence, and this compelled a tactical response from both media and the academy. The academic-media nexus, consequently, is arguably unique in the way that media ritual aligns social control across domains of knowledge work (Rowe, 2005). Turner reminds us that during dramas in which reintegration fails, relationships among parties will change; ‘new power will have been channeled into old and new authority’ (1974: 42). In the punishment of deviance observed here, media status in reaffirming boundaries for tolerable discourse seems to have been raised in conjunction with a foreclosing of deliberation, leaving in doubt the viability of dissent in the space where mainstream journalism and the academy meet. Acknowledgements The authors thank Cara Bottjen for the design of Figure 1 and the anonymous reviewers for valuable suggestions on earlier drafts.
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Biographical notes Michael McDevitt is Associate Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research interests include political socialization, political communication, and media sociology. McDevitt publishes in journals in communication, media studies, political science, and education. He is working on Where Ideas Go to Die, a book on anti-intellectualism in American journalism. Marco Briziarelli is a Communication doctoral candidate in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His areas of specialization are critical and cultural approaches to media, political economy of media, and media and terrorism. Briziarelli publishes in journals in critical media studies. His dissertation is on the communicative practices of the Red Brigades. Brian Klocke is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. His research areas include media sociology, ideological and framing studies, social movements, moral panics, and gender studies.
