The Media’s Role in Shaping Our Perceptions

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

As a news junkie I watch various all-news channels religiously, mostly BBC World News, CTV News Channel, and CBC News Network.

What these networks all have in common, since they have to fill up so much airtime, is making use of various “experts” and “analysts” who comment on the news stories being reported. 

These people are usually academics or else affiliated with the seemingly limitless number of “think tanks,” with fancy names that usually include words like global, international, development, governance, progress, rights, democratic, and so on.

They select these “talking heads” to provide the proper “analysis” so that viewers will absorb the news “correctly.”

The proliferation of this type of reporting is an insidious way of shaping, and often altering, the “narrative.”

Two Americans, Joseph P. Overton and Daniel C. Hallin, came up with theories for the way this works.  

A senior vice president of the Mackinac Centre in Michigan, Overton described the political strategy that later became known as the Overton Window.

It is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. He states that politically unpopular, unacceptable views, if they are to be enacted into law, must be transformed into politically acceptable policies. 

That’s because politicians generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as “legitimate” policy options.

So these views are often first disseminated through the media as well as by educational institutions and other civil society organizations.

Hallin, a communications professor at the University of California in San Diego, posits a theory which has come to be known as Hallin’s Spheres.

Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. 

The sphere of consensus is the inner circle, the place in which most people, including journalists, tend to agree.

The sphere of “legitimate” controversy includes the questions within the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral.

Then we have deviance, which falls outside the bounds of journalistic conversation and which journalists can ignore or even denounce.

Here, they depart from standard norms of objective reporting and treat as marginal, dangerous, or ridiculous individuals and groups who fall outside a range of views taken as legitimate.

Hallin used the concept of framing to describe the presentation and reception of issues in public. He also wrote about an opinion corridor, in which the range of public opinion narrows, and opinion outside that corridor moves from legitimate controversy into deviance.

This, in inconspicuous ways, is how ideology gets disseminated and eventually becomes the “normal,” in other words hegemonic, way of perceiving the world. Thinking outside that box becomes lonely and sometimes even dangerous.

Since Hallin assumes a sliding scale of legitimate political conversation, yesterday’s mainstream ideas may today be considered completely out of bounds, while the reverse is also true. Moving the needle in a certain direction is an apt metaphor.

Politicians and intellectuals find this out at their peril, when someone discovers something they wrote or said a few decades earlier, but which has since become “politically incorrect.”

This often derails their careers, and they retroactively become toxic, as the zeitgeist shifts, sometimes with surprising speed, in what we may describe as cultural revolutions.