COLUMN: Unreliable narration in news

From Michael Pereira's, "Vox", Fall '97 From Michael Pereira's, "Vox", Fall '97You might recognize the god Ganesha by his elephant head. According to Hindu mythology, his large ears and elephantine snout enhance his taste for stories of all sorts. He hears them and sniffs them out in the strangest places. No surprise, then, that Ganesha agrees to take down the whole text of the Mahabharata, while the tireless bard Vyasa relates episode after episode. The labors of our devoted stenographer now bear the dust and legitimacy of accumulated centuries. But his process is as fresh as ink on the morning editions. News in all its modern forms must be our answer to the hoary process of mythology. Our world has outgrown the oral tradition and the morality play. They take too long; the passions they embody are too discrete for the cloyed consumer. Instead, we have modern media -- newspaper, magazines, TV news, internet (speaking chronologically) -- gossip cum legitimacy to simulate variations on a static theme. Seeing, as they say, is believing. The printed word contains an undeniable authority on the face of the Old Gray Lady. Videos on the evening news take you from burning buildings in West Philadelphia to bombed-out arms plants in northern Iraq. And you don't have to leave your Lay-Z-Boy recliner! The world seems to come to you effortlessly, like a TV dinner neatly separated into distinct plastic compartments. Something creeps in between the event and its representation, but like the worm at the bottom of your tenth tequila, it passes unnoticed. A margin of error exists beside every story, containing the simultaneous history of inference and suggestion. News is an entertainment. News therefore, is in part a fiction. Nor do the places of news production pretend to deny it: we the public get "all the news that's fit to print." But who decides what's fit or not? In sum, news is a narration of the day to day; but the narrator, or the plinth of narration below superstructure of power, is unreliable. The story of events is necessarily disjointed and incomplete; but many still imbibe the news indiscriminately, reading the message with same disinterested gaze that takes in Seinfeld and car commercials. The narration of news requires a different kind of reading: a close reading, as they say, between the lines. The news is pocked-marked with omissions and elisions; the duty of the curious reader is to locate those inconsistencies, and if possible, to fill them in. A disturbing example of unreliable narration in news comes from our own school newspaper.Roughly a week and a half ago, a story appeared on the DP's front page describing the abduction of a college freshman and his unwilling tour of West Philly, stopping at various MAC machines and terminating at the charming intersection of 52nd and Market streets ("Student claims assailants kidnapped, robbed him," DP, 11/17/97). The eerie, Kafkaesque geography of the story arrested even casual readers: how did the assailants get our hero into their car without a weapon? Or did they indeed have a weapon? And how did the abducted freshman forget his personal identification number at the first MAC machine, but suddenly remember it at the subsequent two? Of course, there's the shock factor, which may help explain events. Abductions of various sorts, as any student of extra-terrestrial issues will tell you, are often accompanied by a painful amnesia. On a mundane level, getting picked up and robbed can be a shocking experience; only the hardest-boiled urbanite could possibly keep his wits about him in such circumstances. But then, such a thick-skinned soul wouldn't willingly get in a car? unless faced with incontestable means of persuasion. Which brings us back to the first line of inquiry: Did the assailants have a gun? What then can we possibly glean from the episode? Alas, very little that we did not already know. The news has holes that need caulking and our town is unsafe. Then, as if in answer to the question marks in the wake of the episode, College senior James McCormack was shot in the abdomen in a failed car jacking on 42nd and Pine Street while one of the University Police Special Response Teams was a half-block away. The horrors implicit in the unexplained abduction were realized in the shooting; the subtext of the former came out loud and bold on next day's front page. "While 34 of the robberies in 1996 involved a gun only 22 of this year's robberies were armed -- a drop of 35 percent," said another DP article ("Most crimes decrease from fall 1996," DP, 11/20/97). But numbers will do little to assuage the unresolved tension in and around campus. Aggravated assaults, according to that same article, have almost trebled last fall's numbers. In a word, things are not getting better, only more violent. And we seem to be getting used to it. McCormack's shooting has not attracted the public outcry that last fall's shooting of then-College senior Patrick Leroy produced. But it should. Who's to blame? Besides the perps, those people that contain certain stories as too unwholesome for the public palate.