Male Power Elite - media spin on women in the news - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Dec, 2000

LOSING EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO FRAME STORIES

Why do some stories--like the O.J. Simpson trial, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Supreme Court nomination hearings, or the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky sex scandal--run on for months and even years, while other, ostensibly more important issues hardly get noticed by the news media? Many would say the press panders to the masses or gives in to sensational journalism, but Robin Tolmach Lakoff, professor of linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, has a more discerning answer, one that places these and several big stories of recent years at the crux of a major national struggle over who gets to say what things mean in American culture.

"These stories are battles in the war to control meaning between groups that already have the power to interpret reality, middle-class white men, and those struggling to get the power, women and blacks," she suggests. They last because "in addition to being gossipy and salacious, they are deep and convoluted. We know that something we need to understand is playing out before our eyes. We use these stories to explore the hardest questions we have to face, often about race and gender."

She argues that the long-established power elite dominated by white males has given events their meaning for so long that its version--its ways of creating a narrative and interpreting its meaning--has become "normal" reality. However, "we are currently engaged in a great and not very civil war, testing whether the people who always got to make meaning for all of us still have that unilateral right and that capacity."

The answer seems to be no, Lakoff maintains. There is no longer just one story. Several equally plausible versions may be told by different groups of people. During the Thomas/Hill hearings, for example, women succeeded in establishing the reality and importance of sexual harassment, while Thomas had his own point about the sexual exploitation of a black man. Where was the real story? Had Thomas harassed Hill, or had she been put up to her accusations by those seeking a "high-tech lynching"? No one could legitimately frame the narrative for all.

The same was true a decade later during Pres. Clinton's impeachment, when conservatives, feminists, and men and women of all persuasions offered different perspectives. Heroes and villains crossed over and merged. Ambiguity was the order of the day.

There was the "Clinton as philanderer" story of a president who either should or should not be brought down. In a very different vein, the "Starr witch-hunt" story turned on misogyny and anti-sexuality. All the while, media storytellers imbued the antagonists with bizarre and unsympathetic traits: Clinton as sex-crazed and a liar; independent counsel Kenneth Starr as puritanical and monomaniacal. On television, these two men appeared to be cooperative and rational, allowing the public to make even more narratives.

In the stories spun around the First Couple and their personalities lie some of the most complicated, convoluted meanings of all, Lakoff points out. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in particular, occupies a "huge swath" of public attention and gets a "strikingly different" kind of media attention than have previous first ladies. "Images of her are remarkably diverse, ranging from strongly adulatory to ferociously critical; they represent her as a person of wildly different personalities, doing and saying what it is hard to imagine a single individual doing or saying."

Lakoff contends that the First Lady has so far been able to resist interpretation. "She has always found ways, either direct or subversive, of retaining control over her own narrative, her own meaning. I believe this is, to some degree, deliberate. She's a new woman, and she doesn't want the guys in power to tell her what she's about." Nevertheless, they try. "We are continually constructing her. `What does she mean when she says....?' Is she a pushy, aggressive bitch or someone who wants to do good things? Does Hillary make her own story, or does [New York Times columnist] Maureen Dowd do it?"

Lakoff says women have been subjected to polarized interpretations in the media because, until recently, they have had little ability to create public meaning. As a result, they continue to be seen through a male prism. "A man in public life doesn't have to stand for all men. We don't polarize his traits, don't demonize him. He is allowed to be more human."

She does not offer the nation's audience any reassurance that public narratives will become less confused. "After 30 years of skirmishes, no clear winner in the language war has emerged." The dominant male power structure has lost exclusive rights to frame the story, leaving the nation with antagonisms and unresolved jealousies that carry over from one event to another. "Maybe we will learn to appreciate our different voices and work together to create a new understanding, and maybe we won't."