Media coverage replaces lived events, reducing people to walk-on roles.

Evidence

For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. Since these tacitly agreed-upon rules serve efficiently to reduce an unmanageable reality into “news” or “stories,” and since the media strive to reach the same audience which they believe is ruled by a uniform set of assumptions about reality, the picture of Islam (and of anything else, for that matter) is likely to be quite uniform, in some ways reductive, and monochromatic. It ought to go without saying that the media are profit-seeking corporations and therefore, quite understandably, have an interest in promoting some images of reality rather than others. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 178 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Robert Darnton has described these matters very engagingly in his essay “Writing News and Telling Stories,” so much so that he makes us acutely sensitive not only to the reporter’s working reality but to such things as “the symbiosis as well as antagonisms that grow up between a reporter and his sources,” the pressures of “standardizing and stereotyping,” and the way in which reporters “bring more to the events they cover than they take away from them.” — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 181 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: News conventions and profit motive reduce complex reality to uniform stories. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the…, 178; Reporters impose their internalized frameworks on the events they cover. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the…, 181

Broader Connections

• News conventions and profit motive reduce complex reality to uniform stories. #corroborates (0.90) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 178
• Reporters impose their internalized frameworks on the events they cover. #expands (0.82) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 181