Film examines Daily Mail 'diet' | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited In the footsteps of Supersize Me, a documentary-maker has attempted to find out whether we are what we read by giving up all news sources except the Daily Mail.

For 28 days, Nick Angel screened out all television, radio, print and online news sources except for the middle market tabloid.

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Mr Angel said: “It’s important to know what the Mail thinks, because it’s a lightning rod (or so it claims) to ‘Middle England’ - that ill-defined and slightly scary mass of people whose various incarnations include the ‘Moral Majority’ and ‘All Right Thinking People’.

I don’t know if Nick Angel realizes it, but he’s in good academic company. An entire field of inquiry called Critical Discourse Analysis (previously Critical Linguistics) is devoted to investigating the overt and covert vision of the media and other forms of public discourse. And like him, they face a potential pitfall, in some of the assumptions of conceptual inevitability as opposed to conceptual autonomy. The title and inspiration of Mr. Angel’s work (I haven’t seen it yet so I can only speculate on the details; but I doubt I’m far off in guessing) is very telling. It starts with an interesting conceptual blend (metaphor) of food and news. Food provides nutrition and nourishment to the body but the wrong composition can have adverse effects on the body. We (our body) have no control over the effects of what we ingest. We can only make choices about what we eat. If news (and information in general) is like that, than we are completely powerless against propaganda. That is quite obviously not true and neither CDA nor Nick Angel would claim that. These people read the Daily Mail professionally and it doesn’t “poison” their minds. If it did, they would stop doing what they are doing and start writing for The Daily Mail. But the implication of this metaphor (blend) is strongly in the direction of strong influences (particularly over ‘casual’, ‘non-critical’ readers) that hold their audience in a kind of a thrall.

Another Guardian correspondent, Peter Cole, a professor of journalism at the University of Sheffield, (who otherwise does a good job of looking at the vision of the Daily Mail) summarizes the picture in this way:

Why middle England gets the Mail | Media | MediaGuardian.co.uk most of their readers restrict themselves to one paper a day, and find references there to what other papers are saying of little relevance. These readers tend to regard their chosen paper as objective and unbiased and have prejudices against other papers based frequently on never having read them.

Here are two quotes from Teun van Dijk's 1991 Racism in the Press:

"the manufacture of consent, also through the Dutch Press, is such that the people have the illusion of freedom of opinion, but they do not realize how strongly ideological constraints set the latitude of attitude formation and the terms of the public debate." (p. 243)

“media as a whole define the internal structures, the points of relevance, and especially the ideological boundaries of social representations. They provide the ready-made [DL] models, that is, the facts and opinions, that people use partly in what to think, but more important which they also used in devising how to think about ethnic affairs.” (p. 244)

However, even van Dijk would admit (and his research shows) that there is a lot of variety of opinion and a significant level of autonomy readers are able to exhibit. The problem is that this autonomy often takes forms that are not very palatable to the liberal elites (of which I am one) or other arbiters of thought and action. Students who don’t take assignments seriously, prisoners who run their institution, patients who seek alternative remedies, job or asylum seekers making the most (gaming) the system, etc. All of these are instances of autonomy that find disfavor with one holder of collective prestige or another.

Indeed, there is a case to be made that some of the less appealing forms of political expression (like the British National Party in the UK) are actually instances of conceptual and intellectual autonomy. The Daily Mail (as well as whatever party publication and the ‘boys down the pub’) notwithstanding, all these people have been exposed since an early age to a concerted inclusionist, secular humanist message. How come they are not the good middle-class liberals we would like everyone to be? Why hasn’t this taken hold? The assumption is that there must be something wrong with them: either they are not smart enough to understand or they were seduced by ‘racist’ propaganda. (This was wonderfully satirized by Woody Allen’s ‘Everybody says I love you’ where a Republican son of a liberal NY family turned out to have a brain tumor, after the removal of which he went back to being a good left-wind Democrat.) But we could also look at them as people who were able to withstand the barrage of liberal propaganda and form their own opinion more suitable to their situation. This is certainly how the right wing in America thinks of themselves (sometimes paradoxically - such as Rush Limbaugh’s supporters calling themselves ‘dittoheads’).

This is how Howard Becker and his collaborators described the student culture in 1961:

"Student culture consists of collective responses to problems posed for students by the environment." ...

"the students collectively set the level and direction of their efforts to learn. [...] these levels and directions are not the result of some conscious cabal, but [...] they are the working-out in practice of the perspectives from which the students view their day-to-day problems in relation to their long-term goals. The perspectives, themselves collectively developed, are organizations of ideas and actions. The actions derive their rationale from the ideas; the ideas are sustained by success in action. The whole becomes a complex of mutual expectations." (p. 435)

I suspect that we should look for something similar behind the formation of political opinion and the source of political action. In a way, the above quoted Peter Cole summarizes The Daily Mail in a way that is almost celebratory of its 'autonomy':

The Mail is ruthlessly edited and always quick off the mark. Its topical features are always on the day rather than tomorrow, and it commissions much more than it uses, an expensive strategy. It has never followed the youth obsession that has so often preoccupied rivals. It regularly serialises books by or about film or pop stars of another age. It seems not to care that the 60s generation is now in its 60s. Is this because more than 40% of its readers are over 55, and 60% over 45?

The story of the 'idea diet' is very compelling but clearly insufficient unless we tell some other stories to help us determine its limits. That is not to say that some aspects of the metaphor of 'consuming' are not useful as a way of viewing the media (van Dijk's results and 'common experience' indicate that it is consonant with some parts of our social reality). However, if we shouldn't loose sight of the limits of this metaphor and most importantly we should actively seek to investigate its limits (and with that the limits of our prejudices) rather than remain within the comfort zone of its prototypical validity (both in research and casual conversation).

[A quick note on research as casual conversation. Its purpose is more often than not that of confirming identity and belonging (not unlike two modems making noises at each other). So the challenging of stereotypes there might not be all that feasible (ie. the minute we start doing it, the conversation ceases to be casual). But it is interesting how much academic research and general discussion is also of this nature.]