Strategies for Peace, Strategies for News Research

War in Peace

Strategies for Peace, Strategies for News Research

by Peter A. Bruck

Despite the seeming uniformity of mediu presentation of news aboutpace, the fomnats of news reporhng and the contest among various discourses allow for the appearance and sometimes prominence of alternative and men oppositiond discourses that offer a pragmatic for social a c h

They made a desert and called itpeace-Tacitus

Peace and war mean different things at different times, in different places to different people. They are categories that have to be located in the multiple contexs of their use. While hardly new, these observations about the semantic historicity, localness, and specificity of the terms need restating if we are to resist the universalizing and generalizing tendencies that dominate discussions of war and peace in the media and in academic scholarship.

In the continental Europe of the Middle Ages, peace meant not only the absence of fighting between knights and war lords but also the protection of the poor and their means of subsistence (29, p. 246). Pax or Landfrieden, as guaranteed by the emperor or the church, meant access to and utilization of water and pasture, woods and livestock. Peace provided a network of social relations that not only protected people but also entitled them to subsistence and survival.

broadened to include guarantees to exploit resources and to trade commer- cially for profit. The Lanqi-ieden was a people’s peace, a paxpopuli; the new economic peace, pax economica, vanquished this peace. Other semantic changes came about as well. Subsistence living came to be associated with “unproductive” life and traditional ways with “underdevelopment” (29, p. 246). Today, when U.S. presidents talk about peace in the Middle East or Latin America, they refer to this pax econornica: the license to wage a war called economic development against all those who are not yet integrated into the capitalist system and its recent mutations.

With the development of capitalist market economies, the meaning of peace

Peter A. Bruck is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Communication, Culture and Society at Carleton University. Requests for reprints of this article should be addressed to the Centre for Communication, Culture and Society, Carleton University, Ottawa, KIS 5B6, Canada.

Research for parts of this article was supported by grants from the Canadian Institute for Interna~ tional Peace and Securiry, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, Carleton Llniversity. Copyright 0 1989 Jozrrnal of Communication 39(1), Winter. 0021~9916/89/$0.0+.05

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On the other side of the great contemporary divide of' our sociopolitical world, peace has come to have its own special meaning. In Poland toclay, for example, peace means submitting to Soviet hegemony and accepting the domi- nmce of the Communist party. For members of the outlawed trade union Soli- darity, peace means structural violence. The government uses the term peace in conjunction with normalization, the alleged road to peace. Peace in Poland is thus a modern-day version of pax romana, the imposition of a foreign law and foreign order on the basis of the strength of ready legions. When ordinary Poles today speak about something like peace, they most likely use the word solidarity for it. The term peace, however, is firmly located within the vocdbu- lary of the Soviet empire.

Inasmuch as words and their location in larger discourses-particular ways of speaking, specific frames of reference, and prominence within certain fields of knowledge-are subject to historical, politico-geographic, and cultural changes, it is surprising how little communication research, particularly news research, has been able to maintain a pragmatically fruitful conceptualization of its object and its own activity. By pragmatically useful I mean an analysis that is cognizant of its own historical and social embeddedness and is connected to ongoing struggles.

Both tasks are difficult to accomplish,' and I want to discuss the theoretical and methodological problems with the tasks as well as to suggest an alternative mode of analysis. I begin by examining three groups of studies that demonstrate what communication research has to say about the relationship between peace and news, between war and the media.

1 I take it for granted that studies and scholars who do not reflect on these above tasks side "natu rally" with dominant powers, interests, and discourses.

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It is seldom made explicit that much communication and media research owes its development and conceptualization to the war efforts of forty and fifty years ago. This parentage is true in general for the development of the discipline-as, for example, Paul Lazarsfeld’s engagement with the Office of Radio Research, an operation fully integrated into the U.S. war effort (41, pp. 18-22)-and in particular for the analysis of issues like dis/armament, peace/war, and national security/threat (see also 14) . Research questions and methodologies testify to this heritage: Media analyses-and here again particularly news analyses-have used quantitative content analysis as their pre- ferred mode of inquiry and have framed their questions in a conceptual space marked by the terms “propaganda,” “bias,” “persuasion,” and “effects.”

Coming out of research practices structured by statist imperatives and administrative concerns, the positivist epistemology and quantitative methodology of this research are hardly surprising. Rather, they are quite in tune with the bur- eaucratized and instrumentalized world to which that research is useful. Up until the mid-seventies most research on the media focused on its content, its selection, and its impact on the audience. Gatekeeper studies, content analyses, and audience surveys were the most common w-ays to explain the media’s effectiveness, particularly of news accounts.

reductionism, its simplistic conceptualization of signification, and its severe limitations in analyzing power relations (cf. 5, 7, 43) . News research, too, has undergone a considerable transformation in its questions and methodology (7) in light of three realizations: (a) news workers do not just select content but also construct stories, generate meaning, and produce “the world” in their accounts; (b) the meaning of news texts is created in much more complex and intricate ways than can be accounted for by quantitative content analysis; and (c) audiences are not just affected by strings of messages but actively read texts and continuously negotiate their meanings.

These three realizations inform a new methodological approach that is at once more complex and sophisticated, and also grants these qualities to its object of inquiry (1 1). “Construction,” “text,” and “reading” are key terms. Semiotic units are seen as (a) connected to the organizational processes that structure their production, (b) irreducibly structured by each other, with wider syntagmatic boundaries than previously granted, and (c) potentially more open and historically specific.

Recent special issues and debates in two leading journals of the field-Criti- cal Studies in Mass Communication and the European Journal of Communi- cation-testify to and reflect upon this change. But they do not link the changes in research methods to the subjects of the news under analysis (11, 34). Their stated motivations-less simplicity and more complexity in conceptualization and research methodology-might seem to lead to intellectually more satisfying analyses and more respectable results. But for issues like peace and war-and any other range of issues, for that matter-these new analyses offer little else than more detailed examinations of how the media portray,

But in the last decade such research has been criticized for its terminological

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come to portray, and maybe even are understood to portray specific issues. They do not offer insight into the social struggles that are taking place around those issues, and they point to few if any alternatives for the politics of news. They are politically flat and pragmatically inconsequential. They appear to empower the researcher, but the empowerment is restricted “to better see how messages are constructed and how meanings are made” or to allow for “a further and more complex reading” (39) . The qualitative improvement in the analysis is judged solely in reference to a group of people employed in aca- deme. It is a formal improvement, not a substantive one. We need to know and consider the alternatives to the pax economica Americana or the pax romana Sovzetica in order to be able to map discursive structures with some critical effectiveness.

The limits of the pragmatic usefulness of news research have an empirical aspect as well. Many studies of news portrayals tend to show news as free from contradictions and semantically unidirectional. I would argue that this problem arises from the failure of researchers to consider their own political position and knowledge interests.

Critical theorists are one group of scholars who have made overt com- mitments to a pragmatically more political approach. Among communication scholars, critical theorists locate themselves politically and historically, and try to provide a normative context for their analyses. The efforts of analysis and explanation are directed toward an intervention into social and political reality and the incumbent pragmatics of willful action. Although this critical scholarship addresses the limitations of the news research outlined above, I will argue that much of it is tied to a politics and conception of democracy that disempowers a more direct social and political intervention through activism in, for instance, social movements, and is counterproductive to active engagement in alternative and oppositional work.

Critical analysts base their research on a series of assumptions about the capitalist organization of news media. The media are seen as commercial enter- prises governed by the logic of capital rentability and profit accumulation. Max- imization of audiences overrides most other operating factors, most of the time. Even if a media enterprise is a public service rather than privately owned, the pressures of audience maximization persist and become reconstructed in the imperatives to justify and legitimate programming, corporate plans, and resource allocation.

The news text is seen as produced by industrially organized media. The production labor is divided among specialized personnel; complex systems of machinery are also employed and the labor of news workers becomes produc- tive only in interaction with them. This interlinked chain of people and machines carries out a connected series of detailed working steps.

News is also understood as the product of bureaucratically functioning media. Regular sources, routine institutional sites and beats, customary information subsidies, and the documentary practices of the offices of governmental

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agencies and departments make available and efficiently supply “facts,” documentation, proof. News work routinizes textual production in substance and form in terms of what is made to be known and how it is to be known (i.e., produced or written up). Wire services and press conferences are thus pragmatically connected to the practice of attribution.

The bureaucratic organization of news work ties journalistic practice and media operation to operational modes and agendas of the management appara- tuses of the state and the economy. Having at first glance a seeming proclivity for the sensational, and therefore the unbureaucratic, on closer examination the news media turn out to be an integral part of today’s social administration of domination.

research on news suggests that there is little or no room for alternatives, that the media do their job in a consistent and unaltering manner, that social movements are systematically and regularly excluded and rendered ineffective, and that the media are reproducing the dominant ideology largely without slip or hitch. These assertions are consistent with an analytical focus directed toward the study of ideological closure (e.g., 8, 10, 17, 19, 24, 25, 28, 32, 33, 44) . By explicitly stating that the media produce/impose a dominant ideology, these studies have successfully established this point as an orthodoxy within critical media and cultural studies.

These studies, however, have yet to address a number of problems, the first of which is an epistemological one. Most critical studies are textual examinations that consider expost the outcome of what is often quite a contradictory accomplishment. What is lacking is a recognition of the distinction between the relative success and a total imposition of the dominant ideology. In more practical terms, the critical position has led to considerable difficulties for activists in social movements, minority groups, and non-establishment organizations attempting to assess the chances for, and measures of, effective work through the mass media. As my work with Canadian activists has suggested, these social actors find

themselves in a precariously ambiguous situation. On the one hand, they depend on the establishment media to disseminate their messages. On the other hand, they find themselves largely frustrated and thus do not trust their own efforts. Lack of resources and a shortage of know-how often add up to a considerable amount of suspicion, if not open hostility, further disempowering the groups as social actors and frustrating their political intentions. The conclusions of critical media research tend to cap the problem by further document- ing histories of failure. The result has been a continuous tug of war within these movements, groups, and organizations, between those who promote a more or less wholesale adoption of establishment techniques and procedures to “sell” images and go the way of the U.S. political action committees, and those who prefer to circumvent the established media and invest their energies in alternative channels.

Using these assumptions more than empirical evidence, most critical

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The above observations suggest the need to reexamine the central propositions of hegemonic analysis if one is interested in the alternatives for democratic action in the social here and now. If one accepts the analytical assumption that the news media are the reportorial subsystem of the dominant socioeconomic system and that they fulfill an adaptive function, the finding that the media reproduce the dominant ideology does not come as a surprise. What is of interest, then, is how the media accomplish their reproduc- tive labor, when they fail to do it, what factors alter this accomplishment, what opportunities and margins for change exist, how these opportunities are differentially distributed, and what conclusions might be drawn for alternative or oppositional practices and movements.

In concluding his book on the news media’s treatment of the New Left in the sixties, Gitlin (20) argues that

an opposition movement is caught in a fundamental and inescapable dilemma. $it stan& outside the dominant realm of discourse, it is liable to be consigned to marginality and political irrelevance; It on the other hand, it plays by conventionalpolitical rules in order to acquire an image of credibility. . .it is liable to be assimilated into the hegemonicpolitical world view; it comes to be ident@ed with narrow ($important) reform issues, and its oppositional edge is blunted (pp. 290- 291).

Similarly, in a more recent article in Mother Jones, Gitlin chides the news media for speaking the language of power and convention, for being lapdogs of the U S . administration, for tending to go where the power elites want to go, and for giving no room to alternative voices like Daniel Ellsberg and Randall Forsberg (22).

Gitlin is correct. U.S. network television news usually does act as a mouth- piece for the establishment. Yet, television news, and even more often the press, do not behave so without fail. They do their work in differing ways at different times, depending among other things upon topic, political circum- stance, and, I would argue, the alternative social and discursive pressures exerted at a given time. Generalizing conclusions about the operation of the news media like the one cited above lead to what I would consider to be a number of systemic fallacies.

Against a depiction of the media as a relatively seamlessly reproducing appa ratus consistently serving the entrenched powers, I want to argue that the media show discursive openings, inconsistencies, and contradictions. They can provide the basis for developing a strategic politics by alternative groups and movements. To demonstrate I will draw on an analysis of coverage of peace, disarmament, and security issues in 13 English-language Canadian daily news papers in all regions of the country from November 1985 to April 1986.’ I will

The papers sampled were the Vancoutier Sun, Calga y Herald, Regina Leader Post, Winnipeg Free Presr, Hamilton Spectatou, London Free Press, Ottawa Citizen, Globe and Mail, (cont’d.)

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deal here with two aspects: general news formats used by the press and the reprocessing of competing discourses by all news media.

Formal factors such as the writing format can explain and even sometimes predict the closeness of newspaper reporting to the “official view” of governments and other establishment sources. Newspaper writing consists of various types of narratives and formats, which follow different rules and conventions of composition and subject treatment. Different story formats give reports different shelf-lives. These determine not only when the stories may be printed but also how much research on possible alternative sources is practically possible and permissible. The different formats can be ordered by their proximity to the discourse of the established powers on the following continuum: news briefs, news reports, editorials, features, backgrounders, columns, editorial cartoons, and letters to the editor.

inverted-pyramid style of writing give a distinct advantage to the agenda of governments and officials as actors. Sources are selected and legitimated according to political, organizational, or professional hierarchies. The requirements of bal- ance, fairness, and objectivity are used to neutralize oppositional views. Most often, news reports pick up the interpretative frames and phase structures of administrative officials and political authorities (see 16).

Besides news briefs, news reports are the formally most restricted and, in terms of news frames, the most reductive format. News reports are the basic staple of press reporting, constituting 56 to 95 percent of coverage on any particular subject area in our sample. More to the point of our argument, we found that the more contentious an issue is in terms of the dominant discourses and the interests of the established social and political powers, the lower the per- centage of news reports in the overall coverage.

Rather, news format is related to the contentiousness of the topic. In other words, ideological challenges require a different formal leeway depending on the threat they pose to established forms and ways. The constraints of news writing work in two ways. On the one hand, they force the discursive strategies of quantification, officialdom, visualness, and drama to be applied to ideologi- cally challenging activities; on the other hand, these activities cannot be han- dled sufficiently within the routine formal constraints, and other discursive strategies are needed to contain them. The peace movement provides such an example.

The more an issue moves onto the public stage, the more highly structured the discourse surrounding it becomes. That is, the more existing meaning structures and their available resources of interpretative addenda constrain the discussion of the issue, the more socially validated feelings, emotions, and attitudes are mobilized around it (cf. 27, pp. 130-138). We can discern the struc-

In the case of news reports, for instance, the hard news angle and the

This finding indicates that ideological reproduction does not work uniformly.

(cont’d.) Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Gazette, Telegraph Journal, and PEI Guardian. For a more complete exposition of this study see (9) .

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tural pressures that surround a contentious issue, and they seem to work on different occasions in more than one direction.

Editorials, opinion pieces written with an institutional player like a newspaper as author, provide another formal structure. They are the most explicit news format for stating the parameters of the dominant consensus and arguing its merits. Yet, this dominant consensus does not automatically coincide with the interests of the social and political authorities of the day. In our sample, the testing of U.S. cruise missiles in Canada was a case in which editorial writing in a number of papers openly contradicted government lines of argument. This opposition need not be confined to single issues. The country’s largest- circulation daily, the Toronto Star, is taking on the Canadian government explicitly and directly in regard to what is considered by many the most important domestic and foreign policy issue in Canada since World War 11-the free trade agreement with the United States. This campaign by the Toronto paper exceeds the traditional oppositional posture of the fourth estate vis-his government. The campaign does not deal with corruption, patronage, broken promises, or violations of rules or law, but it makes an issue out of the ideological parameters of the government’s actions.

The Star has a history of such campaigns. On the occasion of the Second Special Session on Disarmament of the United Nations, the Star created a peace beat and assigned it to a senior member of its editorial staff. The result of this organizational move was not only a series of editorials but, over four months, dozens of front-page articles on disarmament and peace issues. It is worth noting that the journalist was the former religion editor of the paper. At another Canadian daily, the Ottawa Citizen, the religion and social affairs beat was extended to include coverage of the local peace mcwement. This has not lead to many editorials but to a general opening of a discursive space for alternative movements in the shadow of the critical potential of mainstream religion.

Features, essay-style reports used to place issues and events in context, again show different discursive constraints. They are researched and written by journalists; the subject matter might be the same as in news reports, but stories are given a soft news angle. This typification as soft news allows the discursive accessing of, for instance, individual experiences, the contextual features of an event, the involvement and personal relatioris of the reporter to the event, and the use of news sources whose news authority depends less on organizational/ institutional status and more on personal or expert knowledge. Features discursively resemble backgrounders but tend to more consistently reproduce the dominant consensus because they are written primarily by professional news workers.

The most leeway in discursive openness or closedness can be found in the column format. These individually authored opinion pieces are printed at pre- scheduled intervals in newspapers irrespective of events or breaking stories and give the writers considerable discursive space. Their openness can be illustrated by the column on October 4 , 1986, in the Globe andMail, Canada’s only daily with a national circulation. The Globe is also generally considered to be

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politically the most influential and thus often quite a conservative newspaper. On page two, the Globe columnist from New York, Michele Landsberg, reviewed the coverage the U S . television networks gave to the Nicholas Dani- loff and Andrei Sakharov cases. Daniloff was the U S . reporter in Moscow who had been imprisoned and then expelled from the U.S.S.R. on spying charges; Zakharov was expelled from the United States on similar charges. Under a boldface, top-of-page headline of “Win-lose coverage makes US. media a ‘vol- untary TASS,’ ” the columnist struck at the core of dominant North American media ideology. She disputed the cold war claim that one of the key differences between the totalitarian, Communist East and the free, democratic West rests upon the West having news media of a “different” kind, free, uncensored, not centrally controlled. The column took on President Reagan’s reliance on tough-guy movie cliches when dealing with the Soviet Union’s release of the U S . reporter and sharply critiqued the New York Times for its scorecard approach to superpower relations and the U.S. television networks for their “bright-eyed, blowdried, mindless chauvinism” in the coverage of the case.

Differences in the discursive processing of events can thus be demonstrated to be related to formal elements in the production of daily newspapers. In other words, the symbolic reproduction of the dominant structures has to take place through the specific logics of media production that are associated with news formats. More precisely, the term “format” names these different logics3

reproduction of ideology is more complex and variant than previously assumed but also that the outcome of that reproduction is not and cannot be a seamless web. Rather, I would argue, we can see considerable discursive movement.

The description of the differences in formats suggests not only that the

Having shown those discursive variations that are due to a relatively minor formal element in present-day newspaper production, I want to further develop this point in regard to the knowledge fields involved in the coverage of peace and disarmament issues. In his analysis of the media’s treatment of the student movement in the sixties, Gitlin not only gen- eralizes about what one might call the synchronic seamlessness of hegemonic closure, but he also argues from the diachronic perspective that the media impose a similar fate on other opposition movements: “First, they are ignored. Then they receive some respectful coverage. Then they are trivialized. And, finally, (with help from within) they are sensationalized” (21, p. 53).

The media do speak in their own particular ways about the world and they do produce particularly structured accounts (i.e., their own discourses). The reporting dynamics that characterize newspaper texts are also organizationally routed (see also 8, 16). The media have networks of authorities, of people who

A similar point has been raised in the context of television’s treatment of terrorism (42, pp. 31- 33). Schlesinger, Murdock, and Elliott distinguish between tight and loose formats and open and closed types of programming. Open/closed refers here to the range of knowledge fields made accessible in the media discourse; tight/loose refers to the rhetorical property of achieving an argumentative closure through the specific structuring of a statement.

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are to be interviewed and accessed, people to whom they pay attention and listen, and the media have their specific ways of presenting events, making their stories work, seeking their audiences’ assent, making their regimen intelligible, and so forth.

In doing all this work, the media employ their own well-described codes and conventions, their modes of speaking arid editing, of contracting voices and stories. The discursive materials they work with, however, are not their own. Rather, the media build their accounts of what happens in the world on the accounts of other people, e.g., eyewitnesses, police, experts, lobbyists, poli- ticians, business leaders, and a whole range of other social actors.

What these people have to say enters into the media account either as unac- knowledged background inforniation or as acknowledged and attributed quota- tion. Either way, what sources have to say and how they say it influences to varying degrees the angle of the news story, the points of emphasis, and the structure and the flow of the story. Among sources we have to include what is said in documents and texts, and any other material the media may use.

In this sense we speak of the media reprocessing the discourses spoken by their sources. The media reassemble the information, rearrange different parts, and thus create their own particular way of telling the events in the world. Reprocessing is a well-structured, professional (i.e., done skillfully according to specific codes) activity in which the media appropriate other discourses and reproduce the social and political order of the day.

between the discourses the media produce and the discourses they use as material to build on, process, and deliver. We need to be interested in the structures of transformation. We cannot ignore-as most content analysis does-the discursive components from which reports are constructed.

The fate of an issue or a social movement, the reporting of peace or war, is thus not decided in a transhistorical context, and challenges to the social order are not always thwarted in the same way. Rather, news workers do their work by typifying the occurrences in the world not only according to, for instance, the time pressures they have to work within (44) but also in regard to system- atic regularities of conceptualizing the world, staking their position vis-his that world and addressing the reader/viewer/listener.

language (3, pp. 288-294) by locating it within identifiable institutional sites. How news workers establish relationships of temporal stability between discourses and social relations is part of the historical specificity of the media’s treatment of happenings in the world.

statements that make up the news text. It implies conceptually that there are definite structures to knowledge in use and that these structures are linked to the positions of knowledge (i.e., who can and most likely will know something), to the ways of generating and applying this knowledge, and to the ways of its presentation and articulation. The larger structures of knowledge and knowledge fields can be referred to as discursive formations, the positions of

In news analysis, I would argue, we need to make the analytical separation

One can think about this form of typification as reversing the heteroglossia of

I use the word discourse to refer to the rules and regularities that govern the

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knowledge as discursive placements, and the ways knowledge is produced and presented as discursive practices (cf. 8) .

This concept of discourse is wider and less formalistic than the one used by schools of linguistic discourse analysis (45). Linguistic discourse analysis can add precision and detail, a qualitative orientation, and an understanding about cognitive processes and connections. But its restriction to linguistic units, levels, and dimensions ignores how knowledge is grounded in social and institutional practices and is connected to specific constellations of material social relations. These constellations do not provide contexts only for the intelligibil- ity, functionality, and coherence of utterances; they are the institutional sites of our societies, the web of power, and, as I argue, the resources for the assembly of media discourses. It is critical to maintain from the outset the effective existence of these sites and thus the heterogeneity of discourses.

The news media deploy their discourses within a net of determinations produced by politics, science, education, religion, and other institutions of knowledge production. The media process the discourses of the other institutions in specific and demonstrable ways and use them as resources for their own discursive labor. In so doing, the media differentiate and variably treat particular ways of representing issues.

This argument can be exemplified by an examination of the institutions of nation states (with special attention to the superpowers) that serve as agencies of discourse assembly and dissemination. These institutions are professionally organized mouthpieces with employee payrolls, overhead costs, buildings, and communication hardware. Persons and operations produce a web of discourses serving the interests and legitimations of the respective states (cf. 12). Military and diplomatic services constitute a central core of these bureaucratic propaganda machines (cf. 1). States like the superpowers oppose each other through these institutions even while joining in so-called limitation or reduction talks. International organizations like the United Nations serve as platforms for the enunciation of bureaucratic-diplomatic discourses. Superpow- ers, their client states, and non-aligned states as well pursue their self-interests, discursively arming themselves in a continuous, well-planned, rational fashion. Then there are the experts, the swarm of scholars in universities and research institutes publishing books rather than giving speeches and filling much space in journals. Finally, there are some church and union groups, and-with varying strength over the decades-popular movements, sometimes (and recently more often) in opposition to the state and advancing alternative discourses.

Disarmament, peace, and war are, therefore, not each one issue but issue fields in which different discourses compete. The scenarios are acted out today against the backdrop of the reality of 2,000 kg of TNT per living person and a multiple overkill capacity by both superpowers for every woman, man, and child on earth; more computerized prewarning systems and automated count- down schemes governed by negative restraining powers (powers that run toward take-off unless restraining orders are renewed at specific intervals [2]); and the possibilities of SDI being tested, developed, and deployed.

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Discourses on disarmament/peace/war do not in this context simply form at random. They exhibit shapes and structures, follow sequences, and have differential power. They are socially formed, assembled, reassembled, planned, pre- pared, crafted, and unwittingly regurgitated. They form the infrastructure for public debate.

selected, rearranged, and distributed, according to specific procedures, which we have referred to above as discursive practices. These practices are not purely and simply ways of speaking the world. They are embodied in technical processes, in organizational routines, in patterns of general behavior, in professional codes, in forms of transmission and diffusion, in administrative rules and training manuals, and in pedagogical forms that at once impose and maintain them (cf. Foucault in 6, pp. 199-201). Formulated differently, discursive practices are modes for the production of accounts that are skillfully and reliably accomplished as an unaccountable matter (cf. 18, p. 10).

through which discourses are produced and reproduced in specific formations. By discursive formations I mean complex groups of relations that function as rules for the articulation of statements. They function as the principle of this articulation and manifest themselves in the topical configuration of the discursive content. The notion of disarmament that is linked with notions like national security, window of vulnerability, and the call for an increase in defense spending belongs to a particular formation used by President Reagan and his arms negotiators in the mid-1980s. This formation encompasses a variety of other elements, including SS 20s, aging Minutemans, low accuracy of SLICBMs, or 45,000 Soviet tanks in Eastern Europe. The news media use, reassemble, and disseminate such discourses in their reporting, varying according to historical circumstances and particular production practices. Using different theoretical terms, we can say that the mass media typify stories according to five discourses on disarmament/peace/security. Typification here means clas- sify, process, and manage according to the practical needs of efficiently and safely accomplishing production work (see 44) . It follows from this definition that different typifications lead to a differential processing at different times, in dif€erent circumstances. One of' these circumstances has to do with which subject areas the media report.

The production of discourses is controlled and organized, and discourses are

Discursive forms are the multiple forms of socially organized activities

We can distinguish five main discourses that serve as resources to the media in their production of the news discourse: (a) the discourse of the leaders of state, (b) the bureaucratic-technical discourse, (c) the scientific-technical discourse, (d) the discourse of victims, and (e) the discourse of survival. In our research project on disarmament, peace, and security issues in the Canadian press during late 1985 and early 1986, we isolated 13 different subject areas or general stories as part of the six months of cover age: Star Wars, the Geneva summit, superpower arms proposals, Soviet defec- tors and dissidents, Canada and the cruise missile, the Challenger mishap, Spain and NATO, the Libyan-U.S. conflict, the Chernobyl accident, Canada in

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NATO, Canada and the renewal of the NORAD agreement, Holland’s accep- tance of cruise missiles, and New Zealand as a nuclear-free zone. After briefly describing the discourses, I show how they are used differentially in the coverage of two of these subject areas or general stories. The description of the discourses is necessarily incomplete and even reductionistic, as I rely mostly on categorical schemata to index institutional practices.

The discourse of the leaders of states and particularly the leaders of the nuclear nations and the superpowers (e.g., Reagan, Gorbachev) centers on categories like “national security,” “national greatness,” and the “goodness of its sociopolitical order” and other categories like “threat from outside” and “need to prevail through heightened defense efforts.” The category of “dktente” origi- nates here; the sincerity of one side’s commitment to peace and the unwilling- ness of the other side to reciprocate in kind through an equally strong commitment are repeatedly asserted.

This discourse works mostly in bipolar terms with the construction of enemy images and the characteristic Manichaean split between the good side and the evil side. This split serves as a discursive procedure structuring the different formations of this discourse. The discourse proceeds frequently by enumeration of one government’s armament efforts; it works with abstract, acontextual notions of history and statements of facts ( 4 , pp. 151-154). It is within this discourse that pax economica Americana and pax romana Sovietica find their most pronounced formulations.

This discourse is highly privileged in the media due to the status of its authors as news promoters (see 36, 37). News bulletins take it as their main staple, and front pages and first sections of newspapers are filled with it. Most of what is typified as hard news (44, pp. 51-53) consists of and/or echoes this discourse. What is said is closely reported, if not cited verbatim, and provides for “good visuals” according to the dominant news judgment-speeches, get- ting on and off airplanes, walking through entrance doors or shaking hands. In the Canadian press’s reporting on arms negotiation, Reagan and Gorbachev are the first news actors in 42.5 percent and 37.9 percent of all news items.

Closely related to this discourse is the bureaucratic-technical discourse of the diplomats and diplomatic experts. Indeed, the two discourses build on each other, share particular formations and/or elements, and serve each other as reinforcements. Together they feed on discourses in international law, military strategies, and weapons technology, with all their acronyms and specialized vocabulary. Sincere treaties and solemn declarations serve as standardized references, supplementing the categories of national security with concerns for state sovereignty and territorial integrity aiming at “international accords” and “mutual efforts.” This discourse differs from the first due to its more general categories and especially through its failure to name concrete actors. The driv- ing force in its history is the anonymous arms race, and much is done to avoid identifying any other subjects.

The bureaucratic-technical discourse creates its own realities, ignoring such concrete ones as all the “little” wars that run alongside in “off’ places like East Timor and Northern Brazil. It is a discourse hung up in the sterile sophistica-

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tion of ritualized and routinized negotiation, semantically fine-tuned to the extreme, held up by the same unbending will to power as the first one, and equally terrified of any imaginable threat of its diminution.

At the Second Special Session on Disarmament of the United Nations, for instance, the delegates could not even agree if nuclear war should be “elimi- nated” or merely “averted.” The text of the final document, “Comprehensive Programme of Disarmament,” contains alternative phrasings printed within brackets, with further brackets within those brackets. The order of the para- graphs was equally contested, making the document look like a multiple- choice test rather than an agenda for action (30, p. 175). The Third Special Session completed in June 1988 was unable to issue a concluding document (15). The predictability of this discourse makes it good material for presched- uled news events/hard news, but it is rarely directly cited or closely reported. Institutions or institutional arrangements rather than persons are displayed as authors, and few if any visuals are provided.

A third discourse, which resembles in some of its formations the second and which frequently takes its agenda from the first, is the discourse of the disarmament, military, and other technical experts. It is replete with data and well equipped with technical vocabulary. Unlike the first two, this discourse depends not on bare claims or strict assertions or the fine-tuning of negotiated language but on some scientific-rational procedures of documentation and of constructing evidence. It is a post-enlightenment discourse whose power alleg- edly rests with the truth of the content and not on the status of the author. Analytical procedures thus dominate, along with constructions of rational grounds for stated arguments and proposed hypotheses.

This discourse has its own social spaces a t conferences and roundtables, as well as in journals like Foreign Afairs, Arms Control, Defense Wee&, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, or Defense Monitor. The media use this discourse to sup- plement the previous two. More prestigious papers like the New Yor& Times or the Globe and Mail allow their op-ed space to be used for it, thereby accomplishing “critical distance” and “challenging commentary.” Although this discourse would not be allowed enough space to unfold in news bulletins on radio or television, it is solicited in a calculated manner by current affairs TV programs like CBC’s “Journal,” ABC’s “Nightline,” and CTV’s “W5,” and radio shows like “Sunday Morning” or “As It Happens.” These shows depend on the availability of this discourse for their operation. Visually, this discourse is produced as interviews with some of its authors.

A fourth discourse is the discourse of the victims of war. Central elements of its formations are the short cries of death, the muffled expressions of horror whose codes the media do not care to decipher, the weeping spells of children unarticulated in any sense beyond the bodily production of tears. The victims’ discourse is unelaborated, unsophisticated, and almost hostile to the logos that failed to rescue the physis (cf. 31).

speech” in Barthes’ sense. It is speech of the real (cf. 4 , p. 148). Its imperfec- tions make it closer to silence than to talk. This discourse is frozen by the press

The barrenness of this discourse makes it unable to lie, to be “mythical

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in front-page photographs; otherwise it is largely ignored. Television feeds more willingly on it, with dramatic visuals of blood or death, of destruction and horror. TV and boulevard press and magazines use these images to sell their wares; like any pornographic material, they produce excellent profits. On the other hand, the discourse of the victims of war is restricted in the variety of its articulation. This limitation and repetitiveness make it material not well fit for the news media. It is intertwined with real time and thus lends itself only clumsily to editing.

As a discourse of the real it is essentially subversive to the previous discourses. Its power lies not with the status of its authors nor with the truth function of its content but with its close links to irreducible reality. In its face the other discourses arrest and can be moved on only by circumventing it, ignoring it, denying it. The existence of this sparse discourse is a reminder that the most prolific discourses on disarmament are produced by those who prevent disarmament from occurring. We hear most about ending wars from those authors who are most likely to be the agents of war-making. It is these authors who are recorded in detail, their words that fill the books of history and the films, tapes, and newspaper columns of today. This is no surprise, as recorded talking is as much an effect of the possession of power as is the making of war. Having no power means not being able to wage war and also not being able to be recorded by the news media and thus heard in history.

Recording the victim’s discourse would turn the news media over to the challengers of the authors of the previous discourses, to the challengers of the authorities. Indeed, the real opposition in the case of war, as well as the arms race, is not between the enemies who fight the war but between the war mak- ers and the war victims. This might have been less clear in past history. How- ever, in the nuclear age, when entire populations are targeted for annihilation, this should be obvious. The victim’s discourse is the truly oppositional discourse to the aforementioned ones.

Over the last ten years we can see the emergence-or re-emergence-of a fifth discourse. This discourse, produced by the disarmament and peace movements, is the discourse of survival. It draws its formations from the expert’s discourse as well as from the victim’s discourse. It is torn between the two, and relative to the others exhibits less cohesion and is internally replete with dis- continuities and ruptures. It seeks richness in articulation to better make its point. It works to leave space for the victims’ discourse and gain the elaborate- ness of the experts’ in the hope of thereby increasing its effectiveness.

The newspapers in our study used these five discourses to report the different general stories. If one uses the frequency of associated themes of coverage as a rough quantitative indicator for the degree of dominance of a particular discourse, it is possible to show that the general stories in our sample varied considerably in their use. For the purposes of this argument we can simplify the analysis by building on the distinctions between dominant, alternative, and oppositional developed in the literature on the ideological readings of news (38, 40). The first three discourses can be regarded as generally forming the

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dominant discourses. The discourse of survival can be considered an alternative discourse and the discourse of the victims the oppositional.

A comparison of the general story of the superpower arms proposals with the general story of cruise missile testing in Canada shows an array of themes used in press coverage. Table 1 shows the topical richness and complexity of the coverage of the general story of the continued exchange of proposals between the superpowers to reduce arms. The Canadian coverage of this important story is authored largely by Americans. Two-thirds of the reports in the 13 English-Canadian newspapers were straight copy from wire services, mostly Associated Press (58.2 percent of total wire copy) and Reuters (22 percent). With less than ten percent of copy written by journalists or com- mentators directly employed by Canadian media organizations, most reports filed were from Washington and Moscow. Thus it is not surprising to find that the vast majority of themes in Table 1 belong to the dominant discourses, mainly the bureaucratic-technical and scientific-technical. The four themes with the highest frequencies play out the traditional game of superpower negotiations. Many steps are taken, many moves made, in order to keep all in place. The discourse of the leaders of the state supplies the conceptual deep structure (e.g., themes 9, 10, 11, 12) and reasserts the dynamics of superpower rivalry as part of the mutual maintenance of the respective spheres of influence.

The alternative discourse of survival is not completely excluded from the coverage. It is marginally used and finds its strongest articulation in the four themes least used. These themes provide judgments, assertions of fact, and connections between phenomena that are usually kept apart in the dominant discourses. The insight that the arms race competes with development for resources is common knowledge, but in connection with superpower arms negotiations it is thematically excluded.

The above analysis shows the difficulty peace work has had and-most likely-still would have to make a different point of view heard within a general story like the superpower arms negotiations. News reports, the predomi- nant format of coverage (76.5 percent), favor the use of established hierarchies of news sources, i.e., the reliance on key political actors (either Reagan or Gor- bachev is the first news actor in 80 percent of the stories) and dominant institutional sources (more than three quarters of them U.S. or Soviet officials) (see also 35). The stories are filed from the centers of power using the discourses of power. The concomitant discursive pressures toward the dominant ways of speaking the general story are visible in the wire copy that was predominantly used in the coverage.

The case is quite different when paper staff, correspondents, or even news services are used. Coverage using these bylines provided more openings for alternative views. Two of the thirteen papers used their own staff for a dispro- portionally high amount of coverage. The Globe and Mail, Canada’s only paper with national circulation, and the Ottawa Citizen, the paper in the nation’s capital, used wire services respectively for a little less and a little more than

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Table 1: Main themes in superpower arms proposals stories 6 13English-language Canadian dailies, November 1985-April 1986

No. of appear- ances

1. U.S. arms proposals run into difficulties because (a) of rival attitudes in the Pentagon and State Department; (b) all arms proposals should be linked to Soviet human rights and regional conflicts; (c) the U.S. won't compromise on SDI

2. Better verification is needed to ensure that both sides are complying with agreements. How to verify?

3. What is needed for genuine arms control: (a) greater communication between the superpowers; (b) cooperation on space technology; (c) secret negotiations, away from the public and press

4. Tests are needed to ensure the reliability and safety of the U.S. arse- nal and the credibility of U.S. deterrence

5. Soviet arms proposals show the U.S.S.R.'s interest in arms control/disarmament/peace

6. U.S. proposals must account for the nuclear strength of France and Britain

7. Soviets are making an effort to adhere to the conditions of Salt II. Americans are willing to break them

8. Soviet arms proposals will increase Soviet military power and (a) destabilize Atlantic alliance; (b) concentrate military build-up in Eastern Eu- rope and Asia

9. U S arms proposals show American distinterest in arms controVdisar- mament/peace and interest in favorable domestic and foreign public opinion

10. The 2000 plan (to eliminate nuclear weapons by 2000 a.d. is (a) a Soviet public relations move; (b) unrealistic; "a mutual suicide pact"

1 1 . Soviet arms proposals are motivated by domestic concerns (i.e., the need to divert funds from the military to the nonmilitary sectors)

12. Soviet moratoriums have been deceptive in the past. They are a totalitarian state

13. Strategic parity between the U.S. and Soviets will be threatened b y testing. This will destabilize world

14. An international treaty banning the transportation and production of chemical weapons is needed to prevent their proliferation in the Third World

15. Neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. is interested in arms control; both want a first strike advantage

16. If nuclear weapons are not tested they will not be used nor will they continue to proliferate

17. Canada feels the Soviet proposals worth considering 18. Canada's research priorities are to investigate outer space verifica-

tion technology instead of space-based weapon systems (i.e., SDI) 19. A comprehensive test ban is more feasible than a nuclear weapons

freeze 20. We have enough weapons already to destroy the world ten times

over 21. The gap between the developed countries and the underdeveloped

countries is growing as money is spent on armaments which could be spent on development projects

22. Canadian cities can make proposals for disarmament (e.g., Toronto alderman's proposal for a peace task force)

23. Canada contributes to the arms race through its work on U.S. defense contracts

128

124

98

96

87

55

54

46

39

39

30

19

15

15

I 1

9 6

5

4

4

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War in Peace/ Strategies,for News Research

Table 2: Main themes in cruise missile testing stories in 43 English-language Canadian dailies, November 1985-April 1986

No. of appear- ances

1. Opposition of peace groups against the military and government 2. Necessary to prepare war fighting skills 3. The danger of relying too much on technology is too great (e.g.. the

Shuttle) 4. Cancel 1983 Testing Agreement with the U.S. (effective until 1988) 5. Cancellation necessary to guarantee public safety. The flight path of

the CM covers an area with a population of 100.000. Ottawa is gam- bling with the lives of innocent people

6. The cruise is safe to test due to the advanced monitoring systems used during testing

7. Canada provides landscape similar to the Soviet Union 8. Delay tests 9. More tests needed to avoid future crashes. Tests provide insurance

for the CM which is already deployed 10. Flight corridor not a danger to public since it‘s largely uninhabited,

carefully monitored 1 I . CM test record “looks good”: 8 failures out of 54 tests 12. Necessary to prove allegiance to U.S. 13. Change flight corridor to less populated area 14. Verification is part of arms testing

50 29

20 16

15

15 10 8

7

half of their coverage. In these stories a much wider range of institutional sources is used, including the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarma- ment (23 total quotations, almost the same number as the Soviet or Canadian minister of Foreign Affairs) and Veterans for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament. It is also apparent that in the case of an international general story like superpower arms proposals, the use of national news workers allows more local per- spectives (themes 17, 18, 22) and a discursively “softer” coverage (see also 37).

This “softer” coverage can be further illustrated by looking at a general story which, while still dealing with the superpower arms race, is mainly a local/ national story. The testing of U.S. cruise missiles over Canadian territory is a case in point. At the time of our sample period in the fall of 1985 and the spring of 1986, cruise missile testing had been already a continuing stoiy in the Canadian press for a number of years, and “Refuse the Cruise” had been one of the main rallying points for the public activism of peace groups at the begin- ning of the decade. Table 2 shows the themes used in the coverage.

Like the coverage of this general story in previous years, reporting peaked at the time of the test flights of the air-launched cruise missile. During our sample period, both tests ran into trouble. The pattern of themes in Table 2 shows considerable discursive openness in the coverage. The test failures positioned the alternative survival discourse of the peace groups in opposition to the scientific-technical discourse of the military. The proclivity of news reporting to use binary contrast structures to make happenings easily intelligible worked here to the advantage of the peace groups. Although Canadian and U S . Air

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Journal ofCornmi4nication, Winter 1989

Force spokespeople still dominate as institutional sources-with 202 and 132 quotations respectively-a total of eight peace groups manage to establish themselves as part of the “other side” in the story (46, 11, 8, and 7 quotations for the four organizations most cited).

The majority of the news reports in our sample address this opposition at least once. In this general story, the opposition itself became topical. It is the most frequently used theme in the coverage, i.e., the political and discursive contests became a part of the issue. This took place despite the fact that a highly restrictive format-the news report-was used in 84 percent of coverage and that 80 percent of reports originated from wire services.

In more qualitative terms, the survival discourse of the peace groups bene- fited from a crisis in the scientific and military-technical discourses. The recent explosion of the U S . space shuttle had undermined both and had served as an often-used discursive resource to challenge the scientific-technical discourse’s presuppositional assertion of military technology as safe, sound, and reliable. Direct appeals to cancel the testing agreement and arguments around public safety were other key themes of the survival discourse picked up by the media discourse of the press.

The view that the news media do not produce a seamless web of dominant discourses is pragmatically useful in demonstrating discursive opportunities for peace work to intervene in the hegemonic struggles and ideological contests surrounding the arms race and other issues. The above analysis shows that this view is not only pragmatically useful but also empirically accurate.

Hegemonic analysis that intends to demonstrate ideological closure could probably have also made good use of the above data. But the claim to more empirical accuracy can neither be the sole nor a sufficient reason for a nonfor- malist discourse analysis like the one outlined above. Epistemological and pragmatic political reasons are more important.

notion of ideology as distortion and bias (23, 24, 25, 26) and with news as a production machine of representations that excludes or coopts. These notions are not generally wrong, but they are surely only specifically accurate. There are, have been, and will be many cases where it is useful, accurate, and episte- mologically sound to speak of ideological distortion and clear bias, of systemic exclusion or cooptation. But these terms cannot be the basis of a general conceptualization of how news media socially and semiotically are effective in the North American context. Bias and distortion are generally not useful concepts, because nonbias and nondistortion are ontologically impossible. Nor are they accurate in the North American media scene, where power is generally exerted not through overt exclusion and deliberate manipulation but through positive ways of speaking issues in specific formations.

We know that “Truth” does not exist (see also 13). This does not mean that we have to embrace a general epistemological and value relativism. But it does mean that we have to make explicit and justify analytical presuppositions and

Much of critical news analysis and also hegemonic analysis still works with a

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political values, and incorporate these statements and justifications into our work. The above model of five discourses in the coverage of war and peace in the news media begins with a matrix of sociopolitical power and domination. The model suggests a configuration of ways of speaking, thinking, and acting that is historically and culturally specific. It locates those ways materially and institutionally. It takes into account the dynamics of power that are constitutive of all signification and social life. It connects the analyses of different issues and can lead to strategically fruitful comparative findings. It does not create the news media as either documented villain or failed vanguard. It connects with real social forces and demonstrates the room and range for action alternatives, with a preferential option for peace work.

It is not possible to escape the constructedness and relativity of all signification, nor are media systems and their textual products unitary. The news media do not recuperate and coopt all social dissent with facility and ease outside of history. Social dissent is also not unitary, but articulated in discourses that are often quite intriguingly related to more dominant forms of speaking an event. Capitalistic ownership, industrial organization, and bureaucratic operation do not determine directly the coverage of the news media. But they definitely constrain the news work of journalists. These constraints limit the options for reporting at the same time that they serve as resources. News analysis can iden- tify the constraints, show how they work, and indicate their tightness or loose- ness in culturally and historically specific terms.

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