The Sphere of Deviance  

Phrase of the week comes from Buffalo Geek - The Sphere of Deviance (via Cryptogon).

The row that developed around the Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer tête-à-tête was sadly misguided. Mainly pushed by media outlets who don’t understand the whole point of The Daily Show and the subversive reality of the show’s irony. The Daily Show succeeds because it is the only show on which views from outside the sphere of legitimate debate can be aired and find an audience. It’s comedic basis disarms the critics.

The people who regularly watch The Daily Show treat it as an end of the day metafilter for the news coverage they just consumed. Whether the views aired on The Daily Show are about shoddy financial reporting, corporate media complicity in governmental shenanigans or lazy journalism; the show serves as a cultural touchstone for people who know the whole media spectacle is a sham. Stewart has the only show on which there is even a mild analysis of those who deign to keep the “news” centrally controlled. The fact that he does it in an entertaining manner and that it airs after repeats of Crank Yankers are beside the point.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I refer to the “sphere of legitimate debate”, I point you to Daniel C. Hallin’s book ‘The Uncensored War’, in which he defined the range and biases of journalism in the American media establishment. This is a topic that is central to several intelligent criticisms of the media establishment, most recently put forward by Jay Rosen of NYU’s Pressthink.org.

1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.”

Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week because when there is legitimate debate it’s hard to know where the truth lies. There are risks in saying that truth lies with one faction in the debate, as against another— even when it does. He said, she said journalism is like the bad seed of this sphere, but also a logical outcome of it.

3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.

The Sphere of Legitimate Debate is where reporters like John King, David Gregory, and Carl Cameron operate. They have also allowed entrance to new media reporters who serve as court jesters like Ana Marie Cox.

The Sphere of Deviance is where Amy Goodman of Democracy Now operates. Jay Rosen, Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald discuss why an Amy Goodman and those like her are not taken seriously.

In the sphere of deviance, we also find news subjects…people like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader and others who challenge the lockstep concepts of our society and politics. Think about the scorn that was heaped upon Peter Schiff when he tried to tamp down the irrational exuberance of financial analysts on CNBC and Fox News panel shows. He was treated as a member of the Sphere of Deviance. Schiff and others are made into wingnuts, jokes, zealots and are considered to be unserious. Including their views on a regular basis as part of a serious discussion and not as strawmen would not be convenient to the narrative and construct of American media. ...

The Stewart/Cramer discussion, as ancillary as it might seem to the greater crisis, was one of the first mainstream cracks in that veneer of always having the media define the boundaries of the argument.

Blogs and new media have been eating away at that veneer for quite some time and that’s why newspapers are suffering. Their inability to recognize the critical flaw in their coverage when the people are starting to demand more. Sure, they are having trouble with costs, scale and declining revenue, but the problem with their content precedes all of those things.