Joshua Keating has put together a brilliant piece of writing on the standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. If It Happened There: Armed Rebel Faction Occupies Government Building does two things. Through word choices and descriptive phrasing, it frames the occupation as the U.S. Media would report it if it took place in another country.
This puts an entirely different slant on the situation, breaking it out of the standard tropes the press relies on. As such, it’s like getting a whole new view of what’s going on. It’s an antidote to automatically pigeon-holing the story into the habitual categories, almost forcing a fresh look at it.
Rather, the latest incident is rooted in a long-running conflict between pastoralist tribal groups and the central government. These tribes believe the traditional way of life they have practiced for centuries is under threat from a government that restricts their right to graze their herds of cattle where they please. While the latest standoff is related to a case involving another pastoralist family, the Hammonds, setting fire to forests owned by the government to acquire more grazing land, it likely reflects large prevailing anxieties among a portion of the citizenry over economic development, political centralization, and globalization. Experts believe conflicts over grazing land may only become more common and intensify thanks to the changing weather patterns caused by climate change.
The second thing it does is reveal by contrast, how news reporting too often filters and slants stories in a way that trivializes them and obscures the larger import. If the story had come from Somewherelseistan, phrases like “pastoralist tribal groups” and “central government” would tend to call up certain images and associations in the mind that don’t get invoked when talking about ranchers and the Federal government.
How does that standard kind of reporting color the other stories in the news? A piece like this can make you think. When was the last time you saw anyone talking like this about the current political scene?
The events in Oregon suggest that militant factions may be taking advantage of the power vacuum caused by America’s political dysfunction to increase their territorial control in areas where the government’s control is weaker. The U.S. central government has been paralyzed for years by feuding between the center-left Democratic Party, which controls the executive branch, and the center-right Republican Party, which dominates the legislature. The country’s traditional governing elite have also been threatened this year by the rise of oligarch Donald Trump and his ultranationalist, populist campaign for president.
Read the whole thing.
Thursday, Jan 7, 2016 · 8:23:16 PM +00:00
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xaxnar
UPDATE: Judging by the number of critical comments, this piece demonstrates a third thing. Translation into tropes, albeit a different set than usual, shows that reducing any story to tropes is still going to lead to news coverage that can be shallow and misleading.
But then, that’s always a hazard. See Sturgeon’s Law.