Global Media Project

Courtney Hutchison: I am a senior concentrator in International Relations with a focus in Global Environment. When I graduate I plan to take an editorial assistant position at a magazine or publishing company. At heart, I am a writer who is in love with the stories of humanity. I love literature because it creates a stage for the playing out of these stories and psychology because it analyzes these stories. I have not had much experience with the non-fiction of the news and media type however. I am intrigued by the issues of subjectivity in the of telling a story that requires factual integrity in the way that news does, and also by the inevitable fictions that make it into, and perhaps are integral to, the production of media. In addition, I am eager to gain skills in the presentation of media in non-written venues, especially film. I think I should be able to take the class because of both practical and personal reasons. I need to take a senior seminar in order to graduate and this one is by far the most interesting to me. From a non-requirement standpoint, I think the experience with media in its many forms and the theory behind it will be indispensable to my (hopeful) future in publishing.
The article discusses the implications of speech and writing as forms of communication that both the formal teachers of the classroom and the informal teachers of the newsroom or interview often take for granted. There is both an implicit understanding and an implicit power in the act of speaking which the article references when it writes “to speak is to exercise a will to power”. By speaking, they mean, we assert and accept a position of authority on what we say, and the expectation is that when we communicate information we are in fact communicating knowledge, or even truth. Thus in speech we must accept this inescapable power and with it the culpability of our words. Though we often may not realize the teacher-like position we place ourselves in when we convey “news” in media, this expectation of truth and responsibility places us in a precarious situation in which we must attempt truth in a necessarily part-fiction retelling.
I found the concept of the “dangerous summary” particularly interesting. In speaking the words are somehow loaded bullets waiting to go rogue by the incapable interpreters the bad note-taker, or even the malicious intended editor. This is particularly pertinent to the role of the reporter on two counts. First, that his words can be taken out of the context and summarize in a way that invalidates the factuality of the message he wished to convey. Second, he is a middle man between the reality and the story in the mind of the public/audience, he is responsible for being that talented editor and summarizers, it is to him we trust the distillation of the truth for our impatient ears.

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