Media coverage of the developing world

Media coverage of the developing world: audience understanding and interest This paper examines key issues in the relationship between television news content and the manner in which audiences respond to it. In past research this relationship has been analysed from various theoretical perspectives. Some have seen news content as essentially ideological and as having the power to limit and structure audience belief (Glasgow Media Group 1976, 1980, Philo 1990, Herman and Chomsky 1998). Others have seen the news as a constant recurrence of routinised journalistic practice (Rock 1973, Enzensberger 1974). Still others have seen news content as primarily directed by commercial criteria, based on assumptions about what audiences ‘really’ want to watch (Stone, 2000). There is also a strong current in contemporary research which suggests that media are engaged in the mass production of social ignorance. There are three key issues emerging from these studies which I will outline here: 1.   That the decision made by broadcasters (on commercial criteria) about what viewers would desire to watch have in the long run produced very negative responses in TV audiences towards the developing world. That audiences are misinformed about the developing world because of the low level of explanations and context which is given in television reporting and because some explanations which are present are partial and informed by what might be termed ‘post-colonial beliefs’. That a change in the quality of explanation which is given can radically alter both attitudes to the developing world and the level of audience interest in the subject. Production decisions and assumptions about audiences There is a widespread belief in broadcasting that audiences are not interested in factual programming on the developing world, an extensive sample of 38 senior broadcasters, commissioning editors and programme makers were interviewed. The responses in these interviews highlighted the issue of audience demand and the assumptions which were made about this within broadcasting. As George Alagiah, a senior BBC journalist, notes: Programme editors are driven by audience interest, but this can lead to a fixation with home, leisure and consumer items instead of the broader agenda. (3WE, 2000: 160). His words find an echo in the comments of George Carey of the production company Menton Barraclough Carey: I try and guess what the audience wants. Most people switch on to be entertained not to get a message. Instinctively I feel domestic stories will be more interesting than foreign ones. (3WE) 2000:159. The point is spelt out more forcefully by Steve Hewlett, Director of Programmes at Carlton Television: I know from past experience that programmes about the developing world don’t bring in the audiences. They’re not about us, and they’re not usually about things we can do anything about. (3WE 2000:159). Commercial criteria are now a key consideration for programme makers and this comes down in part to providing what they assume the audiences will want to watch. As Charles Tremayne, controller of factual programmes at Granada TV puts it: We’re past the days of giving audiences what they should have – now it’s all about what they want. (3WE 2000:159). But the assumptions made are not necessarily well informed about why audiences watch and what conditions their level of interest. As Alex Holmes, editor of the programme Modern Times at the BBC admits: Audience interest is very important, second only to a good story, but we don’t know exactly what people want. I imagine what they want. It’s blissfully unscientific on Modern Times! (3WE 2000:159). One consequence of these assumptions on audience interest has apparently been the drastic reduction of factual programming about the developing world. A report by Jennie Stone for 3WE concluded that the total output of factual programmes on developing countries by the four terrestrial channels dropped by 50% in the 10 years after 1989. (Stone 2000:4). Our own study showed that when the developing world is featured on the news a high proportion of the coverage related to war, conflict, terrorism and disasters. This is especially so for the main television channels with over a third of coverage on BBC and ITN devoted to such issues. Much of the remaining coverage is given over either to sport or to visits by westerners to developing countries. For example, in our sample the Bahamas were in the news because Mick Jagger and Gerry Hall had visited and some countries were featured simply because Richard Branson’s balloon had floated over them (Glasgow Media Group 2000:20-21). Programmes such as BBC2’s Newsnight and Channel 4 News had a wider coverage of issues such as trade and politics but it was clear that the focus for mainstream TV news was more likely to be on dramatic and negative images of the developing world. The 3WE study for example found that although coverage had declined overall, the reporting of disasters had actually increased by 5% (Stone 2000:15). When disasters are covered journalist select news angles and visual images which they assume will compel audience attention, e.g. news of an earthquake will feature scenes of destruction, chaos, visuals of collapsed buildings, frantic rescue efforts and appeals for help. These become the basic themes of earthquake/disaster coverage. The problem arises when these are the only themes in the coverage and they become routinised and occur each time there is a similar disaster. Then, for the viewer there is in practice little to distinguish one such crisis from another in the developing world other than the name of the country. Such stories and those of conflict and violence are visually striking and in fact constitute a high proportion of the coverage. So it is not surprising that viewers perceive the developing world to be not much more than a series of catastrophes. Another key problem with such coverage is the very limited nature of explanations which are given (if at all) of events such as political conflict and war. In our study of TV news coverage of the Rwandan refugee crisis of 1994, we found a very large number of references (122 in our sample) which stressed the scale of the flight and the huge number of people involved but gave no account of why any of these events were occurring. As we showed, Africa was referred to on the news as a place of ‘tribal conflict’, ‘tribal enemies’, ‘ethnic war’, ‘insanity’, ‘chaos’ and ‘anarchy’, inhabited by ‘wild men’. Against these descriptions are put explanations of why the West is concerned about military intervention in the region. For example: ‘Reporter: There remained extreme caution about being sucked into the region’s blood-thirsty politics’ (BBC1 2100 1st, 8th and 13th November 1996). On ITN the people of Africa were compared to the topography of the landscape which they inhabited. The volcanoes were described as being ‘far more predicable as the people they watch over’ (ITN 2200 18 Nov 1996). But in the absence of more complex social and political explanations, it is possible to fall back on images of ‘tribal passions’. The BBC for example showed shots of Africans dancing in grass skirts at a border post, and described them as ‘the wild men of the murderous interahamwe militia’. (BBC1 2100 1 Nov 1996). They were not in fact Rwandans at all but were apparently Zairian border guards who had dressed in this way in order to insult the Rwandan army.  I asked a focus group what image came into their minds when they heard the word ‘tribe’. They replied that it would be people with grass skirts and spears standing in front of huts. At the end of that group meeting I explained to them something of the history of Rwanda and commented that the Hutu military regime in 1994 had killed all opposition groups including moderate Hutus, Belgium nationals and soldiers with the UN as well as the Tutsi population. In Butare, a city in the south of the city which was known for its tolerance and liberalism the Hutu students and lecturers at the University were killed because they were assumed to be in opposition to the Hutu government. One woman in the focus group commented ‘Oh you don’t think of them as having universities’ (29 June 1998, St Albans Group). Audience Responses A key finding of our research was that the images which audience groups recalled of the developing world were overwhelmingly negative (including famine, poverty, refugees, war and conflict). The source of these images was given routinely as the media (press and television) as in this comment from a woman in a focus group in London: Well every time you turn on the TV or pick up a paper, there’s another (war) starting or there is more poverty or destruction. It is all too much (retired group, London, cited in Glasgow Media Group 2000:137) A small number of people had experienced living and working in the developing world or in occupations which gave them a different perspective. As one woman from Glasgow commented: I do some voluntary work for Oxfam so I hear a lot about things from there. I mean, you wouldn’t believe half of what is going, really positive things, I mean that you wouldn’t hear about anywhere else. I watch the news sometimes and think oh yeah, here we go again, why don’t you tell us about the people who are trying to change things and the huge advances that are being made. (Low income focus group, Glasgow, Glasgow Media Group 2000:137). People in the groups readily admitted that they simply did not understand the news and thought that the external world was not being properly explained to them. As one group member expressed it: I have a constant sense of not being properly informed about background to issues and things like that. (Middle class, London, Glasgow Media Group 2000:139). There is now some recognition of these problems by professional broadcasters and a desire to find new ways of structuring news and other programmes so that viewers may be better informed. The 3WE research project recorded these comments from Ian Stuttard a documentary producer at the BBC: The whole angle is wrong. We look at the results of things most of the time instead of the causes. Wars rather than the arms trade is an example of this so we’re conditioned to think of the developing world in a distorted way because we don’t look behind the scenes. It’s a challenge because viewers are less politically aware (this isn’t helped by television!), and because ‘causes’ are not always very visual. How do you film money-laundering and arms deals? But it can be done! (3WE 2000:162). ‘How’ it could be done was the subject of the next phase of our work. Audience Understanding and Interest This is an account of a pilot study in which senior BBC news personnel took part in focus group discussions. The purpose was to investigate how changes in the structure and content of programming might affect audience comprehension and levels of interest. In the event, Vin Ray, the world news editor and David Shukman, a world news correspondent both took part. The method used for the focus groups had three elements. First, the group was given a series of still photographs which had been taken off screen from an actual news story. The story was chosen in conjunction with the BBC and they also provided the video material which was used for the taking of the still pictures. These were chosen to represent the main elements of the story and this selection was done in collaboration with a BBC news journalist. In the research exercise, the focus group members are asked to look at the photographs and then to imagine that they are journalists and to write their own news story using only the pictures as a stimulus. The story is then read out but the group and there is a brief discussion about the sources of information which they have used and their level of knowledge of the area. In the second part of the session the actual news item from which the photographs were taken was shown to the group. This was then followed by a moderated discussion which focussed on six specific points: 1.    What was the knowledge base which was used for the story which was written by the group members? What was their level of comprehension of the issues involved in the story? How much was added to their understanding of the story by the viewing of the actual news item? What would need to be added to their knowledge to produce a better understanding of the issues involved? How does the manner in which the content of the story is shaped or presented affect levels of interest? How might such interest by affected by changes in presentation and content? Conclusions There are a number of key issues which emerge from our research. The first is that TV audiences have in general very little understanding of events in the developing world or of major international institutions or relationships. This is in part the result of TV coverage which tends to focus on dramatic, violent and tragic images while giving very little context or explanation to the events which are being portrayed. The development of television organised around crude notions of audience ratings is likely to make this situation worse. The irony is that in seeking to grab the attention of audiences, programme makers are actually fostering very negative attitudes towards the developing world and other international issues and in the long run will reduce audience interest. We also found that in the absence of other explanations on the news, audiences (and some journalists) will ‘fill in the gaps’ with what are effectively post colonial beliefs about Africa and the innate faults of Africans. Our new research with BBC journalists showed that the explanation of the core relationships which link the industrial countries to the conflicts of the developing world can produce a distinct change in the understanding and attitudes of audience groups. The crucial point is that the conflict in Angola was located in a world system of commercial and political relationships in which the group members themselves played a part. The importance of this is that it was the understanding of the core relationships which made a difference and meant that audience members could link different elements of the news story to produce a coherent explanation. For some years now, within broadcasting, there have been arguments about the need to better inform and explain in news programmes. These have resulted in demands for longer bulletins, in-depth interviews and more detailed accounts. Such changes can indeed play a part but we should remember that audiences can get lost in detail and longer interviews with prevaricating politicians may simply add to the confusion. The important point for the journalist is the need to summarise the key relationships that explain the events which they are reporting, to say why these matter and how they relate to the audience. These relationships then need to be referred to routinely in news accounts as it cannot be assumed that audiences will have heard and understood them the first time or indeed that they carefully watch each bulletin. A key result of our work was that the audience groups showed an increase in their level of interest when they did understand the economic and political links which underpinned the continuing war. The reports by David Shukman had been extremely powerful and had produced a very strong emotional response towards the victims of the conflict. But this was accompanied by feelings that the situation was hopeless and essentially an ‘African’ problem. It was the change in this perception that produced the increased interest. Finally, if we look at world news as a whole it does seem clear that many of the problems which viewers experience result from the actions and practices of the broadcasters themselves. If they are not to be held responsible for the mass production of ignorance then it is they who will need to redress the balance between the current priorities of reporting and the need to properly inform their audience.

Conceptualising British Cinema

In the 1990s Andrew Higson tried to conceptualise national cinema along broader lines that purely economic ones or who made the film.

The point of looking at conceptualisation is to enable you to question the question in your examination. Questions about British Film have to assume we all agree what a British Film is - yet in a globalised world national boundaries of badges are sometimes outdated.

Higson essentially offers four paradigms for conteptualising national ( for us British) cinema.

Economic
Who invested in the film. What percentage of the financing was from British sources?

Audience
Is a British film a film that British people watch - if that's the case then all successful Hollywood films are in fact British

Content
This looks at themes and locations, Actors and directors - are they British?

Criticism Lead
The argument suggests that British film is somehow culturally more important than mass entertainment Hollywood film. What we might call first cinema. British film is challenging, avent garde or High Art.

Check your e mail 17/12/10 I sent a PPT file with a more orthodox discription of British film.

Masculinity in Crisis

Masculinity in Crisis

Modernity

Roles we’re given. Life Course Prescribed. Life was full of certainties

Meta narratives

The End of Modernity

The grand certainties of Modernity began to be challenged during the late 1960s

Post-Modernity

Globalisation, Mass Media, Excessive consumerism, multi-identity. Life is fluid.

A sea of possibilities      Gender roles/identity are changing at work at home.

Crisis of Masculinity

What it is to be a man has come into question. Are men defined by their machismo, their caring side (the new man), are they metro sexual (defined by a new male consumerism).

Fight Club is an angry defence of ‘traditional’ masculinity. Forget the new man lets return to a world of honest masculine brutality and a rejection of any ‘feminine side’. of new

Google the crisis of Masculinity

This will offer a useful social context for understanding and interpreting the film.

Guelwaar

'Guelwaar' is a very accessible introduction to the often difficult delights of African cinema. Like Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray, Sembene has often been patronised as a non-Western director making films for Western audiences. And certainly, the film is full of elaborate, didactic speeches - about military, police and civic corruption; first world imperialism etc. - that play like lectures to the uninformed, and would presumably seem like statements of the obvious to indigenous viewers.

Unlike many African films, which are driven by myth, imagery, allegory, or the tropes of oral culture, 'Guelwaar' is reassuringly structured in a way familiar to Westerners. As in a film by Costa-Gavras, a detective story plot is used to uncover wider truths about the country's social and political framework.

There are three interrelated detective stories in the film: where is the missing corpse of the title hero (which translates as 'The Noble One'), a revered dissident fomenting opposition to local corruption and first world neo-imperialism?; how did Guelwaar die - if he was killed, who murdered him?; who was Guelwaar the man anyway?

As in Costa-Gavras, the film's initial focus on the local immediately implicates the national. The first detective story - about the corpse - reveals the deep religious hostilities in the country. Guelwaar was a Christian in a largely Muslim society; when it's discovered that his body was, due to an administrative blunder (a mordantly cynical piece of satire), buried in an Islamic graveyard, the dead Muslim's people refuse to 'desecrate' the cemetary, and return the body.

Most of the movie is taken up with the stand-off of the two peoples in which blind intransigence quickly gives way to a violence which is only neutered when the army are called in. it is unclear whether this is a justification for military visibility - the chief policeman is one of the few sane, non-corrupt characters in the film. Much is made of the irony that each clan proclaims the authenticity of a religion originating thousands of miles away.

The second detective story - who killed Guelwwar - again takes the narrative away from the local. it is clear that Guelwaar was a threat to local and international interests, both politically and religiously - at a ceremony celebrating the receipt of foreign aid, he delivers an incendiary speech denouncing his country's craven dependence on others. it is hard to disagree - none of the strong men in the area seem to do any work, the lands remain unharvested; civic dignitaries line their pockets, and their daughters become bread-winning prostitutes at a socially convenient distance. This is a pleasant, anti-Catch-22 state of affairs - the first world retain virtual power after colonialism; the locals get rich. Guelwaar is in serious danger of disrupting it. He has to be wiped out.

This is all very instructive in an educational kind of way, but would be rather dull as film drama in itself. There is a real thrill (and a kind of horror) when the foreign aid van is seized, its supplies sabotaged and trod on, but agit-prop as hagiography can be rather unpalatable. The third detective story complicates this. Who was Guelwaar? He was certainly an inspiring, charismatic, articulate leader. But he was also a bullying patriarch who diminished his wife and was quite content for his daughter to whore herself for his dinner.

Unlike most political films, which can be very macho, Sembene records female experience in such a society, in which rigid social and religious rules keep women at home while their men fornicate freely. Although the film ends with Guelwaar the heroic, the progression of the four flashbacks is more difficult. The first suggests his involvement in thuggish political violence. The second shows his contempt for his wife and family responsibilities. The third shows his taste for 'freedom' was more sexual than political. Only in the fourth do we get any idea of Guelwaar's nominal nobility, by which time our taste for rhetoric, as opposed to action, has worn thin. Surely the idea that two peoples, adhering to foreign religions, and fighting over a corpse, is irony enough.

So far, so Western. This narrative has other familiar trajectories - the uniting of a scattered family; the power and role of language, colonial and local; the transformation of a Western-educated son into a Senegalese patriot. The satire of bureaucracy and corruption can be very funny. The great pleasure of 'Guelwaar', however, are its digressions from the narrative, when it slows down to record a way of life, even in extremis; the mish mash of rites (tribal, Christian/Islamic); the colourful clothes and murals, the music.

Third Cinema

Third Cinema

Term first used by Solonas and Getino 1969  Argentinean film makers

Term presupposes existence of first and second

Opposes imperialist or colonialist cinema

Hollywood style First cinema

Independent/Auteur Second cinema

Indicative factors of third cinema

an ideologically combative film, differing from commodity products of dominant film industries and cinematic values of auterism

Counter cinema is understandable as mirror opposite of Hollywood therefore conventionally dictated by Hollywood

Wider social political and economic context.

African cinema has not developed like European or American cinema. Much of Africa was under colonial rule until 1960s . . .

Although much of Africa has gained a form of political independence it is not yet economically or culturally independent.

Cultural imperialism . . . media effects paradigm

European way of life example for rest of world seen as highest form of civilisation

euro centric

Historical Context

Sauvy 1952 talked of third world - cold war split the world in two non aligned nations

Third connotes new perspective. new experiences being articulated

1955 conference of independent countries third world becoming a political force immergence of political theory - euro value could be rejected - it has produced Hitler.

Colonialism had taken away history culture identity. Third cinema attempts to reclaim it

Algerian culture projected as being inferior. Women seen as exotic - who constructs those images.  link this to Said

Third cinema challenged this objectification - colonial stereotypes

crowd extras remember events

conveys authenticity

not actors in my film

Includes news footage real location gritty realism.

Sembene I consider cinema as a means of political action.

Characteristics

lack of attendance  geographical problems

Resources limited

Financial support  french speaking films in W Africa

About struggle

Show Battle of Algiers

Viewpoint of colonised not coloniser

Battle of Algiers early example

made 64 released 65 independent 62

one of first examples of third cinema

Italian/Algerian production

Saadi Yacof producer actor leader of FLN

Non linear narrative often no hero

Local dialect

Mainstream distributors refuse to take on third world films, regarding them as a minority interest

Third tries to reinvent cinema so that indigenous cultures can produce their own cinema

each locale should have its own cinema

rewriting basic rules of grammar

Re-introduce film language, anyone can make meaning. Physical form of the sign etc.

Encoding – decoding.

What did we call the decoding of the black students watching Dominant code

Preferred/Dominant/Hegemonic

Which reads the preferred meaning that has been encoded - it is read ‘full and straight’

Negotiated Code

Acknowledges the legitimacy of the dominant definitions while at a more restricted, situational level

Operates with exceptions to the rule

General acceptance of dominant definitions and a rejection of their local implication co exist

Worker pay restraints yes to the logic no to him or her receiving less money

Oppositional Position

Where texts are decoded in a contrary way.

Abberant Reading

Meaning of third cinema can be inaccesable because of belief systems, ideologies and cultural references. Also film styles.

We can call this a cultural curtain.

Audience tend to read film by incorporating into their schemata.

We in other words domesticate that which is foreign.

This has the tendency to subvert other cultures and therefore alter the representation of Africa.

The original culture is lost.

Dichotomy of theory between Gabriel theories

Gabriel Ethiopian scholar

Developed framework - for study of oppositional film practices that articulate cultural struggles  -  in this case Third cinema cuts across boundaries of national cinemas.

Third worldism imposes a fictive unity homogeneityniety that ignores the diversity of conditions of production and reception of third world film texts.

We could make a link here to the constraints of genre.

Gabriel describes those essential qualities third world films possess rather than those they seem to lack

view attacked as essentialist

A varietey of emerging trends stops third cinema functioning as a rigid classification term  -  so avoids setting up another hegemonic norm for 'correct' film making

There is no correct way of making a third cinema movie

Third Cinema is common enemy of imperialism but third world countries are undergoing extremely diversified degrees of development.

What is the role of 'non-native' critic in terms of encouraging a wider interest in third world cinema texts in the first world

quasi-imperial division of labour - third world produces first world produces criticism

Dualism

The valorisation of landscape in the long shot verses the psychologism of the close up.

Folklore logic disrupts Western dichotomies subject/object good/evil

Third world (both in territory and map) so often functions as a symbol of chaos that will mirror 1st worlds image of itself as order.

Mass communications replace conventional weapons. For neocolonialism mass communication is as effective as napalm

Cultural curtain prevails which prevent understanding from outside cultural perspective.

Tendency of audiences to read a film incorporating it within methodologies and critical matrices already familiar to it. - we domesticate what is alien to us.

This process may enrich our aesthetics and cultural traditions but it subverts other cultural traditions.

Lack of cultural perspective and intercultural understanding

Context - Text

Cultural Curtain

Reading a film from a geographic and cultural differencemay be problematised by several factors

The most serious example is the tendency of an audience to read a film by auto matically incorporating it within the methodologies and critical matricies which are already familiar to the audience.

The most important thing to remember when watching or studying third cinema is to insure against assuming that the features of a third world film always correspond to something familiar in First cinema.

There is a deeper level of meaning which can not be known by the uninitiated

EG's

Lavishly filling glass with whiskey a common shot in West, depicts affluence or may be the power of the alcohol

A thousand and one Hands  -  Baraka 1972

depicts the same image yet in Morroco (Islam) this image represents sacrilegious and godless.

Ethiopian film Gouma 1973

Question of honour or repentance of wrong doer rather than vengeance upon wrong doer

Blind person in West considered unfortunate

In Africa (Sembene) blind is a seer with foresight and foreknowledge.

A radical difference to the regular representations of the disabled.

Pervasive icons have radically different meanings

blonde beauty -

Blonde beauty in Morocco may stand for the destructiveness of European culture.

White as a symbol of innocence - Ethiopian symbol of death

Ethnocentric readings can alter the meanings of the narrative. consider major implications of animal slaughter in west compared to every day image of Africa

Americans are judged in terms of individual achievement

African responsibility for community

Underlying ideology of capatilism engenders the notion of individualism. (what Frankfurt school would call pseudo individuality).

Also the notion of competition.

There are often charateristic shots of men or women walking across the landscape

Traditional cosmology of individual dwarfed by background

emphasis on space rather than time.

Consider the collective purpose of the long shot.

Production and Technological determinants of Culture

Imported US leads audiences to expect certain level of technical brilliance

Third cinema must swap urban market for rural audience to negate this trend - however they are difficult to reach.

Production Content reception

Representations of Disability

Representations of Disability

Disability is an umbrella term – the needs and challenges faced by disabled peoples are many and varied. You need to say in your exam that representations are narrow.

Disabled people are often maginalised in mainstream media. This means that in certain groups are seen on the fringes of society and subsequently their media representations are both narrow and infrequent.

Goffman

 When the disabled person assumes that his/her audience knows the difference between what ought to be and what is E.G:  A woman missing an arm. The main challenge to the performance – is managing tension created because the audience is aware of the gap between ideal and actual.

Stigmatised People have to change their reactions to put the non-stigmatised at ease. They use a variety of coping strategies.

·        rejection of stigmatised label by over-achievement in an area considered difficult (para-olympics)

·        joining self-help groups to counter-prejudice and social oppression

·        development o a self-deprecating humour which draws attention to the stigma and relieves the tension for the non-stigmatised.

In some African cinema disability is represented in a positive manner. For example a blind person may be deemed to have special intuition and an ability to see into the future. In UK TV representation of disability can often signify pity.

  

Dominant notions of disability: the individual model 
The societal view of disability generally conforms to the individual or overcoming or medical model of disability. This holds that disability is inherent in the individual, whose responsibility it is to ‘overcome’ her or his ‘tragic’ disability. 
Often this ‘overcoming’ is achieved through medical intervention, such as attempts at ‘cures’. For example, top wheelchair athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson was forced as a child to wear heavy leg callipers which gave her blisters, rather than being offered the simple and practical option of using a wheelchair. This approach to disability aims for the normalisation of disabled people, often through the medicalisation of their condition.

 Disability as metaphor 
Jenny Morris (1991) argues that cultural portrayals of disability are usually about the feelings of non-disabled people and their reactions to disability, rather than about disability itself. Disability thus becomes:

...a metaphor...for the message that the non-disabled writer wishes to get across, in the same way that ‘beauty’ is used. In doing this, the writer draws on the prejudice, ignorance and fear that generally exist towards disabled people, knowing that to portray a character with a humped back, with a missing leg, with facial scars, will evoke certain feelings in the reader or audience. The more disability is used as a metaphor for evil, or just to induce a sense of unease, the more the cultural stereotype is confirmed (Morris, 1991:93).

Watch the clip(s) and answer the following questions

What type of disability is being represented?

Has the encoder used an able-bodied actor to play a disabled character?

Why is there a limited range of disabled representations on Television?

How does the encoder use the tensions Goffman describes for comic effect?

Is the representation designed to signify pity/humour/evil/disgust/voyeuristic pleasure? How do you know this?

What affects our willingness to offer pity when confronting representations of disability? Consider whether the character being represented is deserving of pity?

Useful images to consider

Hannibal (film) 
Agent Starling goes to see Lecter’s victim who is in bed, hidden in the shadows and surrounded by curtains. The light is raised to give a horror view of his face. The character here is evil too, so we associate his facial scarring with punishment for his evil nature, and also with the visual manifestation of evil (we expect evil people to look evil, thanks to generations of fairy tales). We are supposed to be shocked, to recoil in horror. 
How do you think this affects people with facial scarring?

Newspaper photographs 
The tabloids are a particularly good source. One recent example was in The Daily Mail, where a Muslim cleric who had his hands blown off in Afghanistan was pictured with his hooks on prominent display, which were described in the article as ‘metal claws’. The article aimed to expose the supposed glut of ‘bogus asylum seekers’ who are also ‘terrorists’ and who are claiming social security benefits funded by taxpayers in Britain. It thus combined iconic images of Muslim fundamentalist masculinity with disability in order to create and to maximise the fear of ‘foreignness’ associated with post 9/11 society.

Television documentaries 
Recent examples include Amputee Admirers (Five) which purports to discuss Internet-based groups who run dating/social groups for amputees and those who are attracted to them. In this case, an academic who is also an amputee is questioned in order to give an element of political correctness to a programme which is essentially about voyeurism. However, the camerawork exposes the subtext by zooming in on the academic’s stumps and scars as she speaks. Another example of this is in ITV’s The Unluckiest Faces in Britain which utilises stark lighting and mise-en-scene and big close-ups to emphasise the facial differences of its subjects, while they are interviewed in a supposedly sympathetic manner.

Television drama and film 
Wheelchairs tend to predominate here, since they are an iconic sign of disability. Most actors playing disabled characters are, however, not disabled. The wheelchair allows the character to be obviously disabled, whilst still looking ‘normal’, and does not therefore present any major challenges for audience identification. A good example of a film that challenges this view is Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978).

Disability and gender: ‘Supercrips’ 
Supercrips are people who conform to the individual model by overcoming disability, and becoming more ‘normal’, in a heroic way. Jenny Morris argues that in film and TV drama, disability is often used as a narrative device to express ideas of dependency, lack of autonomy, tragedy etc. She argues that

...women do not have to be portrayed as disabled in order to present an image of vulnerability and dependency... therefore most disabled characters in film and television in recent years have been men (Morris in Pointon, 1997:26).

Thus many Supercrip films are about the hell of dependency for men. Since women are viewed as dependent, there is little point in making films about their ‘struggles’ with disability. Perhaps disability does not ‘matter’ so much to a woman? 
An example of a ‘Supercrip’ is the Irish writer Christy Brown, who described his book My Left Foot as his “plucky little cripple story”. The film of the same name is full of useful sequences. 
Problems with the Supercrip stereotype: 
• It focuses on a single individual’s ability to overcome, then puts the onus on other disabled people to do the same. 
• What about those who can’t or won’t try to live up to this stereotype? 
It is notable that the actors playing these Supercrip roles - which often earn them Oscars - are invariably non-disabled superstars with the requisite face and physique. Thus an impaired male body is visually represented as a perfect physical specimen in a wheelchair.

Difference 
It has been argued that dominant notions of ‘normality’ and beauty do not allow for the natural range of difference in human form. These notions are not only prejudicial to the acceptance of disabled people, but also increasingly impact on non-disabled people. Charlotte Cooper, for example, applies the social model to obesity, and concludes that there are some important categories through which obesity can be defined as a disability: 
• A slender body is ‘normal’ 
• Fatness is a deviation from the norm. 
• Fat and disabled people share low social status. 
• Fatness is medicalised (e.g. jaw-wiring and stomach-stapling). 
• Fat people are blamed for their greed and lack of control over their bodies. 
Consider why it is that fat people or disabled people are rarely portrayed as sexually attractive.

Discussing telethons 
Telethons - especially the BBC’s Children in Need - provide a range of interesting images of disability. 
Telethons have been roundly criticised for being “the twentieth-century version of the beggar in the streets. Even the begging-bowls are no longer in our own hands...” 
• Is this true? 
• Are telethons ever OK? 
• What would you replace them with?

Points about Telethons: 
• Telethons use images of brave, smiling and grateful recipients of charity. They ask us to donate out of relief that we don’t have their problems. 
• They rely on ‘cute’ children, which gives a false impression of the real incidence of disability in the population. 
• They create the impression that it is not the job of the state to provide essential funds for disadvantaged groups, and do not question why people are disadvantaged. By making certain people dependent on charity, we create beggars. (Charity is now big business, with marketing executives receiving six figure salaries...) 
• Anne Karpf argues that there is a need for charities, but that telethons act to keep the audience in the position of givers, and to keep recipients in their place as grateful and dependent. 
• Emotive images push other images out. Those who look fit and well are assumed to be able to look after themselves, which is not always the case. 
• Charity is not just about money – it’s also about helping someone with their problems and working alongside them. 
• Telethons could help us to understand, but usually don’t. People donate because they’re being entertained. There is a conflict between the way you raise money, and the way you raise awareness. They are not necessarily the same thing. 
• Who will give disabled people a job when they see such images? The implicit meaning is that we should help disabled people, not that we should integrate them into society.

What would disabled people like to see? 
Karen Ross undertook a qualitative survey of disabled viewers and listeners and concluded:


Many of the changes that viewers and listeners would like to see take place in broadcasting can be described as ‘respect’ issues: respecting the diversity of disability and portraying those varied experiences; respecting the views of disabled people and consulting with them to provide more authentic and credible portraits; respecting the abilities of disabled people and actively involving disabled media professionals in all aspects of programme production across all genres...Crucially, what disabled audiences want is an acknowledgement of the fact that disability is a part of daily life and for the media to reflect that reality, removing the insulting label of ‘disabled’ and making it ordinary (Ross, 1997: 676).