The simple ubiquity of words in modern American society makes them easy to overlook. Outside of obvious print publications like books, magazines, and newspapers, words are found in billboards, posters, signs, menus, labels, packaging, clothes, apparel, and other everyday items, not to mention the interpersonal conversations that we are either engaged in or exposed to throughout the course of any given day. Furthermore, the bombardment of words we see and hear pouring out of our omnipresent smartphones, laptops, tablets and televisions add to the torrential cascade of information we receive each day. According to New York Times interface specialist and researcher, Nick Bilton (2009), “the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day.” He proceeds to mention that Leo Tolstoy’s famous (and notoriously lengthy) novel War and Peace contains about 460,000 words (Bilston, 2009). Because this information was released only one year after the iPhone debuted, and smartphone usage has dramatically increased the amount of information Americans are consuming—over 600 minutes of daily media consumption per day in 2016! (Molla, 2017)—we can safely assume the number of words we are seeing each day is more extreme than ever.
One might assume that this abundance of information and communication at our disposal would lead to an increase in knowledge and understanding among the populace, but there are deep implications of this inundation of words—especially from the 24/7 news cycle of the mass media. The way in which we subjectively process and assign meaning to all these words has a strong effect on our understanding of people and events, as well as our perception of the media, especially in the current political climate, where news coverage is often infused with inflammatory rhetoric and barbed commentary. Educators at colleges and universities have begun to conceptualize and offer courses on “News Media Literacy” to assist students with navigating and interpreting the news from reliable sources (Lorenz, 2015). To echo the timeless American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1866): “Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of someone who knows how to combine them.” This paper will seek to explore the nature of the interpretive phenomena of semiotics and semantics, especially within journalism and news, and will examine their contributions to hostile media effect and the spiral of silence in American culture.
Semiotics is broadly defined as the study of sign phenomena, or how people create, use, and understand signs and symbols such as— but not limited to— language (Semantics and Semiotics). For the purposes of this paper, I will focus more on the closely related linguistic field of semantics, which is “concerned with the conveyance of meaning by the grammatical and lexical devices of a language” (Semantics and Semiotics). One of the early pioneers in this area was S.I Hayakawa, whose 1949 book, titled Language in Thought and Action (currently in its fifth edition, printed in 1990, with contributions from his son), greatly helped to popularize and legitimize the theories of semantics.
There are several underlying assumptions in the field of semiotics and semantics, especially in the modern society of the digital age. In Language in Thought and Action, Hayakawa (1990) anecdotally refers to a character called “the common man in the street,” or T.C. Mits, and uses this character’s relationship with words to convey some of the assumptions of semantics. He writes:
Like most people, [T.C. Mits] takes words as much for granted as the air he breathes, and gives them about as much thought…With words woven into almost every detail of his life, it seems amazing that Mit’s thinking about language should be so limited (Hayakawa, 1990, p. 10).
As communication processes become increasingly expedited and words become increasingly transient, it becomes even easier to take words for granted as we attempt to sift through the barrage of information. According to Martin Irvine (2005), a professor of Communication, Culture & Technology at Georgetown University, “We are constantly sending, receiving, and making meaning in various kinds of media, often conveying and interpreting meaning from one medium to another” (p. 7). Irvine believes this practice indicates a large semiotic influence across the entire culture, one both contemporary and inherited, that he terms a “semiosphere,” which consists of “the whole universe of available and possible meanings in a cultural system” (p.7). To elaborate further on this semiotic phenomenon, Gretchen Barbatsis (2009), a former professor of Media Studies and Communication at Michigan State University, explains that the content of the mass media is, itself, mediated, and that it “locates the meaning of media content in the real world of people living their lives, rather than in a particular media text” (p. 282). Therefore, the issue of decoding, understanding, and contextualizing words comes down to how rather than what the information means (p. 282). Every person has a unique set of circumstances and experiences that allows them to develop a subjective understanding of what a word or symbol means, and just as no two people are exactly the same, no word is exactly the same to two people. To go even further, due to the constant dynamism occurring in our minds and the world around us, no word can ever mean the exact same thing twice. Each time we interpret a word, we attach new meaning, new context, and new associations with that word, no matter how small or insignificant. Hayakawa (1990) claims, “The first of the principles governing symbols is this: The symbol is not the thing symbolized; the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory it stands for” (p.19). Likewise, when it comes to journalism and mass media, the news story is not the event it covers. They are all simply abstractions of a reality that everyone perceives a little differently. This phenomenon is important for the field of journalism because it applies to writers just as much as readers. Most modern journalists aspire to objectivity in their reporting, however, “even if explicit judgments are kept out of one’s writing, implied judgments will get in” (Hayakawa, 1990, p. 29).
Naturally, semiotics and semantics can (and do) have major effects on mass media and news in the United States. Hayakawa (1990) recognized that semantic influences in our environment were becoming increasingly potent, even in the mid-20th century; describing them as “almost completely dominated by commercial motives; public relations counsels who are simply well-paid craftsmen in the art of manipulating and reshaping our semantic environment in ways favorable to their clients. It’s an exciting environment, but fraught with danger” (p. 18). Today, that semantic environment is even more precarious, with nearly every company and corporation employing public relations specialists and social media analysts to enhance their brand, grab people’s attention, and increase profits through strategized advertising and promotional campaigns across a variety of multimedia platforms.
This practice has also extended to governmental campaigns for office, recruitment initiatives, and even news coverage, while often implementing the technique of what Hayakawa (1990) calls “snarl words” and “purr words.” He defines these as substituting a series of words to replace our visceral reactions to stimuli. He elaborates by saying, “Such statements have less to do with reporting the outside world than they do with our inadvertently reporting the state of our inner world; they are the human equivalents of snarling and purring” (Hayakawa, 1990, p. 28). Unfortunately, these words tend to exploit our natural penchant for dichotomy and encourages an “us vs. them” mentality on many issues, especially controversial issues that are often covered in the news and in politics. According to Hayakawa (1990), “to take sides on such issues [like gun control, abortion, capital punishment, and elections] phrased in such judgmental ways is to reduce communication to a level of stubborn imbecility” (p. 29). This makes the notion of objectivity in journalism to seem even more unreachable, although Hayakawa asserts that asking more questions and avoiding generalized blanket statements could help in that pursuit (p. 29). Furthermore, common words in the news can carry complex and varied connotations that evolve over time, which is something of which journalists must stay cognizant; “after all, the words ‘United States of America’ stood for quite a different-sized nation and a different culture in 1790 from they stand for today” (Hayakawa, 1990, p. 41).
It’s difficult to consider the pros and cons of semiotics and semantics, because in doing so, one would be falling victim to the very biases discussed in the above paragraphs. However, an acute awareness of these theories, the subjectivity of words, and their effect on news production and audience perception can be beneficial to both journalist and reader. In a journal article titled Influence of Presumed Influence, Gunther and Storey (2003) argue, “The importance of subjective perceptions in the influence process should not be underestimated; whether they are accurate or not, perceptions can have a self-fulfilling effect on the realization of communication goals” (p. 213). Whether it’s cognitive dissonance, fabrication of the truth, or plain “stubborn imbecility,” humans have a unique ability of rationalizing their ideas and beliefs into personal truths, which can then be easily extrapolated into generalized ‘objective’ truth. Of course, this poses many problems, both to the profession of journalism and to society as a whole, and has been linked to other theories in communication such as hostile media effect and the spiral of silence, which will be explored more deeply in the upcoming section.
The hostile media effect, or the tendency of partisans to view balanced, identical news coverage of an issue or event as slanted against their own side, carries several assumptions as well. First, as elaborated by Gunther & Storey (2003):
The persuasive press inference logic argues that people (a) attend to mass media and form impressions of the extent and slant of media content; (b) assume that this content is representative of content more generally (an extrapolation effect); (c) also assume that this media content has a broad reach; and (d) further assume that media content influences the opinions and attitudes of others (p. 202).
Another assumption of the hostile media effect is the agonistic nature of American society and its news. Agonism is defined as “taking a warlike stance in contexts that are not literally war – [it] pervades our public and private discourse, leading us to approach issues and each other in an adversarial spirit” (Tannen, 2013, p. 177). Examples abound in the mass media, from popular television shows like Storage Wars, Shipping Wars and Family Feud, to military metaphors like the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Poverty” (Tannen, 2013, p. 181). While this phenomenon was not quite so pervasive at the time of Hayakawa’s writing, he also noticed the highly competitive nature of the United States, noting that we try to outdo each other in almost every aspect of life, from wealth to popularity to dress to scholastic achievements and more, and that news coverage tends to focus more on conflict than cooperation (Hayakawa, 1990, p. 8). He also writes, “Over us all hangs the perpetual fear of another war even more unthinkably horrible than the last. One is often tempted to say that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life” (Hayakawa, 1990, p.8). As such, we humans in America are quick to defend our beliefs and convictions when we have any inkling that they might be threatened (or even questioned). However, this approach to discourse can be problematic, as noted by Capella et. al (2015): “Expecting to participate in a debate enhances participants’ selection of uncongenial information that may be more useful in this context…high-quality uncongenial information is threatening because defense motivation dominates decisions” (p. 405). With so much information at our fingertips, it’s easy to find evidence to back up almost any claim in the world, even if that evidence is from an unreliable source—or possibly even fictitious.
The impact on news from the hostile media effect has revealed itself in several forms. First, it has made certain controversial issues with strong divides among party lines much more difficult to solve, because both (or all) sides feel attacked and defensive when presented with balanced coverage of the topic(s), and therefore less likely to compromise or come to an agreement. Also, because news (and perhaps society in general) tends to focus more on conflict than cooperation, consumers can feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the consistent negativity. According to Tannen (2013), this “scandal inflation” leads to a “rhetorical boy who cried wolf” and causes true scandals to become overlooked: “If you hear a fight outside your window, you rush to open the window to see what is going on. But if there is a fight outside your window every night, you shut the window and try to block them out” (p. 180). What might be seen as a paradox of hostile media effect is that oftentimes, balanced reporting, in an attempt to prevent this effect, can create the impression that both sides are equally valid: “for example, when one side, such as scientists providing evidence of global climate change, is “balanced” by a tiny minority of scientists (typically funded by the fossil fuel industry) who deny that claim” (Tannen, 2013, p. 181). This lends credence to certain extreme issues that don’t necessarily merit debate, such as climate change, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy.
Another impact of the hostile media effect on news comes from the emotionally arousing content that permeates many news stories, and our propensity to share it. We are biologically wired to gravitate toward negative information, and then are more likely to disseminate it after reading or watching. As discussed by Cappella et. al (2015), “Negatively valenced information, such as news stories with a conflict frame, is more likely to be selectively viewed than positive or neutral ones” (p. 410). Then, after viewing this negative information, we are usually more inclined to share it, because “emotional arousal triggers social sharing of the emotion, thereby making emotionally arousing messages widely circulated through social networks” (Cappella et. al, 2015, p. 410). To tie that into hostile media effect, even if a reader perceives that a story is slanted against his/her beliefs (which is likely), he/she would be more prone to share the information out of frustration or indignation. This causes many potentially controversial news stories to spread like wildfire among social media networks. Furthermore, the potential anonymity of online discourse often allows for users to act with more hostility without fear of immediate repercussions.
One main reason that the hostile media effect is so prominent today is the increasing ubiquity of the mass media. The mass media reaches a larger percentage of the population than ever before through smartphones and other digital technology, which poses threats to partisan viewpoints that may hope to target neutral citizens. Gunther & Schmitt (2004) note, “The sense of broad reach and thus of potential influence on others invoked by mass media may generate perceptions of hostile content” (p. 66). This can become extremely hazardous to public discourse, however, when high-standing officials become too caught up in the hostile media effect, because it may lead them to “reject even-handed information, to see the tide of public opinion turning against them, to withdraw from public debate, or even to resort to desperate actions” (Gunther & Schmitt, 2004, p. 69). This brings to mind the venomous public ramblings and Twitter rants of President Trump, who regularly decries “fake news” stories about himself and his administration, often going so far as to denounce reporters and reputable news agencies by name.
The president’s strong engagement in the hostile media effect has resulted in many of his followers to emulate the behavior, creating an aura of hostility around his base. Discourse in that kind of environment is often reduced to bullheaded disagreements, aggressive arguments, or even shouting. This type of passionate hostility can be very alienating to anyone who has differing opinions, which can lead to another communicative phenomenon—the spiral of silence—where individuals tend to remain silent if they fear their viewpoint is against the majority and may lead to social isolation. Tannen (2013) anecdotally describes an experience she had when she observed a hostile, shouting passenger on a train: “I realized that I feared that the angry shouter (the word’s similarity to shooter is not, I think, irrelevant) would turn his wrath on me. And that is another example of how the argument culture makes everyone feel vulnerable” (p. 182). What will be the ensuing results on democracy when rational discourse is intimidated away by stubborn and aggressive partisanship?
The hostile media effect is a concerning problem currently facing American culture, and it’s largely fueled by semiotics, semantics, and the 24/7 news cycle paired with vast social media networks. However, journalists can benefit from this knowledge and improve their practice by generalizing less, using fewer “snarl” and “purr” words, and asking more questions to learn more about the beliefs of others, such as “Why do you like or dislike President Trump?” or “Why are you for or against gun control?”. As Hayakawa puts it, “After listening to their opinions and the reasons for them, we may leave the discussion slightly wiser, slightly better informed, and perhaps less one-sided than we were before the discussion began” (p. 29). The key to balancing out the presentation of news is to approach every story with a multi-valued orientation of the topic, rather than a simple two-valued orientation. There are more than two sides to every story. “The individual with genuine skill in writing—and in thinking—can with imagination and insight look at the same subject from many points of view” (Hayakawa, 1990, p. 31), and hopefully that practice will come across to his/her audience, leading to a more rational, better informed populace.
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