Media professionals – the new Wizards of Oz – use a deceptively simple set of tools in their work. There are 12 "event values:" conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity. There is one definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.
There are other tools that come into play as needed, but these are the basic set. Let's call them the Wizard's Tools. They are the starting place for all existing media literacy education: Media Code 101. The Wizard's Tools create the code that resides in every scrap of print, video, and audio content produced by the seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. Professionals who work in those businesses learn the media code in schools of journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising, script writing, filmmaking, campaigning, and terrorism.
Yes, terrorism. Terrorists in the last 20 years have realized they aren't in the bomb business at all. They're in the television business, just like the National Football League. Terrorists are frighteningly expert in the media code. A quick quiz, with one answer: the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 attacks, both occurred at the same time, 9 a.m.; and the summer, 2006, plot to blow up airliners – foiled, happily – involved airliners flying from Europe to the United States. Why? People with media literacy will know the answer immediately. The answer is at the bottom of this blog.
All media has but three functions: to inform, entertain, and manipulate. The information stream includes news of all kinds. “News” has been defined in any number of ways, but the media wizards use a good generic definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. A plane crash, an economy crash, right-doing, wrong-doing, or a city council vote changes the status quo. Anything that may happen, but hasn't yet, is a threat to the status quo. Sports and weather are classic threat stories. In fact, sports is a multi-billion dollar business based on nothing more than the threat to the status quo.
The entertainment stream reaches the public through all seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. The most visible, literally, entertainment stream is television. Manipulation, or persuasion, shows up in media products such as books, commentaries, terrorism and advertising, intended to influence thought, inspire reaction, impact choices, and trigger spending.
Media professionals, knowing the media code, know how it works, and how they can make it work, to inform, entertain and manipulate the public. The public, at its end, is unaware of this. The media/media code/public circuit runs in one direction only, from the media toward the public, a dangerously unbalanced equation. When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, the power equation will start to change.
The American educational system never has exposed the general student population to the code, and that is strange, and dangerous, given the dominance of media in our lives. Even half a century ago when media was slow, and arrived in a newspaper, a couple of television and radio stations, a movie house, and some magazines and books, the media was still a significant part of a person's week, both as news and entertainment, and advertising.
Now, early in the 21st century, 100 years after the media code escaped into the air, the population is inundated in a media code hurricane. With their growing power, since the 1950s, to reach, inform, entertain, and manipulate people, media producers have learned to embed the code with sophisticated skill. The media codes themselves have evolved, and in many cases mutated into forms that in turn feed the sophistication. People have become aware of this new media power, and they complain about it, without having any knowledge of the power's source. This power, according to reports published in the summer of 2007, has turned American teenagers and pre-teens, down to age six, into a fifty-billion-dollar consumer group, obviously highly prized by media producers and marketers. Shouldn't their parents, and the kids, know more about media code? Like starting in third grade? Shouldn't the curtain be pulled back, on the new Wizards of Oz?
The media code is to media as DNA is to a human being. A human being, in all of his or her improbable complexity, is based on four DNA codes, A, T, C and G. Bringing a media product to life may involve divine inspiration, hundreds of sophisticated techniques, and cadres of highly skilled professionals, but the finished product is always based on the codes created by the Wizard's tools. This isn't rocket science, but media code is as genuine, and real in its discipline, as DNA is in biology, or the physics code on which Albert Einstein founded his great equation e = mc2. Media students typically go to school for four years to learn what the media codes are, how to identify them, how to quickly find them in huge piles of raw information, and how and where to embed them in media pages, scripts, layouts, campaigns, and plots.
The 12 media values, for example, are all present, each on their individual strength scales of zero to 10, in every media product you consume. You in the general public haven't seen them, until now, because you didn't know what to look for; no one ever showed you. When you see it, you will start to understand how and why the code influences and manipulates your reactions. Those strength scales, incidentally, are grossly simplified, for illustration purposes. A human being, reacting to an event on the ground, or one in the media, effortlessly produces a code combination whose composition may be described in parts per million, and is an exact, individual measure of response, unique to that individual. That combination, in its precision, is also an exact reflection of the individual’s identity; no two of us are alike.
Much of the time, your reactions are spontaneous and legitimate as you gain information being reported to you about events as they happen in the world. And much of the time, your reactions are being manipulated by code users whose job is to make you feel a certain way, particularly desirous, or make a particular choice, or decision. These code users create vastly lucrative markets composed entirely of American consumers who are too young to get a driver's license.
In the meantime, Americans are losing faith in the media. In its 2007 report on "The State of the News Media," the Project for Excellence in Journalism said that less than 20 percent of Americans "believe what they read in print." They claim bias and manipulation, even in the legitimate news flow. The study cites "continuing doubts" about whether print journalism "is being practiced in a way people want," a phrase I want you to come back and read again, when you realize how it screams with irony.
Yet evidence routinely surfaces, indicating these same people, in their doubts, really have no idea how the media does its job. In September, 2006, my home-town newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, stripped across the top of its Letters to the Editor page a series of letters complaining about some of the U-T’s recent choices for front-page stories.
One griped about a huge front-page photo of Padres pitcher Trevor Hoffman, the morning after he broke Lee Smith’s all-time major league record for saves. Another letter thought the front page should be reserved for international, national or statewide content. A third wondered about showing a photo of local teachers on the front page, where the news of the day should be.
Such reader annoyance with editorial decisions is an eternal, fascinating irony. The values and realities that editors use to make their decisions are there for all to see, right there in the page. Those values and realities are nothing more than categorization and measurement of the way people react to events, and those reactions began tens of thousands of years before the media came into being. People know, without knowing, what the values are, because they created them. In fact the media came into being simply by adopting those values and turning them into a business.
But the people don't realize that. Glance up at the Wizard's tools again. For now, just look at the event values. We know now that there are in fact 12 such values, each with a strength measured on a scale of zero to 10. Every value is present in every story in the newspaper, each on its strength of zero to 10.
When a media professional, in this case an editor, looks at a photo of Trevor Hoffman on the front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune the day after Hoffman sets a new Major League record, he or she sees novelty (10), proximity (10), prominence (10), and sensationalism (7 or 8). Timeliness (7) and human interest (about a 6) are there, too, but the others are the big four behind the Trevor photo.
Novelty is the event value invoked by the unusual, the rare (Snow In San Diego! Clinton jumps to GOP!). Setting a record in major league baseball, "America's pastime," is an unusual event. People still talk about Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, and they were talking again in 2007 about Barry Bonds breaking Aaron's record. Setting a record for saves hadn’t been done for decades, until Trevor Hoffman achieved it in 2006. Novelty insured that the feat was noted in newspapers all over the country, even three paragraphs in The New York Times.
The proximity value means the story happened close to you, either physically or emotionally, or both. Hoffman pitches for the Padres, the home-town team. San Diegans are physically close to stories about the home-town team. If Hoffman pitched for far-away Cleveland, or even Los Angeles, in San Diego the story would have been three paragraphs on an inside sports page.
Emotional proximity is just that: the story is close to your emotions. Winning releases strong feel-good emotions; most of us like to win, and millions of Americans get a vicarious charge from watching their team win, and, in San Diego, from watching Trevor Hoffman become the best relief pitcher ever. A "sports fan" is one who gets to share the famed "joy of victory and agony of defeat" without ever doing any work.
Prominence is simple: big names make news. Trevor Hoffman is a celebrity, who achieved a novel feat, in his home town. And sensationalism, in its legitimate sense, refers to an event that is sensational. Aside from 9/11, which is in a media code league of its own, the biggest sensational story that I can remember is the farewell tour of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. His performances were sensational, and they were noted in the media worldwide, as they happened. My biggest personal sensational story is Steve Garvey’s home run (off Lee Smith, incidentally), in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series in San Diego against the Chicago Cubs in 1984. You can ask anyone who was there (all 10 million of them) if they have ever heard a louder roar.
Even after they know the code, and are able to see its presence in the page, more people than not may gripe about the front-page content selection. Why? Because of demographics, defined in the media code as "the science of dividing people into groups." Every reader, from highbrow to sports fan, has his or her own list of stories they want to see, based on personal interest. It forces editors into choices, which are usually based on another value, consequence: on any given day, which demographic represents the largest number of readers likely to react to this story?
On that day, it was Trevor Hoffman. The "largest number of readers," in the editor's estimation, may have been only 20 percent of all readers, inviting 80 percent to gripe. But because of another code phenomenon, the Second Law of Media, the 20 percent was enough. In fact, a 20 percent response is enough to make an editor, or any media producer for that matter, weep with gratitude. It would be good if the paper could please everybody, get all the news in, every day, but the paper would weigh 15 pounds, they could never sell enough ads, and 90 percent of the content would go unread by any given reader. It's the Abe Lincoln rule of media. You could give all the people all the news all the time, but it would be terrible for business. A reader knowing the media code would understand that, and perhaps be less inclined to doubt that journalism is practiced in a way that people want. In fact it's practiced exactly the way they want. As we shall see.
Quiz answer: The Oklahoma City and 9/11 attacks, and the foiled airliner plot, were scheduled on routine weekdays to ensure maximum events values, and timed to maximize the hours of daylight that television cameras could focus on the disastrous, novel, sensational, images.
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