I couldn't help but laugh at myself for laughing at the people in the audience who were laughing at David Letterman's confession of sex relations with co-workers. It sounded so bizarre. But the people couldn’t help themselves. They are attenuated to hearing Letterman use the “conflict” media value to produce hilarity. When he tried to speak seriously about conflict, they couldn’t make the shift.
In media literacy studies, we learn the Human Reaction Package (HRP), which consists essentially of 12 media values – conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity – and a definition: news is any thing that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. These values and definition can be found in any Journalism 101 textbook. I created the HRP to provide convenience and flexibility to the package, which drives all three media products: information (news), entertainment, and manipulation (particularly advertising).
The 12 values are not presented necessarily in order of importance, though most would agree that conflict is, in fact, the first value because of its ubiquity. Conflict is certainly felt by all people. We are born with it. Very soon after we are born, we understand that we are going to die. By age 5, children talk about dying. Life and death is the essential conflict. Because conflict is such a strong news value, in a news story in which someone has died, the death is always in the first paragraph.
Survival is another strong example of conflict, because survival means staying alive. Stories about staying alive, or how to stay alive, are very important to us. Stories about new treatments or drugs to use against diseases like cancer or AIDS are always big news. We see stories all the time about living longer by eating right or developing good habits of exercise. We see stories about global warming and other threats to planetary survival. When nine miners in Pennsylvania became trapped 300 feet underground, the media followed the story without interruption because people wanted to see the miners survive. When they did, it was the biggest story of the day. Survival is also a very strong value in entertainment media. One of the most popular shows in television for the past three years is in fact named “Survivor.”
People also pay a lot of attention to other kinds of conflict. The first mass media product ever created was a book about the conflict between good and evil. It was the Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1452, the first book ever printed using moveable type. The Bible is still the best-selling book in the world today. People are also very interested in good-and-evil stories such as crime and murder. Novels about crime and murder earn their authors millions of dollars. Crime and murder movies make even more money. Murders become particularly strong stories because they have in them both the life and death conflict and the good and evil conflict. Of course those are the two types of conflict that made the World Trade Center attacks the biggest news story of 2001.
The conflict between winning and losing is the key value in many different kinds of media stories. All sports stories are essentially conflict stories about winning and losing. In politics, election stories are all about winning and losing. Since we live in a democracy in which we send representatives to government to vote on important issues, stories about those issues are very much about the win-lose conflict. Those stories are also about the kind of conflict that exists when there are two sides arguing about how to best get something done.
There are many other kinds of conflict based on people being on two sides of an issue. War is a classic example of this kind of conflict. War also presents us a good example of a conflict about a conflict. This is the “hawks and doves” conflict. For several years, the Iraqi war has been an excellent example of this type of conflict.
There is also conflict where you might not expect it. Love is full of conflict. Shakespeare made a career of finding the conflict in love, “Romeo and Juliet” being a famous example. Anyone who was ever married, or even went steady, knows about conflict in love. This is another strong conflict value found in novels and movies.
Conflict is also a very dependable source of humor, as long as it is someone else’s conflict (people laughed maniacally at Lucy Ricardo, but could you imagine living in the same building with that woman?). Many sitcoms on television are based on a conflict that is funny. In a famous “Seinfeld” episode, Seinfeld mugs an old lady for a loaf of rye bread. We laugh hysterically. George’s fiancé dies after licking adhesive on envelopes. We laugh darkly, but we laugh. Now David Letterman admits sex with co-workers. Funny as hell, coming from him.
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