Cultural Myth and Nature as Adversary in "DATELINE NBC",
Cultural Myth and Nature as Adversary
in "DATELINE NBC"
An immense and expansive body of evidence persuasively builds the argument that
cultural history informs the selection, creation and presentation of mainstream
media content. Academic movements such as the Birmingham School and
post-colonial scholarship have drawn attention to the production of media texts
as cultural artifacts. In addition, academics from history, political science,
anthropology as well as in traditional media studies and communications
departments have all searched and found historical precedents to much of today's
media product.
Recent work has traced seemingly universal or "common sense" images, frames and
narratives in television news and drama to distinctive American and Western
European origins (Schudson; Lule; Lawrence & Timberg). These images and
structures symbolically invoke a cultural past-perhaps not shared by all, but by
much of the media profession and by much of the viewing, and spending, audience.
Many scholars identify this process of abstraction and connotation (Barthes,
Mythologies; Barthes, Image) as mythmaking. Mythic structures such as the
American captivity myth (Slotkin; Pearce), the frontier myth (Slotkin; Cawelti)
and the hero myth (Campbell, Hero) have been suggested as guiding modern
American news and fictional texts (Smith; Lawrence & Timberg; Lule).
According to some, these images and structures construct a culturally specific
frame that those within the culture read as "natural" (Barthes, Mythologies;
Tuchman). [In fact, it has been proposed that this process of naturalized
reading is uniquely American (Stewart & Bennett x)]. Barthes elaborates that,
"myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification,
and making contingency appeal eternal" (Mythologies 142).
Perhaps no entity has been the inspiration of more mythmaking than the
wilderness, or the natural environment. This study hypothesizes that American
mainstream media, in depicting the natural world, provides a framing that may
appear "natural" (in the Barthesian sense) but, in effect is guided by a
uniquely American relationship with nature. By examining a number of texts
from the popular NBC newsmagazine, "DATELINE NBC", this author will suggest that
American news, or at least newsmagazine, coverage of nature and all that is
included in the natural environment is informed by a unique perspective that
runs through American letters, essays, historical documents and literary
tradition from the earliest days of Western European exploration of the North
American continent and of the founding of dominant and powerful strains in
modern popular culture.
Myth and the Media
Like media and news formulas, myth and mythic narratives provide a form for
social, cultural and historical content. In the following brief review, I will
present and discuss common perspectives in myth scholarship, summarizing the
structural study of universal myths, the psychoanalytic foundation of
psychosexual myths and archetypes, and the Barthesian approach to myth as an
ideological device contextualized by social and cultural history.
At its most inclusive, myth can be seen as "the expression of abstract ideas in
concrete form" (Sykes, 16). Different approaches to myth analysis give mythic
forms disparate origins. In his work as a structural anthropologist,
Levi-Strauss distills all mythic structures into a strategy of semantic binary
oppositions ultimately expressed as an organic function of the brain; hence, the
deep structure of myth is ahistorical in nature, remaining constant throughout
cultures. Similarly, Joseph Campbell elaborates that myths, "derive not from
any fund of human experience in time, but from some structuring principle
antecedent to history- or even the cause of history: namely, the form of the
psyche itself, as a function of the biology of the human body" ("Historical"
22). From their principles of psychoanalytic theory, Freud, Jung and Rank
explain mythic structures as expressions of foundational sexual and existential
anxiety. Like Levi-Strauss and Campbell, the psychoanalysts claim these
structures are borne from the psyche, and are universal, transcending history
and culture.
Opposing this perspective, a wealth of myth scholarship, inspired but not
always literally faithful to the writing of Roland Barthes (Fiske 135),
addresses mythic structures as culturally specific, emerging from rich
historical narratives unique to individual cultures. Barthes' work ultimately
implies that the function of mythmaking is to structure history and culture
ideologically, perpetuating the values of the dominant social contingent, which
Barthes refers to as the "bourgeois society" (Mythologies).
An impressive body of literature has brought to light such culturally founded
myths behind today's media texts. Lule isolates one such myth in his study of
the cover of an issue of Newsweek magazine published during the initial stages
of the 1991 military conflict in the Persian Gulf (199-211). Drawing from
models by Barthes and Hall, Lule details how the image of the battered face of
American hostage, Lt. Jeffrey Zaun, methodically invokes what American
historical scholarship (Slotkin 63-64, 403-404; Pearce 1-20) regards as the
captivity myth narrative. Slotkin's research suggests that recurring stories of
Americans held captive by a "savage" enemy entered public consciousness as
direct accounts of conflict between Western settlers and Native Americans. The
myth has gained rhetorical power over time with repeated stories of Americans
held hostage during military conflict and terrorist campaigns.
In a similar analysis, Lawrence and Timberg examine news accounts of three
distinct cases of politically motivated hijackings and the ensuing military
responses in the 1970's, concluding that one of the three events stood as more
salient than the other two in the American media and, consequently, in the
consciousness of the American public (321-330). Suggesting that "a deepened
understanding of heroic news is obtained by considering the peculiar mythic
traditions of a culture" (323), Lawrence and Timberg argue that the 1976
skyjacking of an Air France jet from Israel to Entebbe, Uganda, and the
following successful commando raid by Israeli soldiers fell into the familiar
mode of the American captivity myth and, therefore, secured the attention of the
American public as well as the entertainment industry (several films were made
of the account, one of which starring Charles Bronson as the renegade Israeli
commando leader). It received more coverage in the American media than two
other similar hijacking incidents ending in dramatic military response, one of
which involving an American freighter.
Ethnographic literature also supports the significance of shared cultural
histories in the mythmaking/perpetuating process. In a personal description of
life as a newspaper reporter, Darnton explains how reporters rely on inherited
narrative techniques, which ultimately perpetuate myths founded upon the
assumption of a shared cultural history of the audience to tell news stories
(175-194). Additionally, Eason argues that the New Journalism movement led by
Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion among others in the 1960s was borne from the
discontent over writers' complicit embrace of these culturally founded formulas
(125-129).
Nature As Adversary
Although Western, philosophical, religious and folkloric traditions have sought
to explain humankind's relationship with nature in a variety ways, certain
formations have been perpetuated through time. With the first realizations that
what lay beyond the perimeter of the village or the town was not known and was
not able to be controlled, nature and the natural environment outside
civilization became thought of as an arena for the supernatural. In classical
Greek mythology, the demi-god Pan, (the source of the word "panic"), as well as
tribes of satyrs, creatures with both human and goat-like physical
characteristics, lurked within the darkest parts of the forest and reportedly
"ravished women and carried off children who ventured into their wilderness
lairs" (Nash 11). Monsters and beasts figured prominently in descriptions of
the natural environment in several strains of European mythology, and early
Scandinavian literature specifically spoke of Lucifer manifesting as
Wood-Sprites and Trolls in the uninhabited forest (Nash 11).
Uninhabited nature invited a similar depiction in Judeo-Christian literature
and thought. Much of what surrounded ancient Hebrew villages was arid,
dangerous and unusable desert. The Old Testament drew the distinction between
the lush Garden of Eden, and its "antipode" (Nash 15), the arid and desolate
wilderness into which Adam and Eve were ultimately sent. This expulsion and
consequent loss of the idyllic Garden "embedded into Western thought the idea
that wilderness and paradise were both physical and spiritual opposites" (Nash
15). Consistently throughout the allegories of Judeo-Christian writing, from
the Israelites' Exodus to Jesus' confrontations with evil and temptation in the
desert, the world outside civilization was depicted as threatening and cursed.
The expansive and dynamic wilderness of the New World only reinforced and even
intensified this Christian formation of nature. Settlers were indeed confronted
by a climate and topography much more formidable than that of thoroughly
cultivated Europe. With this seed, however, the wilderness to the pioneers
"acquired significance as a dark and sinister symbol" (Nash 24). Nash
elaborates on how pre-conceived models of the natural environment interacted
with direct experience to establish trends in pioneer thought:
They shared the long Western tradition of imagining wild country as a moral
vacuum, a cursed and chaotic wasteland. As a consequence, frontiersmen acutely
sensed that they battled wild country not only for personal survival but in the
name of nation, race, and God. Civilizing the New World meant enlightening
darkness, ordering chaos, and changing evil into good. In the morality play of
westward expansion, wilderness was the villain, and the pioneer, as hero,
relished its destruction (24).
Seventeenth Century American literature, such as John Bunyon's Pilgrim's
Progress, Benjamin Keach's Tropologia, or a Key to Open Scripture Metaphor, and
letters from the frontier alluding to wilderness as the "enemy" to be
"conquered, "subdued", and "vanquished" by a "pioneer army", all invoked the
Christian and European folkloric myths of the natural environment outside
civilization as moving beyond merely physically formidable to morally and
spiritually threatening (Nash 27-34).
Ultimately, scholars argue that the American movement of manifest destiny grew
from this mythic formation as well as subsequent political and social trends to
conquer and control elements of the natural world (Nash 41; Stewart & Bennett
114-117). Stewart and Bennett additionally assert that viewing nature as an
enemy to be conquered and controlled informed a grander assumption that the
physical world lay at the service of its human inhabitants (115). And from this
perspective came the flourishing of a uniquely American notion of objectivity,
and consequent unparalleled advances by the United States in engineering and
technology (Stewart & Bennett 116).
Nature As Sublime
While the dominant Western historical narrative of humans and nature involved
conflict and conquest, an alternative formation developed from a fragile line of
Christian thought and from the Romantic literary tradition following the
European Enlightenment( that of nature as sublime. The monastic movement,
proposing wilderness to be "a place of refuge and religious purity," sent monks
to live in simplicity outside the boundaries of mainstream civilization (Nash
18). Although his doctrine was ultimately denounced as heretical, St. Francis
of Assisi wrote from the perspective that human beings made up only one small
component of the sublime and godly natural world (Nash 18).
Epistemological shifts wrought by the European Enlightenment inspired the
literary tradition of the Romantic Movement. From the perspective of its
educated urban authors, Romantic literature offered an alternative formation of
wilderness and natural elements as a product of divine expression and,
consequently, as beautiful, grandiose, and sublime. Writers such as Rousseau
and Lord Byron waxed about the peculiar and uncorrupted wilderness of the New
World, and promoted the ideals of primitivism, which attached virtue to
primitive human characteristics and behavior amidst a civilization of tainted
values. Citing the contrast between this reverential view of nature and the
adversarial myth of the Christian settlers, Grant offers this assessment:
"Just as we inherited from our English Puritan forebears an abhorrence of
wilderness that seeks to destroy it, we also inherited a deep love of natural
landscape. By the eighteenth century, England was the most industrialized,
urbanized, and capitalized nation in the world, yet it was in England that the
adoration of natural landscape characteristic of Romanticism reached its highest
development" (81).
The Romantic English tradition inspired a similar movement in American
literature with James Fenimore Cooper's chronicles of Leatherstocking, a
character with invaluable Primitivist attributes, in novels such as The Pioneers
(1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841).
Leatherstocking "became a mouthpiece for the standard Romantic conventions
regarding the sublimity and holiness of wild nature" (Nash 76), and perpetually
faced foils who sought to lay indiscriminate siege to the wilderness and its
perceived "savage" inhabitants.
Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an intensification of Romantic
ideals, formed and guided the American Transcendental movement. This new
philosophy, recalling Plato and Kant, posited that discarding reason and
escaping the material shackles of civilization through an exploration into the
wilderness enabled the "essence" of human beings to transcend their physical
boundaries and connect with the divine. While this formation of man and nature
was primarily embraced by the wealthy and academic social spheres, many identify
this Romantic and Transcendental alternative to the Christian settler/Puritan
adversarial myth as the intellectual foundation for the establishment of the
National Park System and consequent environmental and conservation movements
(Nash; Grant).
These two opposing mythic forms, that of nature as adversary( to be conquered
and controlled( and that of nature as sublime( to leave untouched, to honor and
to associate with the divine( figure prominently in American cultural and
literary consciousness. While the claim may be made that both myths are
influential and pervasive (Nash 23-83), most scholarship asserts that the
adversarial myth predominately informs American social, technological and
political thought and action (Stewart & Bennett 114-117).
To examine these perspectives as they apply to modern media texts, and to assess
the argument in myth scholarship that narrative structures and images in modern
texts often invoke and are guided by culturally founded myths, this author
performed an analysis of thematic elements within a news-oriented television
series. Choosing a sample of texts from "DATELINE NBC" newsmagazine, this
author has examined, quantitatively through story summary coding and
qualitatively through an analysis of selected transcripts, the correlation
between the reviewed myths and the themes and depictions inherent in "DATELINE
NBC" story content.
Methods
In the first stage of the analysis, stories considered were a census of full
stories that appeared on "DATELINE NBC" between January 1, 1997 and January 1,
1999. Repeated stories were considered, however updates that were not connected
to a full story have not been considered. Due to their short length and lack of
a narrative element, the segments, "DATELINE Timeline", "DATELINE Feedback",
"DATELINE Follow-up", "Picture of the Week", and "Question of the Week" were not
considered. A sample of stories were chosen based on abbreviated descriptions
of each full story shown on "DATELINE NBC" as presented in a comprehensive
chronology of story listings made available by Burrelle's Information Services
on the internet.
The initial sample consisted of all stories in which nature or the natural
environment is a substantial component. Defining the natural environment for
this study involved choosing a definition for "environment" from the dictionary
available through the Merriam-Webster Online Internet website. From possible
definitions, this author utilized "2a: the complex of physical, chemical, and
biotic factors (as climate, soil, and living things) that act upon an organism
or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival". I
have previously attached, and will continue to attach, the modifier "natural" to
"environment" to specify that this author is adopting the aforementioned
definition over the second part of this listed definition: "2b: the aggregate
of social and cultural conditions that influence the life of an individual or
community"(Merriam-Webster). "Natural" also reaffirms the distinction implicit
in the first definition between the "climate, soil, and living things" of an
individual's or community's surroundings which are not man-made as from those
that are (e.g., buildings, roads, cities, etc.) This definition of the natural
environment seems synonymous with the usage that many scholars, including this
author, have applied to the word "nature", as in "Human Relationship to Nature"
(Stewart & Bennett 114).
The following has been included within this definition: "climate"( all
meteorological activity including atmospheric phenomena and weather; "soil"( all
natural topographical phenomena including forests, plains, mountains, and
natural bodies of water( and "living things"( all living organisms other than
humans, including plants and animals. This author constructed the initial sample
by identifying, from the one- sentence story summaries, all stories of which the
natural environment prima facie is a substantial component. From this sample,
those stories that prima facie depict the natural environment in a significant
adversarial relationship to the primary human actor(s), in the story were
coded/identified. "Significant adversarial relationship" included solely
language within the story summary indicating that nature is directly threatening
the survival of the primary human actor(s). This author considered natural
phenomena that include floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, wildfires,
blizzards, avalanches, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes as
inherently life-threatening products of the natural environment.
In addition, stories in which the actor(s) actively expresses
reverence/respect for an element of the natural environment were
coded/identified. "Expresses reverence/respect" included summaries of
narratives in which the primary actor(s) acts to either protect or improve the
condition of an element of the natural environment.
Four categories were established from the sample: (1) those stories identified
as depicting the natural environment as an adversary to human actors, (2) those
stories identified as depicting the natural environment as sublime or, more
specifically, depicting primary actor(s) expressing reverence/respect for the
natural environment, (3) those stories not identified as depicting nature from
either of the aforementioned perspectives, and (4) those stories identified as
depicting nature from both of those perspectives.
In the qualitative stage of this analysis, transcripts and videotaped portions
of "DATELINE NBC" were examined. This author provides typical examples of text
or images that shadow specific elements of the historical and literary tradition
founding the popular American myths detailed above.
Results
The table below shows the breakdown of the rudimentary coding:
N
%
Nature as Adversary
100
69.44
Nature as Sublime
13
9.03
Neither
29
20.14
Both
2
1.39
Total
144
100.0
Full stories appearing on "Dateline" between January 1, 1997 and December 31,
1998, which contained the natural environment as a substantial component (based
on one-sentence story summaries). From a population of 1271 stories, a sample
of 144 stories that dealt with the natural environment were selected.
Immediately striking about the quantitative results is the astonishingly high
frequency of story summaries positing an element of the natural environment in
an adversarial role to human actors. If one examines these identified stories
more specifically, the common myth of a dramatic battle of individuals or
communities with powerful natural forces for survival and dominance emerges.
Of the 100 identified stories in this category, 43 fall within the thematic
boundaries of two prominent "DATELINE NBC" series: "DATELINE Survivors" and
"Nature's Wrath". All "Survivors" stories begin with the same video package as
an introduction: A furious montage of ambulances rushing to the scene of an
accident, people stranded atop a burning building, and airplane crash victims
pulled from the ocean by rescuers tethered to military helicopters. The
voiceover includes, "hope turns to heartbreak, triumph to terror, and a single
second can mean life or death. These are the incredible stories of DATELINE
Survivors" (NBC News 1, 22 Mar. 1998). Many depict human actors struggling to
survive in a natural environment( on a remote Andean glacier, in the torrent of
a midwestern flash flood, or amidst shark-infested waters in Indonesia. Clearly
throughout these stories, within a highly dramatic and maudlin frame, nature
serves as a formidable antagonist to the survival and well being of humans.
Similar to, and often thematically interchangeable with, "DATELINE Survivors",
"Nature's Wrath" stories depict natural phenomena such as tornadoes,
earthquakes, ice storms and hurricanes as destroyers of cities, towns and
communities. Often, as with the flooding of small South Texas communities along
the Rio Grande (NBC News, 25 Oct. 1998), and with the frantically spreading
wildfires in rural Northern Florida (NBC News, 26 Jun. 1998), natural forces
seemingly attack outposts of civilization, even threatening their permanence.
The thematic construct of nature unleashing its "wrath" alludes to an entity
capable of harboring "vengeful anger" (Merriam-Webster)- an illustrative, and
additionally, anthropomorphic attribution to the natural environment, which
recalls the literary and historical European, Christian and Puritanical American
settler tradition of positing a supernatural, even evil, force within the
wilderness (Nash; Boorstin; Stewart & Bennett), and "investing it with an almost
conscious enmity toward men" (Nash 28).
In fact, anthropomorphic/animistic attributions pervade many of the stories
identified as adversarial. Nature is drawn as a "beast" (NBC News, 9 Feb. 1998)
and a "monster"(NBC News 22, 22 Mar. 1998), even "the coldest killer on earth"
(NBC News 9, 15 Nov. 1998) "striking with very little notice" (NBC News 1, 15
Nov. 1998) "like a tiger coming out of the grass" (NBC News, 26 Jun. 1998).
Containing a wildfire is "like fighting an eight-armed octopus" (NBC News, 26
Jun. 1998).
Additionally, humans are in a constant battle with this entity. Stories are
routinely introduced as reports on "the unpredictable assaults of" (NBC News, 10
Mar. 1998), "that battle with" (NBC News, 25 Oct. 1998), "the battle against"
(NBC News, 31 Mar. 1998), "trying to escape" (NBC News, 9 Feb. 1998), "the
latest blow of" (NBC News, 18 Jan. 1998) and "the deadly punch of nature's
wrath" (NBC News, 13 Jan. 1998). This frame shadows the motif in literary
accounts of the pioneer experience that Nash describes( the "image of man and
wilderness locked in mortal combat" (27).
Perhaps most revealing is the allusion within many of these stories to a divine
hand in the unfolding of the narrative. As an example, a "Dateline" reporter
concludes it has been "a year of plagues" (NBC News, 25 Oct. 1998), for
communities in Central Texas. The application of "plague" is intriguing, as the
term has been commonly defined as "a natural evil" (Merriam-Webster). This
suggests an encoding of natural phenomena as manifestations of either sinister
or divine forces. In "Overboard" (NBC News, 7 Sept. 1998), which details three
Western tourists' struggles to survive a night in the ocean after a ferry
capsizes in Indonesia, one survivor's testimony precedes the unfolding of the
narrative and establishes an early allegorical tone: "It was like some sort of
struggle going on. Somebody wanted to try and kill us and somebody wanted to
save us" (1). Later in the narrative, when two of the survivors are
miraculously spotted drifting in the ocean by a search ship, the reporter's
commentary races ahead of their testimony: "And then, call it fate, call it
luck, whatever it was, Steve believes a force pulling for them intervened"
(18). Similarly, in "A Day at the Races", when a racehorse runs out of control
through a picnic area and narrowly avoids trampling a baby in its carriage, a
relieved parent exclaims, "Obviously, we must have done something right, because
he's OK. We've had a happy- a happy ending" (NBC News 19, 11 Oct. 1998).
Seemingly innocuous, yet culturally resounding colloquial expressions punctuate
many of the climactic moments where it seems that the natural environment will
overcome the courage, strength and will of the actor(s) in the narrative.
Caught aboard a tumbling downed airplane's fuselage in the midst of an avalanche
on Mt. McKinley, two men were "literally saved by a wing and a prayer"(NBC News
17, 15 Nov. 1998) as a wing strategically and luckily pierced the snow pack and
stopped the plane's momentum. Additionally, survivors pulled from a disastrous
flood were surprisingly healthy enough to "count their blessings" (NBC News, 10
Feb. 1998). And an intriguing conclusion to one story succinctly describes the
spiritual and physical antagonism of early American settlers to their harsh
natural environment; The closing commentary reveals that the survivor of a
shark attack and his family now, "have a new, wary relationship with the ocean
near their home, and they are thankful" (NBC News, 10 Feb. 1998)..
Story summaries identified as conforming to the "Nature as Sublime" myth,
appeared much less frequently than those fitting the "Nature as Adversary" myth.
Of the thirteen that were identified in the sample, all stories except for one,
depicted individuals or small groups working to protect an endangered species of
wild animal, or raise and ultimately free into the wild an orphaned or trained
wild animal. The remaining story tracked a river safari through the unspoiled
wilderness along Africa's Zambezi River. Consistent with the Romantic tradition
as well, the safari narrative depicted the wilderness as invaluable and worth
protecting from the destructive impact of civilization (NBC News, 4 Jul. 1997).
Although examining selected transcripts from this category provides less
convincing evidence of an embedded American myth, a few examples from the texts
allude to the Romantic tradition. A story depicting the endangerment of the
North Atlantic right whale clearly implicates the excesses of industry and
civilization as the source for the diminishing population of the species (NBC
News, 13 Jul. 1998). In addition, "Goodwill Hunting" emphasizes Ben Kilham's
ability to adopt primitivistic attributes and logic as crucial in successfully
raising and releasing into the wilderness orphaned black bear cubs (NBC News, 3
Apr. 1998). Finally, biologist Ken Balcomb fights to free a trained killer
whale from the restrictive and artificial environment of a Miami aquarium (NBC
News, 19 Jan. 1997). Balcomb's belief that a wild animal should not be
contained by civilization, but rather, be left to thrive in the wild free from
human contact, thematically guides the narrative.
Of the remaining stories, twenty-nine of the summaries failed to conform to
either of the operationalized myths. This high number, however, may have
resulted from the limits of the coding method. Several, or even all, of the
narratives may at certain moments invoke the reviewed mythic forms, yet escape
mention in the abbreviated and basic summary. For example, "The Deep", is
summarized in the Burrelle's transcript index as "Researchers still looking for
elusive giant squid" (28 Sept. 97). Examining the transcript in detail might
reveal a "Nature as Adversary" mythic structure, where the actors in the story
battle the "dark" and "ominous" depths of the ocean and perhaps the "fierce" and
"deadly" object of study itself, to survive and accomplish their mission.
Conversely, their task might be framed as an attempt to observe, revere and
consequently protect an endangered wild animal.
Acknowledgement of the final category provides another revealing insight-- that
a narrative may rely on qualities from opposing mythic forms to illustrate and
structure events. The two stories identified from the sample were, "Of Moose &
Men" summarized as "People in Alaska risk own lives to save a moose drowning in
icy water" (Burrelle's, 19 Apr. 98) and "Raging Bull" described briefly as,
"Vicki Moore fights for animal rights in Spain even after a bull brutally
attacks and nearly kills her" (Burrelle's, 19 Apr. 98). Within both summaries,
and perhaps more elaborately in the transcripts themselves, these narratives
depict the natural environment as an entity both to battle and endure, and,
paradoxically, to revere, honor, and protect. Following the previous reasoning
that the coding method might have limited the salience of the results, one may
by looking at the transcripts find a similar paradox amidst the narratives
falling within the bounds of the other coded categories. Constrained by time
and resources, however, this author did not exhaustively examine the transcripts
following this meticulous coding protocol.
Alternative Explanations and Conclusion
Stepping back from the analysis, the most striking result is that "DATELINE
NBC" stories concerning the natural environment overwhelmingly tend to
thematically frame humans and the natural environment in a life-threatening
adversarial relationship. This author suggests that this narrative structure
conforms to an American myth about nature fed by unique cultural, literary and
historical legacy. While one correlation did stand out considerably among the
other findings, possible confounding variables or even alternative explanations
warrant attention. The reduction of mythic structures supported by cultural
history to simple quantifiable human actor-natural environment relationship
codes, and the identification of these trends in one-sentence story summaries,
provides fertile ground from which to suggest, but a rocky surface from which to
prove. The above qualitative analysis hopefully enhances the count, fleshing
out and providing a vivid illustration of what the correlation merely implies.
Beyond the limitations of the design, however, the possibility exists that the
"Nature as Adversary" relationship might surface so often because of other
related, informing variables. More specifically, one might argue that this
narrative construct is inspired simply by a trend in newsmagazine and fictional
storylines toward drama, action, and high-stakes conflict. While this may
indeed inform story selection and presentation, this author asserts that which
actors and which elements are chosen to represent the respective opposing forces
in these conflicts are informed to some extent by cultural myths. Altheide and
Snow have proposed a conceptual model that might accommodate an understanding of
this complex dynamic as "media formats." This paradigm organizes variables for
story content construction according to five categories: accessibility, visual
quality, drama and action, audience relevance, and thematic encapsulation.
Media formats suggest that a simple call for "drama and action" might be
operating along with an attraction to culturally informed or audience relevant
content, as well as a desire to thematically encapsulate what has been selected
(again, informed by culture and history) (Altheide & Snow). Adopting Altheide
and Snow's model of media formats for analysis of cultural myths in news content
might hopefully ground future research.
Critics may additionally argue that anthropomorphic/animistic depictions of
natural elements pervade stories from many cultures and derive from an intuitive
tendency to interpret the world based on a human model (Laurendau & Pinard).
However, recent literature suggests that this tendency is not intuitive, and is
indeed culturally driven (Boyer). Furthermore, while a multiplicity of past and
present societies have described natural elements animistically, the specific
descriptions in American essays, diaries and literary works from American
history as well as current news stories which draw nature as a ferocious animal
or vengeful human in a physical battle with human actors might indeed be a
unique facet of American cultural production. As with the previous criticism,
this construct could be explored in future research.
Although a number of factors may play a role, it is clear that a majority of
"DATELINE NBC" stories concerning the natural environment shadow a familiar
cultural narrative. And while this study merely proves a simple correlation,
it suggests a complex cultural process of mythmaking at work behind television
newsmagazine content. Further cross-cultural studies of television news texts
may provide more elaborate and convincing evidence of what uniquely cultural
traditions guide media narrative. In addition, this intriguing depiction of
nature as a dangerous and threatening "other" may inspire a comparative study of
popular narratives, and examine how the depiction of the "other" finds precedent
in cultural, historical and literary tradition.
Works Cited
Altheide, D. L. & R. P. Snow. Media Logic. Beverly Hills, Sage: 1979.
Barthes, R. Image, Music, Text. Trans. S. Heath. New York, Hill and Wang:
1977.
- - -. Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. New York, The Noonday Press: 1972.
Boyer, P. "What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and
Cultural Representations". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 2
vols, 1 (March 1996): 83-98.
Burrelle's Information Services. "'DATELINE NBC'- July- September 1997 Programs
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