NPR gave us a wonderful example of an aspirational kind of ideological subtext this morning in a story about an Iranian-American student at Columbia University and his long-distance relationship with friends in the homeland during these turbulent times.  Near the beginning, the earnest young man reminisces about hearing his father talk about current events happening in Iran when he was a boy and tuning him out!  Since I and my brother and most of the kids we knew hung on every word when adults talked about current events, I found it peculiar that this boy did not.

It does not matter if the Iranian college boy said it or not.  He said a lot of things and the reporter chose to select that one detail of not caring about the news as a means to structure the introduction of the subject.  Once more, the news director accepted this decision to have the young lad describe himself as a former dunce, just an average Columbia Joe until something or someone changed his life. Keep listening to find out…

The ideological subtext of this detail is clear: children are naturally uncurious and even anti-intellectual.  To “not be an intellectual” has been one of the three basic foundation stones of aspirational subtext in the mass media since at least the 1920s, along with identify and follow the in-crowd and buying something brings happiness.

What has always puzzled me is why writers—the intelligentsia in any society—choose to be the instrument that conveys that to be smart is a bad thing.

The description of “The Marriage of Figaro” in the Pittsburgh Opera’s season ticket solicitation marks a new low in dumbing down the arts.   Here it is:

“What is this thing called love? 

Imagine protecting your fiancée from a lecherous rival, finding your long-lost son, and healing an ailing marriage – all in one day! Most of us would pull out our hair, but this is Mozart, and on Figaro’s dizzying wedding day, love is in the air, behind a door, under a chair, and in everyone’s hearts. And you thought your wedding day was chaotic.”

Now let’s disregard the fact that there is no connection between the headline and the paragraph that follows it.  And let’s also disregard that there is absolutely nothing in the description about the magnificent music, nor about this most literary of librettos, based on Beaumarchais’ play, one of the most subversive, anti-establishment works of the past 250 years.

Let’s focus on the way the paragraph tries so very hard to connect with those who regularly read and take seriously fashion and bridal magazines.  Arts organizations, and especially serious music ensembles, have been engaged in this kind of dumbing down for about 10-15 years now, despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to work.  I can’t say specifically what the Pittsburgh Opera’s financial situation is, but most arts organizations have not been helped by dumbed-down marketing gimmicks; ticket sales are still down for virtually all arts organizations.  But these gimmicks do manage to piss off those core customers who don’t like the anti-intellectualism and mindless consumerism that are the ideological bedrock of fashion, bridal and similar periodical fluff.

For the record: I would be even more perturbed if the description of the opera took a smutty or Sinatra-cool laddy-mag approach.

The New York Times has another great example of ideological subtext in a story on the front page of the August 7, 2009 business section titled “Trickle-Down Costs” and again it had to do with the selection of photos.

The story concerned the pressures on state governments to cut Medicaid costs and focused on Medicaid challenges and cutbacks in the state of Washington.  There was one photo on page B1 and another on the continuation on page B4 (all national edition).  Both photos were of African-Americans on Medicaid in the state of Washington.  Keep in mind that only 3% of all Washington state Medicaid recipients are African-American and only 12% of all recipients nationwide are African-American, according to the latest study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.  The possible ideological subtext that we can infer from this selection of photographs is odious and clearly plays into some old and ugly myths, to say the least.

Remember that as with the Times article described in my August 7 post, the writer of this article, Clifford Krauss, and the editor made a conscious decision to run just these photographs.

But maybe there is another explanation:  Maybe both reporters were cutting corners—grab a few case histories and take a few photos in one city and don’t be concerned with what subtext they might communicate.  Cutting corners or saving on costs or both—that would be the “Occam’s Razor” explanation.  (Occam’s Razor is the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.)  While I’m reasonably sure that the Times does color its stories to convey, and overestimate, the centrality of Christianity to contemporary society in the U.S., I’m also fairly certain that the Times absolutely does not routinely trade in inaccurate racial stereotypes.

One of the things I want to do in this blog is to share my analysis of ideological subtext in the news media. Ideological subtext consists of the messages that a journalist and media outlet make in developing story details, e.g., who or what to feature as the case history example, what comments are selected or simply the unstated point-of-view narrating the news story. The ongoing pattern of decisions creates the media outlet’s ideological subtext. For example, peruse the non-business pages of any newspaper specifically looking for examples of the writer taking for granted that free markets are preferable to regulated ones. I’m sure you’ll find many.

The photos in a story that began on the front page of the August 4, 2009 New York Times titled “Years After Layoffs, Many Still Struggle to Match Old Salaries” betray a Times ideological subtext that I believe is relatively new: support of an overtly Christian lifestyle. The story reflects the headline and focuses on a few people in a networking group laid off by Pratt & Whitney in 2000. The captions to two of the three photos on the page A12 continuation say it all: “Chuck Dettman arriving at his Christian counseling service, Today’s Promise, in Jupiter, Fla.” and “Jim Clark, with his wife, Jeanne, outside St. Paul of the Cross Church in North Palm Beach, Fla.”

Now the writer, Micheal Luo, chose to ask the photographer to take photos in a religious setting and the editor chose to use them. The decision to let religious environments dominate a story about jobs and economics was consciously or unconsciously ideological. Even if the subjects of the case histories all wore their religions on their sleeves, the photographs still could have avoided interjecting religion into the context, for example, photos in front of their homes or at their current lower-paying jobs. Or, the writer could have selected a more diverse group of subjects, which is what we have come to expect from the Times in any case.

(In fact, years ago I used to exploit the Times’ desire to use a diverse set of case history subjects to get stories placed about Pennsylvania economic development programs. I would send information about a Pennsylvania case history to reporters stationed in Detroit and Washington, D.C., who would use the information to round out stories they were doing on economic development that focused on case histories in their regions.)

I wish I had started a blog in 2000 because that’s when I started to notice the Times using religious contexts to depict stories on a wide range of economic topics, social issues and even foreign policy beliefs. I can’t prove it, though, unless I could somehow go back and analyze every Times article over the past 40 years. Let’s call it an impression I have.