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Appropriating Liberation
Barry Kew
ABSTRACT
Media and nonhuman animal liberation is an under-researched area
in the United Kingdom. If the most appropriate metaphor
describing the media/social movement relationship is “dance,”
then largely the media and animal liberation are dancing in the
dark of neglect. Drawing upon different approaches to media and
offering some notes toward animal liberation media studies, this
article explores how, by engaging with the “established terms of
the problematic at play,” animal liberationists and their claims
are appropriated by speciesist ideology through exclusion and
confusing and redefining maneuvers. A contextual analysis of its
typical texts raises questions of the public interest role, due
impartiality of media and, implicitly, of movement strategy.
… structures of ideological hegemony transform and incorporate
dissident values, so as effectively to prevent the working
through of their full implications. (Gray, 1976, p. 6)
There are two main aspects to the background of this article.
Both are historical, but one establishes a theoretical context;
the other, an events context. The former is provided or, more
significantly, not provided by theories of media and social
movements from which animal liberation has been traditionally
excluded, all of them relating largely to human-human concerns .
That is, when we attempt to relate animal liberation and media
to established media theory, we find severe limitations. This is
not the place to tackle that problem; suffice it to say that,
nevertheless, this article is informed by structuralist,
culturalist, and social constructionist approaches to media,
leaning (perhaps unfashionably, though with reason) toward a
transmission view of communication. The article draws mainly on
a study of animal liberation and non-tabloid media in the United
Kingdom conducted during the mid to late 1990s (Kew, 1999).
The events are provided, to some extent, by the slim amount of
animal liberation literature devoted to broad media
representation, which tends to agree that media coverage changed
for the worse during the mid-1980s. Ryder (1989) tells us that
through most of the 1970s the media gave considerable and,
often, sympathetic coverage to the movement; but, by 1978, the
novelty seemed to have worn off. There was a resurgence of
interest as the movement took more direct action (from about
1980 with the advent of the short-lived Animal Liberation
Leagues’mass break-ins and occupations). This interest, too,
dried up around 1984-1985, about the time of the Mars Bars
contamination episode. Following this period, the media
increasingly ignored the militants or castigated them as
terrorists (Ryder, 1989, pp. 287-288; Anonymous ,1986/1987;
Anonymous, 1989; Baker, 1993, pp. 195-211; Harris, 1987; McIvor,
1988) who identify a broader media switch to exclusion,
antagonism, and recoil from the movement’s abolitionism) . As
Molotch (1979) asserts:
Because they are, by definition, alien from the routines of
power and news, social movements must take recourse to
extraordinary techniques to gain coverage…. The use of such
techniques runs a high risk that illegitimacy and/or
incompetence among the activists will be documented….When the
media perceive the movements as nevertheless gaining strength
through coverage, this coverage can be curtailed…. (p. 91)
Having noted that animal liberationist media theory is in its
infancy and having possibly implied -- wrongly-- that coverage
of animal liberation may have ceased, I need to stress that this
article does not set out to demonstrate that in relation to
animal liberation the media constitute a monolith: They are more
a factor (or diverse factors) in the process or dynamic of
social and cultural change. However, we should not form the idea
that media treatment of animal liberation is unpredictable.
There is a discernible pattern, or it is typical of a part of
the pattern . This article identifies and examines within it a
prevailing Exclusion and Confusing & Redefining strain of
activity that may counter, be countered by, responded to, or
consolidated by other activities or maneuvers by both media and
movement.
The focus is not on the interaction of animal liberation and
“news” media in terms of actions/statements and their direct
coverage, the charting of episodic changes, but on the broad,
everyday coverage and identity constructions of a movement and
its philosophy. Therefore, major events-led media coverage
during the period such as the live export protests and possibly
the McLibel case are deliberately excluded for the present.
Terms of Movement/Media Engagement
In talking of the articulation of ideology in and through
language and discourse, Hall (1982) tells us that
…the “struggle over meaning” is not exclusively played out in
the discursive condensations to which different ideological
elements are subject. There was also the struggle over access to
the very means of signification: the difference between those
accredited witnesses and spokesmen who had a privileged access,
as of right, to the world of public discourse and whose
statements carried the representativeness and authority which
permitted them to establish the primary framework or terms of an
argument; as contrasted with those who had to struggle to gain
access to the world of public discourse at all; whose
“definitions” were always more partial, fragmentary and
delegitimated; and who, when they did gain access, had to
perform within the established terms of the problematic at play.
(p. 81)
As with most, if not all, social movements’ activity, animal
liberation is engaged in a struggle over meaninghere of
nonhuman animals, humans, cruelty, problems, progress, health,
justice, decency, rights, reason, compassion, consistency,
coherence, emotion, extremism, and civilization–but I am not
concerned with elaborating that point here. What I am interested
in are the two crucial areas -- access and the determinations of
the problematic -- recognized also in Gamson and Modigliani’s
(1989) claim that in order to gain prominence in the public
sphere, an issue has to be cast in terms that resonate with
existing and widely held cultural concepts . That is, further to
Hall (1982) that gaining access is via the established terms of
the problematic
The major animal liberation groups recognize this problem and,
in the main, have learned -- in contrast to, say, a section of
the American antiwar movement in the 1960s -- (Gitlin, 1980) how
not to act in revolutionary mode in a non-revolution situation,
even if animal liberation is the longest revolution. Though
staffed largely by vegans, most of the groups often operate, at
least ostensibly, in the field of welfarism, exposing and
condemning the legal and illegal cruelties of animal markets,
vivisection laboratories, and factory farms (as well as the
scientific, economic, and other invalidities of animal use).
Indeed, some animal liberation or rights groups refer to their
work in terms of animal welfare or protection. This may result
from (a) the movement’s progress from protest to public policy
activity (where “compromise” fails to do justice to the shift
from epistemology to ontology); (b) a greater adherence to
Singer’s pragmatic utilitarianism than to Regan’s rights theory
-- thus exploiting abolitionist mileage in the existing
interests-based “necessary suffering” legislation in a strategy
in which the recommendations of Bryant (1990), Garner (1993),
and Francione (1996) co-exist; and (c) to the delinquencies of
welfarist legislation and its policing. It is in these
engagements and with familiar rhetoric (and indeed vocabulary:
“livestock,” “farm animals”) that the movement may more easily
resonate and gain productive publicity and support, even if
rewarded with welfarist rather than liberationist results.
Although both the movement and the elements of the media that
cover such campaigns and exposés often would seem to be engaged
in the same work here -- a more general animal protectionism --
two points arise: (a) a confused movement identity with
consequences (see later); and (b) media motivation differing
from that of the movement. As Molotch (1979) notes:
The media cover the activists, but when they are in tension with
the movement (as is usually the case), they do so with opposite
goals in view. From their vantage point in the game, the media
“win” if the status quo is enhanced as a result of the media
coverage. Hence, a typical movement story results from differing
estimates of the consequences of coverage. (p. 77)
Hence, we find that news stories of animal liberation
activities, when they appear, fall largely into three categories
-- when the movement
1. does something outrageous, such as some form of violence,
where media portrayal of “deviants” serves to legitimize the
lawfulness of state violence against animals; liberationists as
the “problem”. Such coverage also informs elites of impending
danger to the status quo (Molotch, 1979, p. 82); usually
coincides with regular news “beats” such as the police and the
courts; and enables the media to divide the movement into
legitimate and illegitimate camps;
2. does something novel such as hunger strikein both these
categories, as Glasgow University Media Group [1976] on trade
union coverage showed, there is an emphasis on actions and
disorder, not facts and issues;
3. exposes illegal cruelty -- satisfying consensus and
bolstering the status of society’s anti-cruelty self-image.
However, one of the achievements of the movement is that it
sometimes does gain access when the story is not of its own
making. Nevertheless, these appearances usually can be
categorized into four groups where
1. animal liberationists are depicted as opiners rather than as
validation authorities/primary definers. This is similar to the
findings from other studies such as Hansen (1991, pp. 450-451)
on environmental pressure groups;
2. animal liberationists are spoken for: such as “some people
oppose…” or (in interview with authority) “some people would say
…,” thus offering an unchallenged opportunity “or justify
animal-using practice;
3. the “balance” finally is tipped in orthodoxy’s favor: such as
interview with vivisector, interview with liberationist, then
interview with a patient waiting for the vivisector’s
“breakthrough”; and
4. the goalposts are moved: such as reducing ethics to
aesthetics, to differences of taste, when the focus is narrowed
to the end product of animal use and not the production process
itself and its rationale.
Examining the Confusing & Redefining “Inclusion”
But, again, this more subtle area of access/inclusion works
toward the enhancement of the speciesist status quo and against
animal liberation’s potential to shatter the problematic and its
constitutive “cultural givens” such as mastery over nature,
progress through animal-using science and technology (Hansen,
1991, p. 452), and the inevitability of animal use -- which
anchor media discourse, one which also excludes on a regular
basis.
Exclusion
There is no need to examine at length the quotidian exclusion of
animal liberation events and existence . It is especially
notable in areas where we may expect to find animal liberation
interests included, if only on the basis of their being “in the
public interest,” this time in a non-elite sense. However, the
two interests usually are kept apart. A general classification
of such exclusion can be arrived at when (a) there are
“breakthroughs” in animal-based medical research (animal
liberation silly); (b) independent reports support animal
liberation claims (animal liberation not credible); and (c)
governments take up the aims of a campaign (animal liberation
unnecessary).
Animal liberation also is excluded from in-depth,
conceptual/cognitive features, by media:
1. failure to connect one oppression (condemned) with another
(condoned or ignored): such as in the “celebrity abroad” genre
where human rights and environmental abuses are castigated while
rodeos or bullfights are enjoyed;
2. non-problematization of animal use: such as at times of drug
catastrophes and in consideration of hunger and land-water-use
predicaments (Birke & Michael, 1998);
3. false dichotomy-polarization exercises, where choices are
framed in terms of factory farming or organic farming (both
animal-based), and welfarists or terrorists (normatives or “nutters”),
thus excluding the bulk of animal liberationists and their
claims .
This preamble has served to bring us to an examination of
general media discourse (both now within the immediacy of news
reportage and in more considered elite journalism), which
incorporates all that we have seen so far --
access/inclusion/exclusion -- in a Confusing & Redefining
maneuver.
Confusing & Redefining
At the same time as the spatial incomprehension is exercised,
media presenters, guests, and writers appear to be confused
about animal liberation. However, there would seem to be more at
work than a genuine intellectual incomprehension. The confusion
standard appears to be related to, or part of, a larger
“project,” which redefines animal liberation (and animal use)
for orthodox purposes. Just as Exclusion allows a glimpse of the
movement’s shadowy proponents, Confusing & Redefining works
further toward appropriation in the struggle to maintain
legitimacy and control meaning. Through this combination,
instrumentalist orthodoxy reasserts its authority, enabling its
representatives and representers to assume the role of experts
and moral guides.
Confusing
A commonplace in the media is the interchanging use of terms
such as “animal rights campaigners,” “animal welfarists,” and
the ubiquitous “animal lovers.” Different animal lobbies are
merged as if they are all one “animal movement”: Wildlife groups
are demanding a change in legislation to help prevent what they
claim is indiscriminate killing of seals by fishermen. Animal
rights supporters met in Edinburgh last week following reports
[italics added] … .
The confusion is aided by rife inaccuracy and the cryptic
regarding both events and concepts. For example, no animal
rights groups were represented at the above meeting, which
approved of fishing and of “killing rogue seals.” Two more
typical examples: “Some members believe that the rowdier element
within the vegan cause…is the result of infiltration by
anti-vivisectionists… ” -- the Vegan Society is
anti-vivisectionist and has been since its founding in 1944;
“Vegetarianism as a moral stance only makes sense if it excludes
eating any living thing .”
One of the greater confusions can be found in features on, and
interviews with, “vegetarian” celebrities who eat fish and
famous vegans who more often than not are described as
vegetarians . Such confusions also are compounded. While a Radio
Times preview referred to a cookery program’s focus on the
“strict vegetarianism” of Gujarati cuisine, the television
program served up meals containing milk and yogurt . A review of
the program informed readers that, “The Gujarati cuisine is so
strictly vegetarian that it eschews all root vegetables .” By
this confusing and seemingly ineluctable
processvegans-to-vegetarians-to-fisheating-to-macrobiotics and
its many variantsanimal liberation is broken up and swallowed
by the bloody body politic (Adams, 1990, p. 79).
We must allow that those responsible for such typical
representations are confused and/or just plain sloppy. But the
media’s interchanging of terms is indicative of something more
profound than their assumptions of popular rhetoric(s) and the
steadfast denial of the word liberation -- unless associated
with the “terrorists” of the Animal Liberation Front -- and the
mixed use instead of rights-welfare-lovers serves to minimize
any sense of animals being in bondage. But we need to consider
Confusing’s bedfellow, Redefining, by which the media may make
their own meanings of the issue(s), lead the public through the
thicket of confusions, and suck animal liberation back to
welfarism’s animal-use norms and values.
Redefining
Animal liberation philosophy usually is bypassed except in
name(s), and the media appear to move with the times in order to
keep them in their place. The state’s animal welfarism becomes
the representation of liberation; the struggle between
state/non-state welfarisms becomes the representation of the
state-welfarist/non-state-liberationist struggle. Discussion may
start out with animal liberation but slips back, at best, into
regulationism. As a bridge into this territory, the first
example not only excludes liberation but also confuses and
redefines it.
Warmly reviewing the first in a Brass Eye television series that
satirized current affairs programs -- the current affair here
being “animal rights” -- Germaine Greer described animal rights
as “incoherent,” citing as an example the fictional dinner-party
that liberals who objected to veal calves kept in crates but not
to lobsters kept in boxes lampooned on Brass Eye. Yet, this
example of inconsistency is characteristic of welfarism, and it
was the ambivalent welfarist orthodoxy Greer was criticizing
when she, like Brass Eye, thought she was ridiculing animal
rights . Seemingly ignorant of animal rights theory, Brass Eye
and Greer have managed to reproduce and reinforce an identity
previously constructed by media/movement interaction.
Animal liberation is also “got hold of” by the orthodox and
redefined within welfarist ontology by more dedicated moves. A
Newsnight item on animals trapped for their fur, for example,
was illustrated with powerful video footage from the Lynx-David
Bailey oeuvre and of caught animals writhing in agony. But the
program’s host named anti-fur campaigners as “animal lovers” and
framed the studio discussion in terms of “which traps are best?”
And, with a sigh of relief that the peril of buying products in
ignorance of their country of origin and its bad human rights
record was virtually over (South African oranges), a Times
columnist now felt pressured to recognize the ethics of food
production at home. Are these eggs “barn fresh?” The
hierarchical structures of a different apartheid naturalize both
sequence and shift, from human then to animal, then from rights
to welfare.
Thus the meaning of the issue is subtly relocated back into the
safe “sphere of legitimate controversy” (Shoemaker & Reese,
1991, p. 188; Hallin, 1986, pp. 116-117), and often accompanied
by various sins of omission. In a lead article supporting the
relaunch of London Zoo, The Times had this to say:
The world is far less sanguine about the confinement of animals
than it was when London Zoo was founded in 1828. The
pre-Enlightenment belief that man has careless dominion over the
beasts dies hard, but the writings of Bentham and Schopenhauer
against animal exploitation are gaining intellectual currency.
Contemporary philosophers such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer
offer a new vision of “animal rights” too puritanical to be
enacted. But the appearance of Bentham’s slogans against animal
suffering in shop windows is not simply faddish .
In what seems like a perpetual cultural lag, it was, for The
Times, Bentham and Schopenhauer, not Singer and Regan, who
represent the burgeoning intellectual paradigm. “Animal rights”
has been acknowledged, although its influence has not, and
speciesism acquires a new patina. What we are not told is that
Bentham and Schopenhauer (both “meat” eaters) pre-date and, in
an indirect way, gave rise to much nineteenth century animal
legislation and thus to the (still sheet anchor though now under
review) Protection of Animals Act 1911. The Act, based on
legal-rights utilitarianism and a certain resignation (the
“inevitability” of animal use), codified and entrenched the
developing welfarist ethic, effectively froze the world of
human/nonhuman relations, and controls its meanings (e.g. of
cruelty; but not so much of what it is but of what it isn’t).
Plus ça change….
It is apparent then that the debate is still being framed in
terms of (illegal) cruelty, the base line of welfarism (à la the
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) rather
than in terms of, say, Regan’s (1983) dissident “not all harms
hurt” and “animals are not our resources.” This is illustrated
specifically by a full-page Daily Telegraph feature dubiously
headed, “Everyone is against cruelty to animals. But opinion
differs sharply over what is cruel -- and about the best ways to
combat it. ” One of the four articles on the page concerned Paul
and Linda McCartney’s purchase of land to protect deer from
hunting, but written by a farmer who was “bitter about the
damage done by the rock star’s love of deer.” The farmer
attacked the (undefended) McCartneys because deer obstructed his
animal farming that, itself and its own inherent cruelties were
beyond question. A second article, “Vets split in the debate on
ethics” explored the ambiguous position of vets in the pay of
“questionable” farming systems such as battery (and not simply)
egg production. Notably, it was the (unnamed) “originators of
the contemporary debate on ethics” whose voices were excluded
from what is, crucially, an older debate . A third article
(“Killing them kindly: the skills of the stalker”) represented
the deer/human relationship as one of naturalized culling, again
in classic cruelty/kindness terms. But, most revealingly, the
final article was the regular angling column, typographically
marked off from the rest of the page. Angling remained aloof
from the cruelty debate. The only way for the angler to combat
cruelty is to cease angling, the unthinkable liberationist
solution.
The kindness/cruelty framing reaches its apogee in the guiltless
decency area that both re-establishes and ring-fences legitimate
animal concern. Selected animal-using practices are identified
as being things which can be done “with a clear conscience,” or
which are “guilt-free.” In this, there is the increase in moral
capital for the animal-using system and its checks and balances.
A regular columnist-cum-organic farmer makes a pitch for “meat
we can honestly enjoy” and informs readers that, “Being organic,
it is as environmentally friendly as you can get; it treats farm
animals with respect and demands of them what they are naturally
capable of giving .”
These three points “make sense” only if it is presupposed for
each that nonhuman animals are humans’ resources and that
agriculture has to involve them. The essentialist code is
revealed not least by the use of the objectifying “farm” rather
than the objective “farmed.”
This area though is also notable for its delusions. In an
article titled “Feasting with a guilt-free complex: Max Davidson
feels no qualms about tucking into rabbit sausage,” Davidson
described the other foods he ate at the same sitting -- cod,
crab and venison -- and was proud that a (wild) rabbit had taken
the place of a pig on that particular occasion. “Morally,” he
wrote, “the [rabbit] dish was a masterstroke .” It is not a
vegan, or even vegetarian, diet (“rabbit food”) that is the
moral masterstroke but, still, rabbit as fooda tactical
masterstroke that blanks out the unsustainability of such food
production that has led to intensive rabbit, fish, crab, and
deer farming.
The final example here is a sketch for a case study of media
coverage of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The BSE
“crisis” is two crises: one spoken and shaped by/shaping the
government-farmer-consumer discourse, a policies and methods
legitimation crisis; and one excluded by this, the legitimation
crisis in the monolith of animal-based agriculture, one diffused
by representing all food-poisoning scandals as discrete excesses
. By this ploy, animal liberation and its comprehensive
challenge has been not only marginalized but also taunted. Media
practice has been to deny space and time to liberationists
clamoring for attention, while condemning them for not being
outspoken on the issue . During the 1996 crisis within the
chronic BSE crisis, orthodox outrage was expressed against the
government’s BSE-eradicating policy, which was killing healthy
animals, as if “healthy” animals were not slaughtered as the
norm. In a rash of press articles and television diatribes, it
was the media that represented genuine animal concern, a
fantastic process which fed into the mythology of animal
liberationists (“phonys”) not really caring for animals at all
(the ulterior motives approach to “explaining” animal liberation
(Tester, 1991).
Set this in its historical context, and it becomes more
intriguing. The crisis began when the first signs of the disease
appeared in April 1985, and BSE was identified in November of
the following year. In 1984, the British Broadcasting Company
(BBC) had been showing Sarah Brown’s hugely successful
vegetarian cookery series. In 1986, Cox wrote what was to become
the bestselling Why You Don’t Need Meat. This is identified as
the period when media coverage took a turn for the worse
(McIvor, 1998; Ryder, 1989). Also since then, and despite the
steadily increasing numbers of vegetarians and vegans in the
United Kingdom, only one other dedicated vegetarian cookery
series has been screened . Yet, animal-based cookery series have
proliferated throughout the BSE crisis . Within these,
vegetarian and vegan dishes have appeared (the latter especially
accompanied by a sniffy comment from the celebrity chef) but
alongside other “exotics” -- try Chinese, Italian, French,
Indian, Thai, vegetarian, vegan cuisine: ethnics not ethics.
Again, here is the swallowing up of animal liberation by
private-sphere digestion. Simultaneously, television has
bombarded its audiences with celebratory programs on zookeepers,
vets, doghandlers, wildlife, and pets (and bloodsports).
Although more about human interest(s) in animals than about
animals’ interests, these have been reasserted as the true
areas, indeed the zenith, of genuine British animal concern,
boosting a sense of unity and stability.
This appropriation finds its most practical-private
manifestation, perhaps, in pet keeping. And we can discern here
not so much a history repeating itself but one turned inside
out. One of the major (though disputed) claims made for pet
keeping during the industrialization and urbanization of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that it assisted in an
increase in awareness and appreciation of animal consciousness
and individuality (Thomas, 1983). That is, pet keeping led to an
increased animal concern. Now, however, the reverse seems to be
more the case: Increased animal concern -- initiated by the
contemporary animal liberation movement -- is being translated
into increased pet keeping and pet dumping .
Dancing in the Dark
Media and movements are dialectically bound, always in motion
and alert to one another’s motion -- be it embrace, flight, or
thundering blow. The most appropriate metaphor to describe their
relationship is dance -- sometimes a dance of death (Molotch
1979, p. 92).
I want to highlight three areas of concern here by offering some
concluding remarks about the Exclusion-Confusing & Redefining
maneuver itself; the public interest role and due impartiality
of media; and the requirement for further research into animal
liberation/media interaction.
In the pattern of media activity identified, we can see how
dominant ideology transforms the movement’s aims and negates its
claims, which, themselves, aim to transform dominant speciesist
ideology. Ostensibly at least, it represents an obstacle to the
formation of an animal liberation consciousness. Moreover, the
(animal-using) scientistic-technological media discourse
delimits the way in which “reality” and its problems are defined
and maintains the unthinkability of an animal-free paradigm in,
for instance, agriculture and scientific-medical research.
At present, within the discursive or hegemonic “struggle,” the
media would seem to be hosting (not a neutral term) a struggle
more between competing welfarisms than between animal slavery
and animal liberation . Fundamental to this appropriation of
animal liberation discourse by, at best, a welfarist one, is the
avoidance strategy -- not engaging with it head-on. Debate
continues or even increases about ways of
rearing-producing-using animals (no bad thing given the extent
of animal abuse) but is cut short when about using them/not
using them (and remains non-existent on television, and
virtually non-existent in the press, about animal liberation in
its wider contexts of health, environment, land, and water use).
Animal liberation is appropriated and sold back as welfarism:
effectively, a cultural enhancement and closure. What utility
can be found in animal liberation is assimilated into speciesist
discourse, appropriated like “nature,” thereby neutralizing the
animal liberation beast, bringing it under control. (In this
sense, the media/movement “dance” is more of a wrangle). There
is a relationship between how both animals and animal liberation
are treated: Both become invisible except as forms and tropes.
Both are hollowed out and swallowed up, but their skins remain
as something else used to clothe other bodies.
In terms of Molotch’s (1979) metaphor, it is fortunate for
liberationists and liberation that any death by this process is
only symbolic (Gerbner & Gross, 1976). After all, the movement
is more than able to take care of one of Kielbowicz and
Scherer’s (1986) three main areas of movement/media concern --
social movement maintenance; emergence (achieved long ago); and,
most pertinent, attainment of goals. The movement is continually
attaining micro-abolitionist goals and -- even if major goals
still are far off -- also achieving resource mobilization
success. Despite, or perhaps even because of, media performance
in relation to animal use and animal liberation, public opinion
polls are finding high and/or increasing numbers of people
concerned about human treatment of nonhumans and majorities
opposing certain animal-using practices . That is, there is some
index of the animal-use myth-dilution.
But while public opinion on, the fundamental inefficiency of
animal-based agriculture and the unreliability of animal-based
research is hardly known, weights of opinion on many animal
issues -- when they are known --are not honored. Such
opinion-poll news often is reported in the press but rarely on
television where news and television in general, including
fiction, carries on as if vivisection is still a public article
of faith . In many areas, that is, the due impartiality of media
is seriously compromised. The media fail on their own terms,
regardless of calls for “the formation and implementation of
quite different editorial criteria” (Bennett, 1982, p. 306;
Connell, 1980).
The producer-consumer harmony of media texts conceals
fragmentation, but how this actually translates into personal
action is not so easily ascertained except from, say, the
RealEat-Gallup polls on the increasing numbers of vegetarians
and vegans in the country . The questions yet to ask concern
where and what the animal-issue influences are; what levels of
dissonance exist (belief v action); and what, indeed, are the
public knowledges . This is the complex dynamic awaiting
research, which includes the non-development of government
policy in response to the demands of the movement and the
aroused publics. Such research would also analyze audience
reception-interpretation and study in greater depth the
enlightening, occluding, or death-dealing role(s) different
media play in such patterns of evolution. It would be careful
not to dispense too readily with structural, functionalist media
theory (including transmission and ritual models of
communication) in favor of “anti-power,” pleasures of the text,
resistance, and polysemous theses. The risk is detachment from
notions of domination, ideology, and change, thus denying
justice to billions of “crimeless victims” (Molotch, 1979, p.
78) whose liberation lies beyond the present incorporation of
the movement’s transformed values.
Note
* Barry Kew, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
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