How the White Male Worldview Dominates the Media   

Slick Spins and Fractured Facts:
How Cultural Myths Distort the News
By Caryl Rivers
Columbia University Press

Slick Spins and Fractured Facts:
How Cultural Myths Distort
the News
By Caryl Rivers
Columbia University Press
250 pages; $24.95

Suppose Martians took over your local newspaper. They don't look like you. They don't think like you. Having grown up on Mars, they have different histories and values from yours. How closely do you suppose their newspaper would parallel your interests and needs?

That's roughly the situation Caryl Rivers sets up in this provocative new book, although she's not talking about Martians. She's talking of white men vs. everybody else, particularly women. The media, she contends, tend to reflect the worldviews of the mostly white, mostly male journalists in charge. News is shaped by the "cultural myths" and stereotypes men have built up over centuries, and stories take form from the templates that pop into male minds as they confront various news situations.

This is not a new proposition, but Rivers, a journalist, novelist and Boston University professor, gives it a fresh look with new examples. She positions herself as an "insider-outsider," someone who knows and loves the news business but gains insight, and passion, from being outside the dominant elites.

Here she lists numerous myths and stereotypes, considers how they influence news coverage and looks in depth at several key news events to show how coverage got distorted. Her central complaint is that the male vantage point is so strong a norm that everything else is treated as a deviation.

"Men are perceived as neutral, value-free observers when they put men at the center of the universe," Rivers writes. "But when a woman sees a female at the center of the drama, she is attacked as feminist and biased." She views this as an important issue journalistically because "the sense of threat experienced by white men..creates certain frameworks around many current stories."

For example, she demonstrates how the press readily promotes the notion that boys are naturally superior to girls at math (Washington Post: "At Mathematical Thinking, Boys Outperform Girls"; Time: "The Gender Factor in Math"). But seldom does it take the same approach to girls' supposed superiority in writing. Headlines like "Do Women Have a Writing Gene Missing in Men?" appear "about as often as..a unicorn in your driveway."

Another myth is "The Misery of the Working Woman," Rivers says, quoting a stream of articles about the unhappy lives, health risks and stress concerns of employed women. Yet, she contends, research actually shows that employment gives women "a chance for heightened self-esteem, a buffer against depression and enhanced mental and physical health."

Other myths include "The Myth of Female Unreliability" (which causes men to downplay women's reports of sexual abuse, for instance); "The Myth of Black Carnality" (employed "to keep blacks in their place"); and "The Moral Turpitude of the Poor," accounting for the current demonizing of welfare mothers.

In dealing with diversity, Rivers points out, "white guys tend to assume white males are individual voices, whereas blacks, women, Hispanics and others always speak for the entire group. Thus you may see 15 columns on Bosnia or Whitewater..but one piece by an African American journalist on a 'black issue' is assumed to have covered the subject fully."

�er most convincing technique is to invite us to apply such demeaning stereotypes to powerful men — then listen to how silly they sound. While Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, is regularly described as a "hardheaded careerist" (New York Times) or "am�itious arch-feminist," (Newsday), how often "would anyone have called George Bush an 'ambitious arch-preppie' " or "Pat Buchanan..an 'ambitious arch-Catholic' "?

She quotes columnist Richard Cohen as defending women's rights against strident criticism but adding that "certain feminists have it coming" because of their "wild exaggerations." But, points out Rivers, "during the civil rights movement, did sympathetic reporters say that demonstrators 'had it coming' because some of their number indulged in overblown black power rhetoric?"

And she scores easy points by showing how sports coverage focuses on the physiques of female athletes such as Nancy Kerrigan and Chris Evert. "A number of male quarterbacks, tennis stars, National Basketball Association forwards and major league baseball stars have classic profiles and well-conditioned bodies," she notes, "...but rarely are those attributes mentioned in the sports pages."

There is, of course, room to argue here. Rivers has a point of view, and she chooses her evidence selectively. But her logic and the parade of embarrassing examples prove persuasive.

The consequences are clear. To the degree media thinking is dominated by middle-aged white men, the media audience will be, too. For journalists wondering how to attract young people,
women, working-class readers and minorities, the best answer may be an old one: It's all in the head.