Alarming Reports: Communicating Conflict in the Daily News. Andrew Arno. New York, NY: Berghahnbooks, 2009. 216 pp.
Based on an unusual anthropological approach, Alarming Reports offers sharp insights into the dynamics of the news as it moves through complex social systems. The first published monograph in the University of Hawaii’s new Anthropology of Media series, Andrew Arno’s work contributes to a new media anthropology. The book thus is part of advancing the theory of media and communication studies in ways that dovetail with cultural activism (e.g., Ginsburg, 2008), transnational media (e.g., Mankekar, 2008), and so forth. However, Arno goes beyond these methods by deploying an anthropological approach to news as a special speech genre. Alarming Reports is thus refreshingly original, and deserves the special attention of media and communications scholars.
Arno’s primary concern is news whose intrinsic characteristics are formed by the inextricable web of social conflict, and are perceived as noticeable by the audience. Based on this observation, Arno strives to investigate the intrinsic characteristics of news by the means of various interdisciplinary theories, then expanding his analysis to news media in a context of society’s whole structure.
Arno, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, analyzes news from the eyes of the audience. News as a social process is not formed when an event takes place or when a report of the event is created, but when an individual receives the news with a sense of alarm. This argument, in some sense, does not look fresh, compared to existing reception theories. However, Arno’s approach is quite different. His understanding of news is entirely as a theoretical participant critic and as an anthropological observer. As a matter of fact, he draws upon various language theories in order to buttress his argument: one of them is Austin’s language theory—locutionary (the act of meaningful utterance by face-to-face talk), illocutionary (intent of an utterance), and perlocutionary (effect of the utterance on the person) speech. That is to say, Arno’s concept of news as an alarming report is a specific kind of perlocutionary act of language.
Arno sees news as a unique kind of speech act that occurs in the social dialogue as well as in alarming reports to the audience. For this, Arno borrows the concepts of entextualization and co(n)-textualization from Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban: entextualization refers to the extraction of a discursive segment from society (news coverage), and through cotextualization, the extraction becomes produced as an autonomous text (news production); this text is inserted again into social contexts by contextualization (news distribution). Arno concludes that news has a well-developed text ideology dimension drawn from the ongoing discourse of social life. This kind of argumentation becomes possible because Arno painstakingly connects anthropological observation with various theories of humanities, linguistics, and social science.
As a former newspaper journalist for fifteen years, I find the freshest and most persuasive aspect of Arno’s work is his insight that news is basically drawn from social conflict. He defines news as “institutionalized forms of communication about conflict.” A news story without social conflict is not news because conflict as well as communication is the “most powerful and basic elements of social life.” Media sociologists explain news as something that is socially constructed or that newsmakers make up; political economists see news as a means to mobilize support for the special interests of a power group. But Arno does not adhere to these explanations and instead examines the new dimension of news that is located in social conflict. Since social conflict is one of the major features of modern society, the understanding of news should start from the linkage of conflict and news.
In the first half of the book, Arno’s approach is based on microanalysis of news flow in society. However, he says, anthropology “must find ways of documenting the interrelations of macro and micro processes of meaning.” That’s the reason he develops his analysis forward to the societal level in the second half of the book. He proposes another concept related to news—“control communication,” or response mechanisms to social conflict. Mass media share a central defining characteristic with other control communication institutions such as law, religion, and social science, but news media, Arno argues, are a special “conflict discourse system” that functions as a mediator among different social conflict discourse.
Anthropological sensibility, on the one hand, is the concern for different organizing perspectives or systems, and on the other hand, is characterized by an holistic approach not isolated from relations of each relevant element. Arno’s micro and macro approaches provide explanation for the dynamics of conflict discourse systems in news media content, and offer a way of relating news to other important forms of communication. Furthermore, since social conflict is increasingly interwoven with social institutions, news as a reflection of social conflicts also is getting more complex. Thus, Arno’s anthropological approach to news based on social conflict is valuable. If I add one small wish, I hope he deals with journalists as well with a visionary anthropological approach in his next work.
CHANG SUP PARK
Southern Illinois University