Newspeak

Have you noticed the odd way that newscasters have of accenting varying words. One of the most common forms of poetic expression is iambic pentameter. Shakespeare employed it in his plays. Newspeak  was the language Orwell created for the repressive society he envisioned in l984. But it’s a good word to use to describe how television announcers communicate. It’s not iambic pentameter, but it has definite cadences that revolve around emphasizing certain words and whether you’re listening to CNN or NPR or CBS or even Al Jazeera, it has the tendency to make all the news, whether it concerns a lost pet or plane, sound remarkably the same. There’s an old neuroscience conjecture that if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter long enough he will write Hamlet. Can the same thing be said about newscasters? Sometimes the emphasis seems arbitrary. Every sentence seems to require a key word. For instance let’s say a CNN’s anchor like Carol Costello or Chris Cuomo wants to say “the cat is out of the bag.” They won’t just iterate the words like you or I. They will probably emphasize the last two words of the sentence, “the bag.”  Let’s take another sentence an anchor might say, like “Ray Rice punched his then fiancé.” “Then” would obviously be the nominee in that particular sentence. Or here’s another possible sentence a newscaster might read, “Sources at the Pentagon have indicated that the ‘no boots on the ground’ policy may soon be reversed.” You’d think the emphasis might fall on “sources” or “Pentagon,” but “indicated” is clearly the word that punctuates the mood that the sentence creates.  Newspeak is definitely a language that one has to learn like French or Spanish and like all language it contains its own river of meanings that lies under the superficial veneer that the words create once they are encoded into a particular syntax. For instance, French communicates a certain pertness (as opposed to the perkiness of Newspeak), verging on rudeness or abruptness; there ‘s a hyberbolic sardonicism to French. When a French man or woman can’t do something that you require, they say “Je suis desole,” which means they are not desole at all and you can go fuck yourself since you’re not getting squat. Newscasters are totally the opposite of the French. There hardly a negative personality amongst them and every word out of their mouths is an expression of interest and enthusiasm. When Carol or Chris speaks to one of their correspondents out in the field, she or he is incredibly interested in everything the correspondent has to say, no matter how insignificant it is. Neither Chris nor Carol would probably ever dream of uttering the English equivalent of “Je suis desole.” Berlitz is one of the places one goes to learn French, Spanish or Italian, but how does one learn Newspeak. It’s the old nature versus nurture question. Obviously there are some people who are born talking like newscasters. Others start to talk this way after watching too much news and other wannabees attend schools of broadcasting which supposedly will teach you how to be a radio or television announcer. But once you have learned to talk like an announcer, can you ever return to the monotone of normal human speech. Can a pickle be turned back into a cucumber once he or she returns home from announcing headline stories?

INN, The ISIL News Network

flog of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

There has been much talk about how media savvy ISIL is and how part of the executions involves getting their victims to add to the propaganda blitz. The very notion of media and social networking is warm and cuddly and makes you think of the kind of political advertisements that fill the airways during a presidential campaign. Hyperbole rules the roost and all kinds of absurd claims are made, but it’s really business as usual. While chopping off heads isolates ISIL from the family of man, their expertise at conveying their message and the success with which they do it, what McLuhan meant when he famously said “the medium is the message," creates a business as usual type feeling. ISIL even sounds like a network  It’s always shocking how anything can be packaged to appear normative. (Remember Leni Riefenstahl’s paean to Naziism, Triumph of the Will?) Is it really far-flung to think that ISIL will someday provide competition for Al Jazeera?  The Al Jazeera Media Network is purportedly funded by the Thani family family of Qatar and there have been rumors that ISIL is being funded by Salafi and Wahabi money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar both. Providing news and weather  on cable is in itself a way of creating a certain kind of validity. For instance Fox News specializes in tendentious and often tabloid reportage, but it radiates an air of legitimacy simply because it’s a well- positioned and slickly produced offering on cable channels. Who is to say that someday in the not too distant future, ISIL won’t attempt to become just another cable news show, sugar coating the situation of their soon to be beheaded hostages by using them as anchor and weathermen, who read from a script in which they report the temperature in Riyadh,  domestic abuse scandals among NFL players and their own obituaries, before being executed.