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21 April 2011

Seeing and Unseeing in Big Media

As you will perhaps remember from your intro comp or literary analysis courses in high school or college, one of the first things a critical reader must determine is the point of view of the writer of a given piece of prose. In other words, onto what particular elements within the vast plain of reality is he or she casting their eyes?

Why is this important? Because all gazes are necessarily partial; the choice to fix our partial field of sight on one segment of reality means necessarily that we are not fixing it upon another part of reality.

Or as the great Spanish essayist Ortega y Gasset said: “Every act of seeing is also an act of unseeing.”

All this as a prelude to an article in today’s New York Times which bears the headline “German Politics Faces Grass Roots Threat,” a story which tells us about how citizens are organizing to challenge the long-standing hegemony of the Christian Democrat and Socialist parties in that country.

Let’s go back to that headline and the use of the word threat.