I am still unconvinced that individuals can have brands. What is Daniel Schorr’s brand as opposed to Michel Martin’s brand? Is this phenomena of brand confined only to cable news media?

Furthermore because this is an academic blog I was looking to see some structural analysis. I do not think that journalists are responsible for structural analysis because their duty is to report the event with factual accuracy. For me academics exist to illuminate what is operating behind an event, before and after the event and to put the event in a larger historical and social context giving that academics are giving tenure to study a particular subject area.

I do not think that issues of individual racial sensitivity and looking at discrimination on a deeper structural level are opposing arguments on the same plane. Being individually sensitive to racial jokes and ethnic slurs is a an issue of individual emotional pain and rarely has a social impact. Social Structures which operate behind a national discourse on issues of race, ethnicity and religious discrimination have to do with unequal relationships of power among people where certain people (the dominant social group) can make jokes about others (the marginal social group). This matters because this affects the ability of people from the marginal group to make free decisions equal to that of the dominant social group. It is very important to not conflate these two levels of analysis. These are not equally compelling argument. The former can be dismissed as a fluke while the latter is about unequal distribution of power among different social groups.

Furthermore there is a lot of conflation of social issues going on here. Lou Dobbs is commenting on a question of ethnicity which implicates issues of immigration which is not necessarily implied in a discussion of race.

Williams issue is complicated because he made a discriminatory comment made on religious fashion which does not necessarily discuss a single race as Islam is a group that contains many races (African-Americans are also Muslim but they do not encompass all of Islam leaving open that other Muslisms are other races). Given that African-Americans are also Muslim (e.g. Congress people Andre Carson and Keith Ellison) he has offended people of the African American community as well.

Williams issue is actually even more complicated. Besides complicated issues of religion and race this issue takes place across three networks ABC (Bill O’Reilly made the initial remarks on The View), Fox News and NPR. So the state of journalism is at issue here. Williams specifically talked about headscarves or hijabs so there is an issue of gender here as well. Finally Williams own race became an issue as NPR’s diversity is scant to begin with. So issues of brand do not even begin to address the social/political impact of this event.

For me this article falls into the same trap as the media setting up a fight between Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart as opposing ideologies. Stewart astutely pointed out his aim was to express anger at a network which claimed to have the best business experts and know all that happens on Wall Street while not being able to explain the biggest financial meltdown since the great depression and not to punish/fight with Jim Cramer. Stewart clarified his position on the Rachel Maddow show soon after his rally when he said that he viewed people on cable news as weather people looking at events through a narrow particular ideological lens while he and his staff are climate scientists looking at the larger questions and structural issues generating the events of the day. It is this distinction that I think applies most to the difference between journalists and academics where academics are charged with looking at the bigger picture.

Therefore I think that the more interesting media discussion would be to tease out and a describe the brands of the networks the controversial commenters left behind.

What are CNN and NPR’s brands and what does that matter for mainstream media reporting and the national political news discourse?