I visited I Love My Laundry a little while ago, and loved it. Because they’re so quirky and different, I decided to write my profile on them, rather than on a random semi-famous person. So, here we are
Walking in to I Love My Laundry from the streets of a bustling Saturday morning Cape Town is like breathing in fresh air. It has an atmosphere of calm, yet it is busy. There is an early morning regular here for coffee and breakfast dim-sum with her sons. Wiechert, the manager, is organising bags of laundry, fixing coffee and steaming dim sum all at once. There is much being done, yet there is not an ounce of frenzy in the room.
Students gathered in Molly Blackburn Hall at UCT this evening to hear Mamphela Ramphele speak at the launch of the new UCT wing of Agang SA. Though the mood was serious, Ramphele entertained and engaged with the students in what promised to be a dialogue rather than a speech.
The UCT choir started the evening off with emotive songs in various African languages. The crowd sang and cheered at the sounds of Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrica
Interim leader of the UCT wing of Agang SA, Fortune Ntlantla, spoke about what the group would stand for. The crowd showed their support for his closing statement with calls of ‘Viva!’
Dr Mamphela Ramphele started speaking after a short introduction by the emcee, Andrew Gasnolar. She cut straight to the case, addressing the party policies, what Agang SA stood for, and what they hoped to achieve and change. She highlighted the importance of voting, especially in the student community.
A Q&A session was opened, with students allowed to address Dr Ramphele directly. The questions were as followed:
A student questions Ramphele’s trustworthiness in offering a free and fair society after her actions regarding UCT workers and outsourcing of labour during her time as Vice Chancellor of the institute
A fairly direct question about the funding of Agang SA in response to Ramphele travelling to the United States and other developed nations to gather funding
A question possibly prompted by media reactions to Ramphele’s recent public declaration of her finances, and her call for President Zuma to do the same. Her answer led, once again, to a tittering crowd.
According to Walter Lippman, it is the journalist’s role to make sense of information for the reader, to be the link between policy makers and the public (Lippman, 2007: 206). However, biases, framing, priming, agenda setting and news values can affect how the reader interprets what is being said, making them important to study as a means to understand what is really being sold to the reader as ‘the truth’. In February 2013, a study was released by the University of Stellenbosch revealing substitutions and contamination of various meat products with substances not listed under the ingredients labels (Cawthorn, Steinman & Hoffman, 2013: 1). The story was placed high on the agenda of the South African media, meaning much emphasis was placed on it and it was regarded as important to the public (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007: 11). The media dealt with this story in different ways, each writer concentrating on a different element to the story, revealing various audiences, angles, framing, priming and biases. I have chosen to analyse an article published by fin24, an article written by Chris charter for bizcommunity.com, and an article by Andrew Lieber, written for gourmetguys.com.
Arguably the best written article was published by fin24 (anonymous, 2013: online). Written for an educated, business oriented audience, the article assumes that readers are up to date with important news, which we see from the fact that the European horse meat scandal is mentioned, but not explained; meaning that the journalist assumes that it is already understood. The language and tone also suggest this. The article concentrates on percentages and statistics sourced from the study, as well as interviews with its authors. These sources are viewed as reliable and authoritative, bolstering the reader’s trust in the article’s accuracy. It does not focus on any one of the unlisted meats, but mentions all of them giving a good overview of the story without it being biased to a particular aspect. The story is dramatic, in that the meats are “unconventional” (anonymous, 2013: online) and the percentages of unlisted ingredients are shocking to readers; personalised through interviews with the study authors, novel in that no such study or findings have ever been mentioned before and is linked to readers’ ongoing concern with health.
Photograph from fin24’s article
It can be argued that the audience is primed to view the mislabelling in a negative light, and as unsafe and unhygienic because of the photograph used – a bloody, unidentifiable carcass being handled by a person who is not wearing gloves. Priming is the use of certain “activation tags” (Scheufele, 2000: 299) which prime a certain concept or issue in the reader’s memory, which “influence subsequent information processing”. Activation tags can be words, concepts or images, for example. The ideas activated by the image are negative, making the article less objective as opinions on the facts rather than facts alone are now present in the article (Boudana, 2011: 386).
In Chris Charter’s article, the story is framed as a legal, rather than religious, ethical or medical concern, as it is in the fin24 article (Charter, 2013: online). This is to suit the readers of bizcommunity, who are businesspeople (it is a business focussed website) who would be concerned with the business and legal side of the story. The audience is assumed to already have the basic information, and thus the article does not focus on the facts of the story, hardly using the study as a source at all, but rather the consequences and implications thereof in terms of the consumer protection act (CPA).
It can be argued that the article is in fact biased, which is why the shocking facts are not mentioned. It seeks to convince consumers not to seek redress from business owners, but to consume more “consciously” (Charter, 2013: online). Although the article admits that retailers would be wrong if they knowingly contravened the CPA, it states that most did not do it knowingly, and are thus not at fault. Bias against consumers consulting the National Consumer Committee is clearly revealed in the quote: “Consumer activism does not only mean running to the NCC” (Charter, 2013: online). The simple use of the word “running” primes a negative reaction.
Photograph from bizcommunity
Picture from bizommunity
The priming in the photographs used reaffirms the idea of positive bias toward the retailer, as the images are of clean, sanitary looking meat with no blood or dirt of those used in the fin24 article. There are various reasons for bias, including advertisers, owners, audience and the journalists themselves. Many argue that objectivity is in fact impossible, and that it is an unattainable and undesirable standard which does not serve the industry, as readers read biased opinion and believe it is objective fact simply because it is in a newspaper and that is what is expected as the norm (Boudana, 2011: 390).
The article by Andrew Lieber is aimed at the most specialised audience of all three articles. Gourmetguys is an amateur food news site, marketing themselves as “South Africa’s internet food newspaper, magazine and blog.” (Lieber, 2013: online). It is expected to be read online, as we can see from the format used – bite sized chunks of information separated into short paragraphs – as well as its heavy reliance on multimedia which would be inaccessible if printed – the video embedded above the article. Because of its audience, the article frames the food and ingredient angle, it is in the “Know Your Ingredients” section of the site, but the journalists have done little of the research for the article themselves. It is in essence a synopsis of a video clip from a larger news corporation, e News Channel Africa (eNCA). This means that Andrew Lieber relied heavily on their facts and figures rather than his own.
The article itself is framed by the health angle of the story, relating to the ongoing concern of readers with their health and the healthiness of what they consume. The video, and thus the article, do mention the health concerns of eating donkey, which is not mentioned in any of the other articles. The eNCA video relies heavily on study and interviews with one of the study authors, making it sound objective and unbiased. The images, however, show a different story: sausages being cut open, dissected, pressed out of their casings, meat being minced, and sausages being cooked outdoors with no gloves or other sanitary measures – these are all unappealing and negative images, priming the audience to see the story in a negative light.
Thus we see that although these articles may all individually look objective, when compared to the original study (or in other cases the press release) or with one another, the framing, priming, news values, audience and biases show through in all three. Though the Fin24 article is structurally the best, the image used primes the audience to see the story in a negative light. The Chris Charter’s article frames the legal consequences of the mislabelling, and is clearly biased toward retailers and against complaining consumers. The Andrew Lieber’s article shows how a story can be tailored to a specific audience, in this case health and food oriented. Though the article itself seems unbiased, the visual priming of the embedded video influences the audience to see the story in a negative light. In comparing these three articles, the bias and lack of objectivity in all three becomes clear, reaffirming the importance of not simply trusting one source, but comparing a number thereof to get close to the truth.
Boudana, S. (2011) “A Definition of Journalistic Objectivity as a Performance”. Media Culture Society 33: 385
Cawthorn, D, Steinman, H & Hoffman, L. (2013) “A high incidence of species substitution and mislabelling detected in meat products sold in South Africa”, University of Stellenbosch: 1-13
Lippman, W. (2007) “Public Opinion”, NuVision Publications, LLC: 206
Scheufele, D. (2000) “Agenda Setting, Priming and Framing revisited. Another Look at Cognitive Effects of Political Communication” Mass Communication & Society 3 (2&3): 297-316.
Scheufele, D & Tewksbury, D. (2007) “Framing, Agenda Setting and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models” Journals of Communication, 57: 9-20
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