The "I" of the storm: a textual analysis of U.S. reporting on democratic Kampuchea

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to test the propaganda model of the media proposed by Herman and Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent. However, rather than adopt their methodology, the author proposes to undertake a textual analysis following the methods of Hall and others of the Birmingham School, in which one subject or theme is selected and then analyzed in a close reading of the text itself with little reference to issues of production, author intention, or audience readings. The author also highlights the issue of “experts,” as articulated by Said in his book Covering Islam, by focusing on what constitutes an expert source and what the relationships are between journalist as reporter and journalist as expert source. In this analysis of the discourse of a representative reporter, Elizabeth Becker, the text becomes the discourse of Becker over a period of time, with close attention to her journalistic reports for the Washington Post, her book reviews, magazine articles, and booklength treatment. The analysis reveals that four discursive strategies appear in the text: (a) anticommunism; (b) individualism and an Us/Other construction of individuals; (c) anthropomorphism; and (d) objectification of the subject of study, a presumption that these “Others,” the Cambodians, exist in a different time/space continuum from “Us.”