Theft at the Public Till
exist in isolation from one another and in which, given proper self-scripting and stage management by newsmakers, all the news is capable of being good news. The spending taxing mess is a dramatic case, but it is not unusual. To the contrary, this line of news coverage illustrates a process that takes place more or less every time a news story is put together. The central fact about the interaction between news media and the people they cover is that the people being covered know the media are watching and behave accordingly. As a result, the actions the media cover as news aren't spontaneous events but self-conscious efforts to create favorable impressions. For their part the news media are aware that newsmakers are perform- ing, but they nonetheless treat newsmakers' fabrications as authentic ac- tions, covering or ignoring these performances as they see fit. They rarely go beyond the performance to unmask the plays and players or to describe events with reference to the self-conscious, self-serving effort at work back- stage. Thus, both parties deny the manipulative nature of their roles in making the news, insisting instead that their actions are authentic, un-self- conscious, and taken on the merits. Of course the media lacks an explicit habeas corpus standard -- a term, meaning "having the body," i.e. the state cannot prosecute a crime unless the body, which is evidence of the crime, is produced. If the media could not declare that a problem exists without producing evidence of the problem, many of the so called crises would just fade away -- but so too might the networks and many of our most popular magazines. The news story tells its yarn in a voice that pretends not to be telling a yarn, merely reciting a list of facts. In fact, of course, what it tells is a story; the pose of objectivity is just a means of encouraging the reader to attend to and accept the story. The voice intensifies meaning, reinforces the particular story's construction of events, screens out discrepant, story-undercutting material, and invites the reader to get involved in the text. That pose, how- ever, has consequences that go far beyond those intended. In real life, when we speak with others about events we have witnessed or experiences we have been through, we do not confine ourselves to facts or
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