Word: contexts
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...often hear the word used, typically in the maligned politician’s plea that his absurd-sounding quote was “taken out of context.” Watch TV news, and you may begin to feel like the whole election is out of context, and it’s going to be up to the voter to put it all together. The very structure of television media minimizes context, since only the skeleton of a story can survive the cutting that it takes to reduce a complex issue into a two minute “package?...
...years ago, in the context of a lengthy and fascinating videotaped deposition, Bill Clinton’s famous remark that a lot “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” was a clever response to the question put to him. Clinton had been asked if there “is” a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and had felt free to say no because the relationship had ended. He hadn’t volunteered any more information, of course, largely because he rightly suspected that...
Dick Cheney, for one, seems keenly aware of the context effect, and has learned to use it to great advantage. Last Wednesday, in an important speech mostly blasted out of the news cycle by another suicide bombing in Iraq, Cheney took issue with the claim of Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., that soldiers who want body armor and other needed equipment have to purchase it on eBay, because the military does not provide it. But Cheney didn’t refute the claim at all. Instead, he pointed out that Kerry voted against an appropriation of $87 billion requested...
...popularity of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” is a good example of our sensitivity to context. Unlike other nighttime political humor on the Leno-Letterman-Conan axis, Stewart relies less on jokes that begin with a nugget of news, followed by a made-up punch line. For the most part, the humor of his “fake” news routine lies in the fact that it’s not fake at all…he allows politicians and journalists to mock themselves. My friends and I often blink in disbelief...
...emerging Medicare fiasco will be a test of how readily context can be assembled in the news media. We learned last week that the chief federal Medicare actuary was ordered, under penalty of unemployment, to withhold from Congress his knowledge that the administration was understating the Bush prescription drug bill’s cost by about $150 billion. This is shocking on its own, but more so in context—namely, that the bill passed by one vote after GOP leaders persuaded some opposing Congress members to change their votes on the floor. In context, these revelations mean that...