White News

Before, taking the Media Studies 100 course I was naive, in the sense that I felt that everything I read and saw in the news was true and objective. I thought news media was a credible and reliable communication device for the “truth”. I guess I used to be have a liberal pluralist perspective on news, I felt that news provided a window to the world but after that course I saw just how blurred that window was as news is infact hegemonic. In tutorial, a point was made on pronouns used in news paper headlines, this got me thinking. What is the effect of using words like “we”, “they” and “you” in headlines? For an event to have news value it needs to be have relevance and proximity to the reader, we like news that affects us, so by using pronouns it makes the reader feel included. But the question is who is the “we”, “they” and the “you”?
Metro magazine on its 'Really Rich List' cover had a title on its left hand corner “Hone Harawira and the Maori Party: what have we got to fear” in this the “we” is obviously being addressed to its audience which is predominately white. The reality is that media is in the hands of white people, thus they will speak for the whites. Headlines like the one above, take on the white subject position, when we read news we must do so from the ‘white eye’.
Richard Dyer says "White people create the dominant images of the world and don't quite see that they thus construct the world in their image". One of the key mechanisms in the construction of whiteness as drawn by Richard Dyer and John Fiske is universalism, this means that western values, traditions and practices are assumed to be held by everyone. This is the idea that white is the norm, as Dyer says whites are not of a certain race, there just the human race. Because white is considered the “norm” must we see the “truth” from their perspective?