Transcript Presentation 6

Ethos
• or the ethical appeal, means to convince an audience of the
author’s credibility or character.
• An author would use ethos to show to his audience that he is
a credible source and is worth listening to. Ethos is the Greek
word for “character.” The word “ethic” is derived from ethos.
• How does The Wire make an appeal using ethos?
Logos
• or the appeal to logic, means to convince an audience by use
of logic or reason.
• How does The Wire appeal to logic?
Pathos
• or the emotional appeal, means to persuade an audience by
appealing to their emotions.
• How does The Wire appeal to our emotions?
Ethnography
• Systematic study of people and cultures
• The observation comes from the point of view of the subject
of the study
• Field study reflects the knowledge of the system of meanings
in the lives of a cultural group
• “Should collect information in the context or setting where
the group works or lives. This is called fieldwork. Types of
information typically needed in ethnography are collected by
going to the research site, respecting the daily lives of
individuals at the site and collecting a wide variety of
materials”
“ethnographic imaginary”
• World enough and time
• Simon’s style of TV speaks to this idea
• Makes arguments, sets up contexts that could not be
managed in journalism alone
• Serial television melodrama, according to Williams, makes
possible the larger canvas of the ethnographic imaginary
• Combined factual, ethnographically observed, and detailed
worlds of cops and corners into one converged fictional world
Season 1
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Breaks crime story conventions
Introduces a crime
A cop who pursues solving the crime
Higher ups who have no interest in solving the crime
Doesn’t stay with the cop, but moves to the complex world of
the committer of the crime
• Humanizes that character as well
• Equally important procedures of cops and dealers are
introduced
Comparison between two
microsites
• Cops who want to be good and cops who just want to bust
heads
• Competent drug dealers vs. ones who lack the discipline to
avoid capture
Complexity of the Series’
microsites (plotlines)
• Politics
• Different police details
• Education
• Co-ops
• War on drugs and “Hamsterdam”
• Etc.
• The vivid and interlocking stories from so many
concrete ethnographic sites is what fiction affords,
what ethnography aspires to, and what newspaper
journalism can rarely achieve
• Multi-sited ethnographic imaginary that no longer
needs to depend on allusions to abstract ideas of
“the state,” “the economy”, or “capitalism” as its
“fiction of the whole”
• The many sites reveal a vivid picture of that
“whole”
• Simon had to quit the business he loved
and turn to television
• Hasn’t fully embraced the form
• Hence the comparison to Greek Tragedy?
John Carroll and Bill Marimow
• From Baltimore Sun (criticized “The Metal
Men—1995”
• Said it was too much like “The Corner” and
that it wasn’t hard enough on the thieves
• Simon believed that newspapers should
adopt a wide sociological approach to the
city’s problems
• His editors thought he should be more
clear and focused on right and wrong
Rifle-Shot Journalism
• One story is small and self-contained
and has good guys and bad guys
• The other is about why we are where
we are
• About who is being left behind
• Harder to report
• Carroll and Marimow saw them as
performing a public service that can’t
reach for the larger ethnographic
complexities
Rifle-Shot vs. Multi-Site
• Rifle shot is like a half hour of episodic
television whose world is necessarily
narrow and whose time is limited to a half
hour or hour
• In contrast, Simon’s reporting presented
an expanded world view
• Transforms a social “type” to a human
being
White Middle Class Editorializing
• In The Corner, his editorializing has an
identity
• In The Wire he shows instead of telling
• (Which is more truthful?)
• In place of the five-paragraph rifle-shot story he
would eventually create a five- season
cumulative serial whose primary outrage-a
futile war on drugs-encompasses myriad others
• Serial melodrama can show us, in a way
sociologists and ethnographers cannot, how
much as Detective Lester Freamon puts it, “all
the pieces matter.”
Serial Drama
• Segmented quality
• Moves from place to place and also creates: Parallels,
Contrasts, and Interruptions
• Must parcel out (often melodramatic) units of information
that grab attention
• Also grabs attention through stories about compelling
characters facing difficult obstacles
Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Progress of white people (those who believe they are white) is
built on violence
• “Government of the people” what has the US considered the
word people to mean?
• Race is the child of racism and not the father—it is not about
genealogy or physiognomy, but about hierarchy
Hegemony
• before white people were white they were Catholic, Corsican,
Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish
American Exceptionalism
• America believes itself exceptional—we should accept
American innocence at face value—
• Coates holds America to that high standard
Destruction of the Black Body
• Coates, speaking to his son, speaks of the vulnerability and
danger
• He doesn’t view police brutality as “a few bad apples,” but
that the police are “Correctly enforcing the whims of our
country”
• Page 10—page 11 the dream
• “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body”
• Vulnerability of the black body is not an accident or a
pathology, it is correct and intended policy of a society
• “the other world was suburban and endless, organized by pot
roasts, blueberry pies, ice cream sundaes, immaculate
bathrooms and small toy trucks”
• “personal responsibility”
Certainty
• Constant questioning, questioning as ritual,
questioning as exploration rather than the
search for certainty
• Current views on implicit bias training is
unnecessary
• “The dream thrives on generalization, on limiting
the number of possible questions, on privileging
immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of
all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing”