People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia

8. The Mediated Rainbow: The American Media Look at the Rainbow Family

All of us at one time or another have read a newspaper story or seen a news broadcast that we know misses the real story. Perhaps we have been present at an event, only to find the next day's news account far removed from our firsthand experience. The more one understands about the world, the more one sees how our news media deliberately or inadvertently fudge the facts and distort key issues. -Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media People learn about the Rainbow Family and vicariously experience the Gatherings through the media. Since most people who read articles, watch television , or listen to radio news reports about the Family never attend a Rainbow Family event or even talk with a Rainbow Family member, their perception of the Family rests on these reports. likewise, their impressions of the Gatherings stem entirely from media reports. Since most Americans are unfamiliar with the existence of the Rainbow Family, it constitutes what the former director of social research for the CBS television network calls a "new issue": The Mediated Rainbow· I 4. Mass communication is extremely effective ... in the creation of opinion on new issues. By "new issues" I mean issues on which the individual has no opinion and on which his friends and fellow group members have no opinion. The reason for the effectiveness of mass communications in creating opinions on new issues is pretty obvious: The individual has no predisposition to defend, and so the communication falls, as it were, on defenseless soil. And once the opinion is created, then it is this new opinion which becomes easy to reinforce and hard to change. This process of opinion creation is strongest, by the way, when the person has no other source of information on the topic to use as atouchstone. (Schiller 1973, 166-67) Media descriptions of the Rainbow Family are therefore potent. They take root as uncontested fact in the minds of media consumers unfamiliar with the Family. Since negative press reports fall on such "defenseless soil," the way local media present the Family before a Gathering is crucial for community relations. When Rainbow Family members appear in a community where the press has portrayed them negatively, they face the difficult task of trying to change public opinion. Positive press reports in local papers, on the other hand, pave the way for a smooth reception. The most common device used for creating a negative press portrayal of the Rainbow Family is biased language. A media critic points out: "It is the choice of just the right adjective or verb to sum up a situation that evokes from the receiver the response the communicator feels should be adopted toward a story. ... The word and the situation it describes become almost inseparable, so that the use of the word triggers a standardized response in the receiver. ... Language patterns stereotype both the situation and the person they are applied to" (O'Hara 1961, 229-40). It is easy to see how the language journalists choose to describe the Family may emit subtle negative signals. The media tend to anachronize the Rainbow Family (and the environmental and antimilitarist movements of the I990s) as remnants of the I960s (Aslam 1990, 24; Hagar 1990, 34). S.uck jn .he I•••s The twenty-four stories (twenty-two about Rainbow Gatherings, and two about a mother who killed her teenage son to keep him from associating with the Rainbow Family)I sent out over the United Press International (UPI) wires in the midto late I980s, without exception, are full of I960s references. In the lead sentences of all the stories, the most common descriptives of Rainbow Family members were "aging hippies" (four articles) or "middle-aged hippies" (four articles). The next-most- I SO • The Mediated Rainbow popular descriptive (three articles) was "1960s style hippies." This bloated descriptive serves to remind readers that "hippies" and thus, Rainbows, are anachronisms. The descriptive term "hippies" stood alone in two lead sentences, making itthe fourthmost -popular descriptive. "Erstwhile hippies," "neo-hippies," and "hippie like folk" each appeared once, characterizing the diverse Rainbow Family as well as the phrase "middle-aged white folks" describes the population of the United States. These descriptives link the Rainbow Family to a bygone era, signaling to the reader that Rainbows are not to be taken seriously in the contemporary world. Likewise, readers need...