The Cowboy and the Goddess: Television News Mythmaking about Immigrants
Prof. Otto Santa Ana (University of California Los Angeles - UCLA)
University of Antwerp, City Campus
Wed. 11 May 2016, 12.30pm, B.003
The lecture presents an empirical examination of contemporary US network television news stories about immigrants that is informed by myth and film genre scholarship. A review of a full year of network news programs – ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN evening news reporting about unauthorized immigrants crossing the US border – determined that two age-old story-types constituted the base narrative of all the news reports regarding immigrant voyages and apprehensions. One ancient story-type, currently manifested as the American Western, occurs when the news story protagonist border patrol agent portrays the American cowboy archetype. A US foundational myth is based on this story-type. The second story-type derives from a journey myth of Inanna, a Sumerian goddess. These two millennia-old story-types accounted for all the network evening news stories immigrant reports. Western news stories rearticulate nationalism, while the Inanna news story contests the nation’s foundational myth. Thus, on this topic, journalists write about immigration to entertain and indoctrinate, as much as to edify. At the same time, US news viewers are entertained by epic narrative myths – as much as they are edified – are set to consume television news stories in which they recognize the characters and resolutions of stories that reaffirm cultural values.
Biography Prof. Otto Santa Ana
Otto Santa Ana (PhD University of Pennsylvania; M.A. & B.A. University of Arizona) is currently Professor at the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). His scholarship over the past 15 years focuses on language that constructs social hierarchies and on how mass media amplifies the construction of unjust social inequity. He is widely recognized for his contribution to the research on mass media representations of Latinos in the US context. His book Brown Tide Rising (University of Texas Press, 2002), focusing on newspaper analysis, was named The American Political Science Association Book of the Year on Ethnic and Racial Political Ideology. His more recent and widely acclaimed book-length works include Juan in a Hundred: The Representation of Latinos on Network News (University of Texas Press, 2013) as well as Arizona Firestorm: Global Immigration Realities, National Media, and Provincial Politics (Coedited with Celeste González de Bustamante, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).