How Media Demagogued Virginia Parent Protests in 2021

Part 2 - Media's Terministic Screens

Recall in Part 1 of this media case study, I showed how 40 articles presented ideological versions of reality, of parents protesting in Loudoun County, Virginia. Textual patterns (like word instances and quotation ratios) emerged among the 8 Left articles showing parents as an out-group to be ignored while 8 Right articles depicted parents as an in-group to be defended. The Left also identified teachers, administrators, and Critical Race Theory as in-group while the Right slightly identified administrators as the out-group. These are not definitive conclusions to generalize all Left or Right media in all circumstances, simply results based on assessing articles written about this 2021 rhetorical situation.

I can also highlight demagogic patterns in media through a powerful rhetorical device for detecting framing known as terministic screens.

In Language as a Symbolic Action (1966), rhetorician Kenneth Burke argues that any discourse, any story, description, or web of terms (“woman,” “suburban,” “white,” etc.) must act as a terministic screen–that it frames an issue to reveal parts of it while necessarily concealing other parts of it (D’Angelo et al. 2009; Kuypers 2002, 2013). In terms of digital news, any article’s news lede constitutes a screen of literally written terms that draw our attention. Burke notes there is a dual nature to these screens: they are both a surface upon which our perceptions and images can be projected and also objects that block our view of all contributing elements. Like a coin, both of these aspects come into play as we view one side of the coin while this first side blocks our view of the ‘back’ side. As a result, the issue framed by a set of terms is inevitably changed:

Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function as a deflection of reality. (45)

For example, in quoting 45 political and school officials and only 1 parent, the Left selects a version of the Loudoun County school issue that emphasizes Critical Race Theory and the perspective of officials while decidedly deflecting or erasing the perspective of parents. Conversely, the Lean Left, Lean Right, and Right cover both parents and officials at more balanced ratios.

The same principle holds true for each of the 5 ideological columns because which words each chooses will never fully encapsulate everything that the reality is and can be. That’s the selection aspect. The deflection aspect is also important to note, because while our own brains tempt us to think we’re being shown all there is, what limited amount we see distracts us from the rest. These language-induced expectations in turn limit what we allow ourselves to know about the issue, in Wittgenstein’s terms:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world¹

I believe our bodies (eyes, ears, etc.) mediate reality and knowledge as does language. However, his point that language shapes what we can see and know at any given moment about lived experiences is well taken: look at Twitter/X and cancel culture. Each ideological view of the 2021 parent protests demonstrates how the media limit what we can know about the event.

Although I know the world exists independent of the words I use to describe it, my body being the primary mediating material through which I accomplish that, Burke’s rhetorical terministic screen powerfully demonstrates the Wittgensteinian limits of language to portray reality and experience.

That’s because - first off - news sources, no matter the ideology, optimize their publication space and thus can only tell so much of an event. Second, mix in the selective and deflective limits of language, and it’s a recipe for incompleteness and misunderstanding. Third, add in our natural acceptance of certain news sources as authoritative because they confirm our biases (they wouldn’t lie to me!), and our subjective perceptions/biases are confirmed via naïve realism as naturalized given truths. And, fouth, if an outlet or ideology does not perspective-shift, then it can easily universalize their limited perceptions, believing they falsely have a direct untarnished perception of the world. And hence demagoguery. And this is so easy because, as Burke observes, no outlet or ideology escapes the selective/deflective conditioning of terministic screens:

We must use terministic screens, since we can’t say anything without the use of terms (50).

And in the disembodied textual world of news articles, terministic screens represent the precise limits of saying and knowing anything about the world beyond our embodied, lived realities. Ok, enough theory, let me show you the linguistics limits each ideology imposed on its readers in 2021.

The Limits of Each Ideological Terministic Screen

Let’s look at how each ideological terministic screen distributes 4 demagogic terms from Part 1 relative to each other: parents, conservative, Republican, and CRT/Critical Race Theory. We can combine several other terms to see distinct distributions, yet I chose these 4 terms to further illustrate how these 8 Left articles presented their demagogic speech to readers.

What I would read of the protests if I only read Left outlets:

I am 6 times more likely to read the terms CRT and Critical Race Theory than parent and 3 times more likely to read political terms like conservative and Republican than parent. Combined with the fact that the Left quotes 45 officials and only 1 parent, clearly officials are selected while parents are deflected here.

What I would read of the protests if I only read Lean Left outlets:

Here you would read parent much more often than CRT/Critical Race Theory while the share of political terminology (28%) remains equal to the Left (30%). Result: much higher selection of parents and CRT focus cut in half from Left.

What I would read of the protests if I only read Center outlets:

Here, political word selection is mildly toned down from Left and Lean Left while CRT and parent receive a mild boost of 3-4 points in their respective share of the terministic screen than Lean Left.

What I would read of the protests if I only read Lean Right outlets:

Here, focus on CRT increases significantly from Lean Left and Center while maintaining focus on parents yet halving political terminology. If one’s ideology is difficult to identify, then is it ideological for Lean Right to barely mention the terms which they use to identify themselves? In other words, is it then demagogic of the Left to inordinately use political terms to politically/ideologically identify those who it thinks responsible for the protests (political activists)? Is the Left leading with a binary paired term about who is really fomenting the parent protests?

What I would read of the protests if I only read Right outlets:

This Right terministic screen presents nearly identical percentages with the Left outlets yet with stark term distribution contrast: Right gives 65% focus on parents whereas Left allocates 60% focus on CRT; Right gives 24% focus to CRT yet Left gives 30% focus to political terms; and Right gives 11% focus to political terms and Left gives 10% to parents. This means the Left distributes 90% of these terms to CRT and political words whereas the Right distributes 89% to parents and CRT. The Right mentions CRT the least of all 5 ideological columns yet mentions parents the most by 20 percentage points from the nearest ideology (Center) and 6.5 times higher than the least mentioning ideology (Left at 10%).

What this means is the Left articles spent their publication space barely discussing parents who are the very actors that generated the protest phenomenon in the first place in 2019 and 2020 before the governor’s race drew national political and media attention to it in 2021. One aspect to mention is that the Left seems to attempt to counter right-wing Fox News representation of CRT and Critical Race Theory and conservatives like Christopher Rufo, Asra Nomani, and Ian Prior. Being oriented toward countering what it perceives as CRT misinformation from its Right may justifiably account for why the Left and Lean Left word distributions and instances so heavily select CRT, ideological descriptors, and officials yet deflect parents. Understandable to a degree. Regardless of whether parents organically began the protests or political stunts began it, the Left presents it one way while other outlets present it differently by quoting parents and mentioning parents more. One could say these 8 Left articles just ignored parents and their concerns to focus on relevant contextual details. Yet the story that all 40 articles reported is about the Loudoun County parents and their protesting. Without them, there is no story.

In Burke’s terms, the Left overwhelmingly selects officials and abstract theory and deflects parents. On the other hand, the Right overwhelmingly selects parents and deflects ideological and political descriptors like conservative and Republican. The Right’s relative omission of these political terms perhaps reflects a right-wing ideology that identifies protestors views’ as its own and as authentic nonpolitical concerns to be described in fuller exposure. Sharing the views as the parents, identifying them as conservatives is redundant. Therefore, they can describe parents in many other terms. Is the Right perhaps demagoguing here? I believe so. In other words, we can see the media demagogue this issue because of the differing terministic screens they employ: the Left sees the officials and theory as their own while the Right sees parents as their own.

Terministic Screens and Correlation to National Trends

This corresponds to major demographic shifts in the national parties: Democrats shifting away from working class to elite concerns whereas Republicans in the last decade have garnered increased working-class vote share. In his April 2022 Substack post, How to Fix the Democratic Brand, American political scientist and liberal, Ruy Teixeira, elaborated the point:

[The Democratic Party] is now thoroughly out of touch with its working class roots and completely dominated by college-educated professionals, typically in big metropolitan areas and university towns and typically younger. These are the people that fill the ranks of media, nonprofits, foundations, and the infrastructure of the Democratic party. They speak their own language and highlight the issues that most animate their commitments to ‘social justice’ (my emphasis).

This case study shows how much the Left, occupied by journalists who have overwhelmingly been educated within CRT and antiracist-friendly liberal and progressive programs over the last 2 decades, would likely focus on CRT and more likely identify with it to explain and defend it as their own worldview rather than focus on parent voices and concerns. The demagogic Us/Them thinking appears in their fixation on CRT/Critical Race Theory and deflection of parents.

Via a simple text-mining analysis thru demagoguery and terministic screens, we can more completely account for which version of reality we consume when we read news. Remember terministic screens when you read the news today.

1. "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logigo-philosphicus, 1922. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. | Smithsonian American Art Museum (si.edu)