The media practice of ignoring, trivializing and demeaning farmed animals is a strategy that is characterized by the phrase 'Dominance Through Mentioning'. In it, disturbing truths and unorthodox viewpoints are 'mentioned' so that the press can claim 'balanced' coverage, without having to disturb the dominant worldview.
KAREN DAVIS: The media practice of ignoring, trivializing and demeaning farmed animals is a strategy that is well characterized by the phrase “Dominance Through Mentioning.” In Dominance Through Mentioning, disturbing truths and unorthodox viewpoints are “mentioned” so that the press can claim “balanced” coverage, without having to disturb the dominant worldview. In particular, Dominance Through Mentioning is the attitude of the coverage toward the information presented that constitutes the “dominance”…
The strategy of Dominance Through Mentioning appeared in Canadian filmmaker John Kastner’s documentary Chickens are People Too, which aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s weekly television show Witness on November 14, 2000. Kastner and his crew spent three days filming our chicken sanctuary here in Virginia, for the purpose of creating what Kastner called a “dialogue” between our perspective and sanctuary versus the point of view and violence of the poultry and egg industries. Hatchery operators, chicken farmers and chicken catchers freely acknowledge in the film their lack of compassion for the chickens.
Despite scenes of horrific cruelty to the chickens along with images of the chickens in our sanctuary, Kastner manipulated the “dialogue” by gorging on eggs and chicken parts in almost every scene. The show ends with him sitting in a tree with a bucket of fried chicken, listening in his head to our slogan, “Don’t just switch from beef to chicken – get the slaughterhouse out of your kitchen.” The shape of the show circles back to the beginning without any notable change of attitude or behavior in the investigator. His mockery dominates and surrounds the “mentioning” of the chickens.
In a review of Chickens are People Too, television critic Tony Atherton mimicked Kastner’s mocking tone. Kastner, he joked, “forces inveterate chicken eaters, like himself, to at least consider the sad life history of Sunday dinner before tucking in”…
In 2007, 2015, and 2022-2023, articles about the avian influenza epidemic have ignored or totally underplayed the torture of millions of birds by the poultry and egg industries, focusing instead on the “suffering” of consumers deprived of the usual abundance of cheap eggs. Birds being agonized to death by agribusiness killing crews are falsely said to be “euthanized”…
Thus are the victims “mentioned” (“A hen’s egg production”) in a dominant narrative by corporate media siding with agribusiness to ensure public ignorance and apathy toward the brutal massacres, while hyping consumer distress over egg shortages. In 2015, chickens sickened by avian influenza were called by The New York Times the “live inventory”:” Farmers, we were told, were “forced to euthanize their own live inventory.”
Animal advocates are understandably happy when a Letter to the Editor or an Op-Ed focuses attention on the animals themselves, particularly in The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal. While we are thankful for these additions and challenges to the dominant narrative, in terms of both information and attitude, we must understand that they are “mentionings” – inserted into coverage that overwhelmingly ignores and trivializes the animals and their experience. SOURCE…
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