Assignment 2: Breaking Down CNN's Report on the Lekki Tollgate Shooting: How Different Viewers Understand It

 Breaking Down CNN's Report on the Lekki Tollgate Shooting: How Different Viewers Understand It

 

In recent years, the Lekki tollgate shooting in Nigeria has dominated national and international debate, particularly with widespread media coverage by media outlets like CNN. Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding theory provides a good model for deconstructing how this investigation is covered and interpreted. Hall speculates that media messages are encoded with certain meanings by the producers and can be decoded differently by the audiences. This is based on the cultural and social contexts of the viewers to interpret differently. In the case of CNN's coverage of the Lekki tollgate shooting, the message intended in the video and how different audiences decode it can be understood using Hall's model.

CNN's coverage of the Lekki tollgate was encoded with a specific message to highlight the brutality against peaceful demonstrators during the End SARS demonstrations. The intended intent of such coverage reverts to human rights violations, government accountability, and a call for justice. The video includes eyewitness accounts, gruesome photographs of the shooting, and activist commentary, all of which contribute towards putting the story in a frame of injustice and police brutality. The encoding is a commitment to revealing the events and holding authorities accountable, thereby appealing to a global audience that is concerned about human rights.

However, decoding the video varies significantly among audiences. Nigerian local protesters, for instance, would likely decode the video in a dominant fashion closely corresponding to CNN's intended meaning. For them, the video serves as a verification of what they experienced and suffered, confirming the narrative that their peaceful protests were brutally suppressed. Such decoding can produce solidarity between protesters and sympathizers, viewing international attention on their cause. The access via international media can energize local movements, inspiring protesters to continue fighting for reform.

Conversely, the government of Nigeria can choose to engage in a negotiated decoding of the video. While they are unable to entirely ignore the fact that the events do occur, they could attempt to remove the extremity of the conditions or describe them in such a way as to deflect responsibility from state agents. Political leaders will concede the shooting took place but maintain it was a regrettable consequence of a runaway situation, emphasizing the need for law and order rather than the broader issues of system that led to the protests. This decoding shows an effort at maintaining power and control over the message, exemplifying how the government tries to defuse criticism but still acknowledge the event.

Global publics, and specifically those which are not up to speed on the niceties of Nigerian politics, might decode the video oppositionally. They will be appalled and horrified at the film initially, but their awareness of context will be limited. They will understand the video to indicate a general failure of the Nigerian state, and so read off characteristics of violence and instability in Nigeria as a state. This decoding can actually act to reinforce negative sentiments about the nation, blurring the subtleties of the circumstances and the larger socio-political dynamics at play. In addition, cultural diversity is able to strongly influence the interpretation of the video across different audiences.

For instance, viewers from nations with a deep history of civil rights struggles will be able to relate to the plight of the protestors, decoding the video as a call to action. They will identify with the commonality between what happened at the Lekki tollgate and their own experiences of police violence, and they will feel an international solidarity. But viewers in more oppressive regimes may not be able to identify with the protesters, and may perhaps regard the violence as required in order to maintain order. Hall's theory also suggests the role of power relations in the encoding and decoding process.

The media, as a powerful institution, also carries the task of shaping the perception of the masses. How CNN reports the Lekki tollgate shooting is controlled by its status as an international news network that is bound by the responsibility of reporting breaches of human rights. This power comes with the possibility of biases in coverage where certain stories get highlighted and others relegated to the periphery. For example, the views of local activists could be put at center stage in CNN's reporting, but the complexity of their demands and the background to the protests may not necessarily receive due attention, perhaps creating a misleading account. Finally, the encoding and decoding of CNN's questioning of the Lekki tollgate shooting encapsulate the intricacy of media representation and audience reception.

Although the symbolic value of the video seeks to make concrete human rights abuses and call for responsibility, different groups of audience interpret the message differently based on their political, social, and cultural contexts. The local protesters may share in the hegemonic message, while the Nigerian government can engage in negotiated decoding to minimize allegations. Foreign audiences, however, might get the images in oppositional terms, and that can lead to misinterpretation of the general context. Hall's theory serves to illuminate the intricate dynamics of the communication process and calls for consideration of the importance of understanding how power relations shape encoding of media messages and how they are received by different audiences. This analysis underscores the need for critical media literacy in navigating the representational and interpretive depths of global discourse.

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