Page 307 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Nat onal sm and the Med a

of national identity construction, the media offers us images that include and
exclude. In particular, film and television narratives have notoriously depicted
citizens of other countries and races in demeaning and inferior ways, allowing
us to feel nobler by comparison. Films such as Black Hawk Down, for example,
perpetuate centuries-old racist depictions of Africans as savages; whereas depic-
tions of Britons in film and television frequently posit them as uptight, humor-
less, class-obsessed snobs. In general, one often finds foreign women depicted in
wholly sexual terms, as if the world existed for American male sexual conquest;
while foreign males are either comically inept and effeminate fops, or overly
aggressive and predatory. Such types allow the American characters in a film to
retain the role of sympathetic hero, and allow the audience to feel assured in the
righteousness of their national identity, but in the process they create wholly er-
roneous and offensive depictions of foreigners.
Many such images and types then spill over from the realms of fiction into jour-
nalistic reporting, which can tend to rely upon age-old racist and nationally chau-
vinist depictions in telling the supposed truth of the world’s events. We see foreign
nations most often in the news when they are struck by war, famine, or disease.
Similarly, such types are rife in the tourist industry, as nations and national identi-
ties are branded for marketing purposes, creating, for instance, the “spiritual” East
Asian, or notions of “wild” Africa. With today’s globalized media system, Ameri-
can images of foreigners are traveling overseas with ease, and thus risk threatening
international relations when foreigners are faced with demeaning images of them-
selves in media as diverse as blockbusters, magazine ads, and cable news.
Furthermore, however, such images create considerable problems for national
identity back home in America too. With each demeaning image of a foreigner,
immigrants or those of the same racial background as the imagined foreigner
are then faced with the task of overcoming the image. When many media texts
so gleefully depict Arabs as insane, wife-beating terrorists, for instance, Arab
Americans face considerable prejudice that effectively excludes them from feel-
ing welcomed into the American national identity. Thus, while media images

early landMarks in nationalistiC Media
1925—Sergei Eisenstein directs the Soviet revolutionary film, Battleship Potemkin.
1933—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt begins delivering his radio “fireside chats.”
1935—Leni Riefenstahl directs a Nazi propaganda film of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies,
Triumph of the Will.
1940—Winston Churchill addresses England with his famous, “We shall fight them on the
beaches” speech.
1953—The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) offers extensive coverage of the coro-
nation of Queen Elizabeth II.
1964—Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, or the “Little Red Book,” is released in
the People’s Republic of China. Over 900 million copies are believed to have been
published and circulated.