Page 178 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 163
exotic into daily life rather than searching for the exotic within the
quotidian’ (Kracauer 1995: 311). Reality TV, despite appearing as a
naturalistic guise that does not have a meta-narrative, performs its
important ideological role by taming the potentially transgressive.
The fact that cop shows are so popular in the Reality TV format is
perhaps reflective of its own role as a policing element in culture. It
creates: ‘This meta-story, the ideological reduction [that] makes the
strange banal ’ (Nichols 1994: 46; emphasis added).
According to Nichols, the central element of documentary televi-
sion missing in Reality TV is ‘Adherence to the principles of rhetoric
that govern the discourses of sobriety’ (Nichols 1994: 47; emphasis
added). The phrase discourses of sobriety refers to the attempt to
understand the world using factual/political resources rather than
focusing upon trivial and banal constructs. We will see in the next
chapter’s examination of the Other News, and its recourse to the
trivial, its conflation of current affairs with celebrity affairs and so
on, that such a rational principle of rhetoric is regularly undermined
in mainstream media coverage. Nichols argues that particularly
striking images can momentarily exceed the enframing power of the
tele-frame by managing to assume a metonymic function – even if
only momentarily, an image can achieve a wider political significance
over and above its nominal content. For example, he uses the case
of Rodney King as an example of how his infamous beating by LAPD
police, fortuitously filmed by a member of the public, could not be
contained by the conventional bromides of the media. It acted as a
catalyst for widespread rioting in Los Angeles because it represented
a focal point for all those other unrecorded incidents of police
brutality disproportionately suffered by black people in the USA.
In the following chapter we discuss the extent to which similar
metonymic excess was found in the Abu Ghraib pictures, represent-
ing as they do for many people in the Islamic world an unusually
explicit (in all senses of the word) view of the insouciance of
American power. Unfortunately, however, the shock effect of images
from events such as Abu Ghraib and the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina is often temporary. The ability to exceed the normal
powerful media frame is the exception not the norm. Periodic
exceedings of the tele-frame have radical political potential but that
potential is vulnerable to subsequent pacification. For example, the
immediate post-hurricane devastation in New Orleans clearly demon-
strated the race-based socio-economic inequality of life in contempo-
rary America, but the ultimate political fallout was relatively slight.
Nichols demonstrated the predictive power of critical theory by
rhetorically asking, well before the Hurricane Katrina tragedy: ‘Has
the shape of public response, including our own outrage, followed
the contours that transformative social praxis requires, or does it

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