Page 194 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 179
image-idea does indeed seem to have driven out the idea to the
point that the US and UK governments feel able to declare war
upon an abstract noun (terror). Despite being societies of the
spectacle, Western governments have nevertheless struggled to com-
pete with the Other’s political use of the image. This ranges from
the malevolent media savvy of Osama bin Laden’s made-for-media
attack of 9/11, to the pseudo-event staged for the world’s cameras of
April 2007 in which the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
voluntarily released 15 captured British sailors while images from
Guantanomo Bay continue to poison relations with the Islamic
world. In this chapter we see that profound and generally under-
acknowledged political consequences result when the obscene
becomes the mis-en-scène and a critical perspective is lost.

Television’s other news

the other news offers modes of explanation and sense-making
which displace and mask the social, political and historical
context in which events occur and can be made to mean. The
personal and the impersonal become ‘naturalized’ forms of
expression and intelligibility within a news discourse which
deflects attention from what is perhaps a more crucial factor in
explaining the conditions of mastery and its nemesis – the
structures of domination and subordination.
(Langer 1998: 150; emphasis added)
What is important is the surge and volume of emotion, not its
object or its subject, and it doesn’t matter whether the twenty-
four-hour parade of sensational effect goes nowhere except
around in circles, or who sings the undying songs of love, or
whether the revelation of divine celebrity takes the form of
Madonna, next week’s serial killer, or the president of the
United States.
(Lapham 2001: ix)
A major strength of critical media theory is its ability to undermine
conventional accounts with what Žižek refers to as The Parallax View
(2006). In addition to the conventionally recognized barriers to
democratic expression that exist within the mediascape, critical
theory enables us to see that at a deep-rooted, structural level, it is
characterized by explicitness without understanding – the alignment of
commodity values and media technologies allows the medium to
dominate the message. The Other News provides an extremely useful
example of this ideological role played by the media. It expands
upon our previous analysis of celebrity and Banality TV to show how
their combined effects are felt in the steady diminishment of

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