Page 195 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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180 Now
reason-based public discourse. Langer (1998) defines television’s
Other News as news content that does not fit Nichols’s previously
discussed sober discourses of politics, economics, foreign affairs and
other important social issues: ‘the news story and the advertisement
are collapsed together through a language mobilized from bill-
boards, newspaper entertainment pages, fan magazines and televi-
sion commercials. Hyperbole and exuberance are the keynotes’
(Langer 1998: 57). Resistance to this situation by those within the
media itself is the exception that proves the rule .
1
The previous analysis of the culture industry thesis demonstrated
how systematic processes and effects form a rationalized (in terms of
pure consumptive efficiency) kernel to our otherwise largely irra-
tional and emotive consumption of commodities. Similarly, in the
developed culture industry of the contemporary mediascape, politics
assumes a new hue akin to the previously encounted emo.Ina
media-sponsored abandonment of sober discourses, debate contain-
ing conceptual depth is now systematically replaced by a complex
amalgamation of more innately superficial, surface-level modes of
discourse based upon personality, celebrity, the spectacle, pseudo-
events, and so on. This means that in the place of traditional
categories of discriminating thought and reason, the mediated
public sphere is now dominated by amorphous and intangible
associations. The mere fact that images are presented of a person or
an event now provides a new form of de-symbolized aura in which
tautological justification (for example, celebrities/brands are well
known/recognizable because they are well known/recognizable) is
largely immune to critical evaluation by media commentators and
cultural populists subscribing to the values of that tautological
environment.
The rise of the Other News and a general cultural environment of
the obscene has its roots in Kracauer’s identification of contingency as
a dominant value within the mass ornament and is a key factor in
the betrayal of Benjamin’s early optimistic hopes for distraction.
According to Langer, the Other News helps to create a ‘regulated
latitude of ideological positions’ (Langer 1998: 51). Any potential for
the creation of a system more open to radical and less predictably
structured meaning is undermined by the way in which the existing
dominant and subordinate meaning systems are reinforced by the
seeming naturalness of the tele-frame and its circumscribing effect. A
new false consciousness for the media age is created in two main
forms:

1 The masses are presented with an elitist celebrity order to which
they can both aspire and defer in a predominantly passive mode.

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