Page 201 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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186 Now
this ‘depoliticized valorisation of the “everyday” ’ smoothly comple-
ments the pervasive predigested banality of everyday life presented
in more overtly entertainment-orientated forms of television.
An eagerness to defend the way in which the television news
‘shows it the way it is’ misses the value-laden structure that in fact
underlies such a seemingly self-evident natural form. For example,
news reporting of the 2007 Israeli military operation in Southern
Lebanon illustrates the only superficially neutral nature of this
mediated process:
On the front page of another issue of the [New York] Times was
the stock tragic Arab refugee shot of a distraught Lebanese
woman in an abaya holding a terrified child. I tell you what the
Times is not going to run. They’re not going to run a big
colour photo above the fold on the front page of a pretty,
light-skinned young Lebanese woman in Prada shoes, Diesel
jeans and a Dolce & Gabbana blouse with an arm blown off or
half her face missing. The media have been selling this war like
a sporting event: ‘Hizbullah fire 105 rockets into Haifa and
northern Israel, killing four and wounding 18, while the Israelis
struck Sidon and Tyre, launching 48 bombing sorties against
suspected Hizbullah positions with “some reports of civilian
casualities”.’ The audience becomes addicted to narratives,
digestible narratives. No news organisation is going to meet its
quarterly market projections by shoving political and moral
6
quandaries down the throats of its audiences .
This reliance upon images that speak for themselves, combined with
circulation-driven sensitivity to market share, exhibits the same basic
qualities as celebrity production. Boorstin’s above conflation of the
newsmaker with the advertiser indicates points to a cultural align-
ment of commercial and technological grammars. The combined
effect of these quantitative and qualitative effects produces a media-
facilitated form of cultural extinction: public discourse is irreparably
colonized by the values of appearance rather than substance –
Debord’s notion that the dominant capitalist social value has
changed from one of ‘having’ into one of ‘appearing’. Above, both
Boorstin and Lapham highlight a deeply disturbing process whereby
the reporting of non-commodified, unemotive or non-pseudo-events
become, to paraphrase Benjamin, as rare as an orchid in the land of
a mediascape that is self-referential but not self-reflexive. Images and
formulas cross-reference each other only in a repetitive, unquestion-
ing mode of circulation. Critical self-awareness in the media becomes
subordinate to the way in which it prefers: ‘to spectacularize the
symptoms of crisis and commentary, rather than risk the possibility
of indicting themselves as contributing culprits’ (Goldman and
Papson 1998: 10). On rare, particularly traumatic occasions as

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