Page 202 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 187
Nichols previously pointed out, this unreflexive self-referential insu-
larity of the media may be temporarily exposed. One stark example
was provided by the contrast in the levels of coverage devoted to the
death of Princess Diana and the amount of analysis of the media’s
own crucial contributory role in that death.
Visuality’s influence over rational discourse is consistently reflected
in more subtle but cumulatively important ways at the highest levels
of US political life. The Congressional 9/11 Commission suggested
that President Bush’s failure to read his President’s Daily Briefing
documents may have contributed to the failure to prevent the
tragedy. President Bush’s apparent lack of comfort with the written
word provides a useful trope for the wider audience of television
7
news . As Sidney Blumenthal, the journalist and former senior
adviser to Bill Clinton, recounts:
Bush … does not read his President’s Daily Briefs, but has them
orally summarised every morning by the CIA director … ‘I
know he doesn’t read,’ one former Bush national security
council staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers
corroborated this. It seems highly unlikely that he read the
national intelligence estimate on WMD before the Iraq war that
consigned contrary evidence that undermined the case to
footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence that he read
the State Department’s 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq,
warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls.
(Blumenthal 2004: n.p.)
Without wishing to succumb to the media’s tendency to personalize
issues (which was criticized in the previous examination of celebrity),
the dire consequences that resulted from President Bush’s lack of
attention to written accounts in both the case of 9/11 and the
subsequent second Gulf campaign highlight in dramatic form the
risks that accompany the mass media’s deconceptualization of the
public sphere. President Bush’s failure to read the relevant pre-Gulf
conflict reports encapsulates in microcosm our wider society’s failure
to read complex political situations properly. Discourses of sobriety
make way for an over-dependence upon the image with profoundly
negative geopolitical implications.

Geo-politics and the death of sober discourse
Of all nations in the world, the United States was built in
nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of
unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfec-
tion. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves
in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we

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