Page 205 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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190 Now
pressure, the US media naturally avoided the deeper aspects of the
‘why’ question because the formats it uses are particularly ill-
equipped to deal with it.
A more sustained attempt to answer the question would inevitably
raise the question of the practical causes of the worldwide resent-
ment felt towards the USA and much more practically inconvenient
issues such as the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) large-scale
and well-documented initial funding of both Bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein. These are the type of important political issues that, as we
have seen throughout this book, effectively become non-questions in
a media predicated upon fragmented images and decontextualized
discourse. Thus, in a manner that Bin Laden probably factored into
his calculations, the media turned him into ‘public enemy number
one’ or in terms of this book an anti-celebrity, a move that effectively
insulates him from more nuanced critical analysis. One vivid exam-
ple of the media’s tendency to create an atmosphere of non-neutral
banality that occludes meaningful discourse was provided during the
first weeks of the second Gulf campaign when a large number of
complaints were logged by the US Defence Department’s press
office. These complaints related, not to any substantive issues
relating to the conduct of the war, but instead to the dress-sense and
garish clothes worn by Victoria Clarke, the colour-blind Assistant
10
Secretary of Defence for Public Affairs . In the context of a military
campaign in which civilian deaths are not known to the nearest
hundred thousand, even critical theory appears ill-equipped to tackle
the full banality of Banality TV.

The Gulf conflicts

Žižek (2002) delineates two major post-9/11 options open to
America: ‘it can either further fortify its sphere from which it
watches world tragedies via a TV screen’ or it can ‘finally risk
stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the
Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real World’ (Žižek 2002:
49). The second Gulf conflict can be seen as an acting out of the
former option rather than the latter. Despite heated debates and
huge mass public demonstrations over the two Gulf conflicts, the
biggest shifts in the British and American publics’ perceptions
occurred through a series of vivid, defining images at various crucial
stages. Baudrillard’s analytical approach illustrates the value of
critical media theory’s concepts to understand more fully the
ideological nature of such images. His speculations upon the hyper-
reality of the conflicts usefully explain the actual grounded impact of
the hyper-operationalism of the Allied military techniques. In con-
trast, the purportedly ‘critical’ debates of the mainstream media

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