Page 206 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 191
during the first Gulf conflict centred upon questions related to the
media themselves such as the limited access to the war action
provided by the US military’s pool system and the alleged censorship
of journalists. Much bigger questions were left unasked such as the
reasons why images of oil-polluted birds were given equal (if not
greater) billing on Western television screens to pictures of dead
Iraqi soldiers and the fact that in 1998 CNN was advertising for the
next expected war as if part of its next season’s television schedules
(Merrin 2005: 91).
In the face of this mainstream media prudishness about asking
questions that fundamentally interrogate the tele-frame, Baudrillard’s
critical media theory doggedly describes the profound social harm
caused by the disintegration of the symbolic and its systematic
replacement with its etiolated semiotic substitute – the sign.In
keeping with this book’s account of the culture industry and Ratio
from then, he poignantly describes how unpredictable social proc-
esses have now become supplanted by pre-encoded, predictable
models for both actual military engagement and its reception on the
screens back home. At a macro-level, the historical unpredictability
of war is replaced by a result we know in advance due to massive
inequalities in technological weaponry, and at a micro-level, confron-
tation with the enemy takes place in a form that is so heavily
mediated that it produced ‘the most horrifying [non-]images of
unilaterality as, over seventy miles of trenches, front-line Iraqi
soldiers were bulldozed and buried alive. Already dead in advance
before the American forces they were not worth engaging, only
burying’ (Merrin 2005: 88). In terms of the media’s reporting of the
conflicts, the decontextualized/depersonalized portrayal of Iraqis
through night-vision missile guidance sights and the additional
mediation of these images through the formulaic segments of prime
time news programmes provide a particularly tragic illustration of
Benjamin’s previously cited criticism of the Futurists’ perverse enjoy-
ment of war and the notion that ‘mankind could become an object
of contemplation for itself’ (Essay: Epilogue). Particularly in media
coverage of the first Gulf conflict, death of fellow human beings was
reduced to a digitally neon version of Candid Camera so that: ‘In
[this] hyperrealization of experience and simultaneous distancing
from the symbolic reality of its effects, nowhere does Baudrillard’s
comment, the more closely the real is pursued “the greater does the
real absence from the world grow” find more horrific support’
(Merrin 2005: 92).
Undue optimism was at its media-sponsored peak during the fall
of Baghdad and the Ozymandias-like toppling of Saddam Hussein’s
statue. This incident contained a forewarning of the cultural misun-
derstandings to come when a US soldier momentarily draped the

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