Page 207 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Stars and Stripes around the statue’s face. Merrin’s interpretation of
the incident is a good example of the manner with which critical
media theory like Baudrillard’s extends Debord’s pseudo-event to
reach the parts of the mediascape other theories simply cannot:
With Saddam’s disappearance, all that was left was a non-event
produced and framed for our consumption as the definitive
and predictable sign of the regime’s end. The self-liberation of
the Iraqis could not be accomplished: when it became clear
that they could not quickly pull the statue down the American
military stepped in to finish the job. The Iraqis did not
understand the primacy of the western audience, the time
constraints even of rolling news, and the networks’ fear of a
drifting audience and their need to deliver that ‘Kennedy’
moment (‘where were you?’ … ‘watching television’). So the
Iraqis were excluded from this act, in an implosion of media
and military with the event that neutralized and short-circuited
the people’s efforts, replacing them with that demanded,
semiotic image of the statue’s fall. Believing that they were the
centre and meaning of the act, the Iraqis did not see that they
were only the extras, providing local colour and a guarantee of
authenticity and legitimacy for the western audience for whom
the event really occurred.
(Merrin 2005: 109)

Such examples, forcefully communicate the misleading significance
afforded to individual images and events by the media and the
profound consequences this has had upon political discourse in the
West’s discourses of sobriety.

Punishing Lynndie England and Saving Private Lynch

Lynndie England was the US army reservist who gained worldwide
notoriety with the publication of various photographs from Abu
Ghraib showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, one of which infa-
mously showed her holding a dog leash around an inmate’s neck.
Coincidentally, Ms England came from the same US State, West
Virginia, as another famous female US soldier, Jessica Lynch. Both
women vividly illustrate the flip-sides of the same rhetorical coin –
excessively mediated representations. In the visually metonymic
codes of the tele-frame, one provided shorthand for US heroism and
one for its brutality. Lynndie England’s parents experienced at first
hand the image-led nature of the media’s account of the conflict as
a whole and the consistency with which images are processed within
the tele-frame whether good or bad:

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