Page 208 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 193
Ms England’s mother, Terrie, told the Baltimore Sun newspa-
per: ‘It’s all over the news, but we’re not hearing anything new.
They just keep showing the pictures. How many times do I have
to see those pictures?’ … ‘Just like what happened with that
Lynch girl, this is getting blown out of proportion,’ Ms Eng-
land’s father said. ‘But in a negative way rather than a positive
way’.
(Buncombe 2004: n.p.)

The invasive reach of Hollywood and the culture industry’s influence
into the previous sober discourse of non-entertainment was further
exemplified by the domination of the front pages and morning news
bulletins of the US media on 2 April 2003 by the story of a daring
rescue by US soldiers of an injured 19-year-old female colleague that
was filmed at the army’s invitation. It was presented by one
anchorman with the words ‘It’s just like a movie but it happened in
real life’ and covered throughout the media with the tag line: Saving
Private Lynch. The ‘rescue’ of Private Lynch, was presented by US
television channels in explicitly Hollywood terms and just like Saving
Private Ryan it promoted profoundly misleading impressions. 11
The media-constructed Saving Private Lynch centred upon a feel-
good message that continued to follow the tele-frame of pseudo-events
with further mediation that included a televised press conference for
Private Lynch’s subsequent home-coming. This emo-based reporting
unsurprisingly failed to discuss various aspects of her rescue that had
initially given her the status of a heroine and were subsequently
found to be false. Excluded facts included: Iraqi doctors had
unsuccessfully attempted to return her to US troops who had turned
them back with gun fire; her injuries stemmed from a traffic
accident rather than actual combat; and, perhaps most disturbingly,
there were no enemy troops near her at the time of her ‘rescue’ –
US troops were aware of this and acted out a camera-friendly
‘daring’ rescue operation for the cameras and reporters that accom-
panied them (Potter 2003). By the time a discourse of sober analysis
could be applied, the emotive, affective associations to be made
between one soldier’s fate and a Hollywood blockbuster had already
12
achieved their substantial ideological effects . To this extent, critical
accounts of the media tend to operate under conditions of ‘catch-
up’ – critical voices do arise (including those of Private Lynch
herself [see Helmore 2003]), but they are innately ill-suited to match
the much more shallow but much speedier nature of the uncritical
commentary that tends to substitute banal real-time descriptions for
more considered conceptual analysis.

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