Page 108 - Culture Society and the Media

98 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
Thus the image in our film of a soldier clipping a magazine on to his rifle
as he peers from his sandbagged bunker fortress in Belfast can activate the
myth by which we currently ‘understand’ the army. This myth, as we shall
show, is that the army consists of ordinary men, doing a professional and
highly technological job. In order to trigger this myth the sign must be
robbed of its specific signified, in this case, perhaps, of ‘Private J.Smith,
14.00 hours, January 4th 1976’. The sign loses this specificity and
becomes now the second-order signifier; so the signified becomes oneof-
our-lads-professional-well-equipped (not Private J.Smith) and the sign in
this second order activates or triggers our mental ‘myth chain’ by which
we apprehend the reality of the British soldier/army in Northern Ireland.
(Fiske and Hartley, 1978, p. 42)

However, Fiske and Hartley move quickly from this to suggest both that myth
meets our cultural needs and that those ‘needs require the myth to relate
accurately to reality out there’.
Indeed, Fiske and Hartley go on to argue that their Belfast news film is part of
a general process whereby television tests myths against reality and upon
apprehending inaccuracy, initiates change.

Our news film from Belfast provides us with a particularly clear example of
the way television can hint at the inadequacy of our present myths and thus
contribute to their development. The sequence of army shots is followed
immediately by a sequence showing the funerals of some of the victims of
the violence. The last shot of the army sequence is of an armoured troop
carrier moving right to left across the screen. There is then a cut to a coffin
of a victim being carried right to left at much the same pace and in the
same position on the screen. The visual similarity of the two signifiers
brings their meanings into close association. The coffin contains the death
that should have been presented by the soldiers in the troop carrier. Thus
the myth of the army that underlies the whole army sequence has been
negated by television’s characteristic of quick-cutting from one vivid scene
to another. (Fiske and Hartley, 1978, p. 44.)

There are a number of problems with this reading. Although the basic claim that
Fiske and Hartley make (that television news is critical of institutions) is not
implausible, the reading that supports it is. Buscome calls it ‘nothing more than a
piece of free association’, pointing out that in order for the two shots of the army
and coffin to have the meaning claimed, it would be necessary to show that it is a
general rule of television news-editing that two subjects moving in the same
direction across the screen will be read as ‘linked’ by more than space and time,
or alternatively that the interpretation offered of the inter-cutting is in some way
marked in the text, if for example, the second track said something like ‘Where
the army goes, death is not far behind’ (Buscombe, 1979, p. 88). Basically