Showing papers by "Andrew Hoskins published in 2007"

Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse

Abstract: Prologue: The (Terrorised) State we're in Introduction Television and Time Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of the 'CNN Effect' Talking Terror: Political Discourses and the 2003 Iraq War Television's Quagmire: The Misremembered and the Unforgotten The Distant Body Drama and Documentary: The Power of Nightmares Security and Publics: Democratic Times? The Irresolution of Television

Television and Time

Abstract: Time is at the centre of our understanding of the relationship between television news, television per se, and the culture within which television content is produced. In the weather commercial above, CNN appeals to viewers with reference to different temporalities. It offers ‘real-time’ weather reports, ‘historical perspective’, and ‘forecasts’ of weather to come. Moreover, bringing to bear the present, past, and future upon weather is a service framed as integral to the viewer’s security — enabling them to be informed and prepared, we might infer, for the worst. CNN promises a premediation of potential weather catastrophes, reminding us of the potential for catastrophe while rendering the notion contained by CNN’s own capacity to prepare us. In this chapter, we explore the principles underlying the CNN weather broadcast as they apply to television and television news in particular. We outline the ‘economy of liveness’ underlying television broadcasting. This forms the basis for a medium-specific alternative to Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge’s (1965) ‘news values’ paradigm which has endured in much media analysis to this day.

Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of the ‘CNN Effect’

Abstract: The purpose of this chapter is to offer an alternative understanding of media—policy relations or the ‘CNN effect’ to that which has dominated existing political science approaches. In doing so, we show how our alternative ethnomethodological approach can shed more light on the original matter of concern. Hence, before we analyse media events, we must take a step back into sociological method. Through our ethnomethodological analysis of one case study — Fox News’ coverage of Hurricane Katrina — we examine how the television coverage was achieved. We explore the televisual construction of the event. It becomes clear how messy the coverage is, and therefore how any attempt to map out causal relations between ontologically discrete units, ‘media coverage’ and ‘policy decisions’, is problematic. In addition, we suggest that this messy, chaotic coverage creates uncertainty about what was happening and that terror was amplified by Fox News offering representations of connections between Hurricane Katrina and terrorism, economic insecurity, and health hazards.

Drama and Documentary: The Power of Nightmares

Abstract: In examining the television interaction order and the relationship between on-screen interactions and the off-screen perceptions of security of audiences and policymakers, the role of drama and documentary is particularly interesting. Woven into the schedules alongside news, these formats present renderings of many of the security salient events constituting news in recent years. Entertainment, as a cultural genre, is not antithetical to politics,1 despite Postman’s (1986) concern that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death (or to political stupidity). Elizabeth van Zoonen (2005) argues that entertainment can provide a context for viewers to contemplate their role as citizens and their political engagement; that entertainment can thereby make citizenship pleasurable (cf. Livingstone, 2005). Our audience analysis reveals the manner in which television viewers understand ‘actual’ events through analogy to television fictions. Some interviewees suggested they enjoyed being provoked to think ‘deeper’ about events by documentaries such as Panorama and the films of Michael Moore. If, as we argue in Chapter 8, citizens’ perspectives emerge from the interaction of their political, media, and experiential discursive realities, then drama and documentary are a part of anyone’s media discursive reality. This chapter features a comparative analysis, examining how drama and documentary remediate (critically or uncritically) actual security events present in news.