Risk and blame

The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in American Society

There is a quotation attributed to Joseph Goebbels that has haunted me: "When I hear the world 'culture' I reach for my revolver." The attribution may be erroneous, but it is appropriate. Certainly Thomas Mann and the members of the Frankfurt School who found refuge in the United States after Adolph Hitler's ascension to power accepted as an obligation the maintenance and continuance of a German culture untainted by the populist state racism of National Socialism. Such a polar opposition between state and culture would have appalled Matthew Arnold, who desired to recruit the state as a servant of Culture. The enemy of Culture was Anarchy, defined as Doing as One Likes--the One being the selfish self, the sectarian self, the class self, the provincial self, even when used for the "mere glorification by ourselves of ourselves," the national self. All are subjective projections of will in the service of self-interest. This may set them in opposition to an objective whole arrived at by informed judgment, but they are selves that find representation in a democracy. In other words, Arnold is using the label Anarchy as a pejorative term for Democracy viewed only as a jostling of factional wills in an endless power struggle. It is acceptable rhetoric in an open society to so load terms, to refer to the Christians and gentlemen on our side in opposition to the fanatics and rascals on the other. Arnold put forward his Culture not as a phenomenon to be scientifically studied but as a concept to be individually embraced and institutionally embodied. If the State is to be recruited as an ally in upholding in society an equitable and balanced institutional support for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, the State must be weaned from the belief that it is only an instrument of the temporarily dominant portion of the will of the people. Arnold's "disinterestedness" meant a refusal to become preoccupied with tactics and machinery in order to focus on grand strategy and the determination of suitable ends. It did not mean a withdrawal out of the race, however much, as E.K. Brown has pointed out, a fugitive and cloistered virtue might be a temptation--as appears in such poems as "Stanzas From The Grande Chartreuse." However, determining suitable ends did mean recognizing that the Platonic triad that ideally was the content of culture was, for historical reasons, split. Europe had taken from its Judeo-Christian beliefs the disciplining of the will required for the Good. From its Graeco-Roman origins Europe had taken the intellectual training needed for the pursuit of the objective rational light of Truth, and the aesthetic standards of Beauty. Ideally the Hebraic and Hellenistic components should form a mutually beneficial balance, but historically they had rather tended to alternating distortions. Arnold agreed with what Edmund Burke had told the electors of Bristol: "Government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination," and he hoped for government support for Culture. However, this could only happen if the dominant middle classes could be cured of their excessive Hebraism and provinciality and led to accept Culture as an overriding objective standard alien to class or other anarchist likes or inclinations. But difficulties remain, which I can best illustrate by using the Arnoldean technique of juxtaposition, in an example from my own country. In July 1963 the then Prime Minister of Canada, Lester B. Pearson, established a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, consisting of ten commissioners with Andre Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton as co-chairmen. After a Preliminary Report in 1965, the Commission produced a Report of six books in five volumes, 1967-1970. The first book contained a General Introduction, written by Andre Laurendeau and printed on blue paper, devoted to defining the key terms, one of which was culture. After noting that there were many definitions current, Laurendeau gave the definition of culture the Commission would use: . …

Culture and Democracy

Celebrity and Power

Responding to the apparently ubiquitous interest in contemporary fame, the last ten years has seen an expansion of academic work on stardom/celebrity, whether in film, media and cultural studies or beyond. Reflecting contemporary popular discourse, the emphasis here has often been on change: the notion that modern celebrity represents a qualitative break with the past. But what has arguably been lacking is a sense of dialogue or debate about the implications of this ‘shift’ for (now long-standing) theoretical/methodological approaches in the field. In this article, I bring aspects of these spheres together – the history of academic discourse on celebrity and the province of modern fame – in order to stimulate questions about their present and future relationship. In particular, I return to the seminal work of Richard Dyer (1979; 1986) as a form of dialogue between these spheres, placing his intervention within the history of work on stardom/ celebrity, and evaluating its relationship with contemporary celebrity culture.

‘Starring… Dyer?’: Re-visiting Star Studies and Contemporary Celebrity Culture’, in edition on ‘Celebrity’

In this article, we define the notion of ‘celebrity news', emphasizing the fact that the portrayal of film stars embodies the imitable and the inimitable and, consequently, points towards values. In that context, we discuss the results of a thematic content analysis of a wide corpus of the daily and weekly European, French-speaking printed media to reveal which values are highlighted in celebrity news; we also compare these results with the contemporary values which emerge from recent European and global surveys of values. We then compare the various types of printed media. Finally, we focus on a specific aspect emerging from the main content analysis: the ‘meltdown' or ‘fall from grace', which records the decline of a star figure. Such narratives are good examples of syncretism in values, in which very contradictory attributes in celebrities are made to coexist, yet in which the subversive aspect of such a confrontation is passed over. We conclude by showing that the widespread negotiation of different values perceptible in reporting on celebrity figures is a sign of an era of change and re-evaluation, and therefore deserving of study.

"Desirable people: Identifying social values through celebrity news"

There was a time when news coverage of celebrities was mostly confined to tabloids, distinctive magazines and special sections of newspapers. Today, celebrity news is an endemic phenomenon; it has found its place across the entire media spectrum where it proved its capacity to attract a wide range of publics and to drive consumption (Turner, 2010). Celebrity coverage has become omnipresent and pervasive even to the extent that it constitutes a new normality in the contemporary media world. The increasing presence of celebrity news has often been subjected to critical accounts of the media and cultural industries. Public consciousness tends to perceive celebrity coverage in terms of a dirty pleasure of sensationalist tabloid reporters who capitalize on exposing the private lives of the famous. It is considered by many to be the ‘dark planet’ of contemporary journalism. As a symptom of tabloidization it is seen as contributing to the dumbing down of news content and journalistic quality (Franklin, 1997). Celebrity news may well distract public attention from the important issues in public conversation, diverting public interest from the issues that really matter (Couldry et al., 2007; Postman, 1985). In this issue, Martin Conboy warns that such a cultural flattening may have a broad, if apolitical, democratic potential. The consequences of the ‘discursive bleeding of celebrity discourse’ (P. David Marshall, in this issue) into the political context might also be more direct. In his contribution to this special issue, Jason Wilson argues that the infiltration of the political sphere by the celebrity logic raises questions about reforming political leadership and modes of democracy in an environment where significant proportions of the population have tuned out from official politics. These questions bear enormous relevance across contemporary democracies.

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Studying celebrity news

The role of media in the construction of social representations of risks still deserves further analysis, especially in situations where new or unexpected risks are being reported. Risks associated with animals have more often become a source of concern in terms of potential harm for human health; media reports have participated in developing new fears and ambivalence. These risks associated with animals reflect transformations of the human relationship to nature and the environment. In these processes, several boundaries are being challenged: broadly the nature-culture division but also the protection offered by national borders are questioned. After discussing these animal-associated threats in the light of social science analysis of risks, we present empirical results based on a corpus of media articles in Switzerland over a 30-year period (N = 4480). Our analysis depicts the importance and evolution over time of dangerous animals in media representations; even though these have always been present in ...

Animals in the media: New boundaries of risk?

Le fait divers interesse, derange, indigne ou passionne, mais il laisse rarement indifferent. Il constitue aussi un genre mediatique qu'une analyse des discours et des images elabores dans la presse ecrite permet de qualifier. L'ouvrage recense, dans une 1ere partie, les connaissances disponibles sur le genre, toute en soulevant les principaux problemes qui lui sont lies. S'equisse ainsi une definition sommaire du sujet, qu'il convient alors de discuter a la lumiere d'une analyse, dont la seconde partie examine l'objectif, les limites et la methode. Elle estime notamment les termes epistemologiques et methodologiques d'une analyse narratologique du fait divers, qui s'appuie sur la definition du recit proposee par Paul Ricoeur. La derniere partie rend compte des resultats de l'analyse d'un large corpus collecte dans la presse francophone europeenne. En y appreciant les dits (l'ecriture) et les scenes (la mise en scene de l'intrigue et son faconnage), elle renouvelle la definition du genre du fait divers.

Les dits et les scènes du fait divers

Canada, Belgium and Switzerland are multicultural countries with several similarities including having French as a minority language. The trio also shares similar media landscapes, systems and approaches to journalism to those of other Western European and Northern American countries. These commonalities offer an opportunity to probe for the possibility of a language-based differentiation in journalists’ professional identities. Our comparative analysis of Worlds of Journalism Study data suggests that francophone journalists in our three countries have much more in common than not with their other-language peers. However, the francophone journalists seem more likely to identify with a politicized role that includes agenda-setting, citizen-motivation and scrutinizing power, and less likely to be driven by attracting and satisfying audiences. A difference francophone exists, but it is modest.

Annik Dubied

Papers

"Desirable people: Identifying social values through celebrity news"

Studying celebrity news

Animals in the media: New boundaries of risk?

Les dits et les scènes du fait divers

Quelle Différence?: Language, culture and nationality as influences on francophone journalists’ identity