Media, terrorism, and theory: a reader PDF
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Media, Terrorism, and Theory Critical Media Studies INSTITUTIONS, POLITICS, AND CULTURE Series Editor Andrew Calabrese, University of Colorado Advisory Board Patricia Aufderheide, American University Vincent Mosco, Queen's University Jean-Claude Burgelman, Free University of Janice Peck, University of Colorado Brussels Manjunath Pendakur, Southern Illinois Simone Chambers, University of Toronto University Nicholas Gamham, University of Westminster Arvind Rajagopal, New York University Hanno Hardt, University of Iowa Giuseppe Richeri, Universita Svizzera Gay Hawkins, The University of New South Italiana Wales Kevin Robins, Goldsmiths College Maria Heller, Eotvos Lonind University Saskia Sassen, University of Chicago Robert Horwitz, University of California at Dan Schiller, University of Illinois at San Diego Urbana-Champaign Douglas Kellner, University of California at Colin Sparks, University of Westminster Los Angeles Slavko Splichal, University of Ljubljana Gary Marx, Massachusetts Institute of Thomas Streeter, University of Vermont Technology Liesbet van Zoonen, University Toby Miller, University of California, of Amsterdam Riverside Janet Wasko, University of Oregon Recent Titles in the Series Changing Concepts of Time Harold A. Innis Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919-1968 Edited by John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge Liesbet van Zoonen A Fatal Attraction: Public Television and Politics in Italy Cinzia Padovani The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934-1952 Paul Heyer Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting Edited by Greg Elmer and Mike Gasher Global Electioneering: Campaign Consulting, Communications, and Corporate Financing Gerald Sussman Democratizing Global Media: One World, Many Struggles Edited by Robert A. Hackett and Yuezhi Zhao The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy Ben Goldsmith and Tom O'Regan Raymond Williams Alan O'Connor Why TV Is Not Our Fault: Television Programming, VIewers, and Who's Really in Control Eileen R. Meehan Media, Terrorism, and Theory: A Reader Edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Todd Fraley Media, Terrorism, and Theory A Reader EDITED BY ANANDAM P. KAV OORI AND TODD FRALEY ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham· Boulder· New York· Toronto· Oxford ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com P.O. Box 317, Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright © 2006 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Con~ress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Media, terrorism, and theory: a reader / Anandam P. Kavoori and Todd Fraley. p. cm. - (Critical media studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-3630-2 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-IO: 0-7425-3630-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-3631-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-IO: 0-7425-3631-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) l. Terrorism-Press coverage. 2. War-Press coverage. 3. Terrorism in mass media. I. Kavoori, Anandam P. II. Fraley, Todd, 1972- III. Series. PN4784.T45M442006 070.4'49303625-dc22 2005012635 Printed in the United States of America @TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992. Contents Preface vii Part 1 Orientations 1 Televising the "War on Terrorism": The Myths of Morality 3 Daya Kishan Thussu 2 Mediatizing the Global War on Terror: Television's Public Eye 19 Simon Cottle Discussion Questions for Part 1 49 Part 2 Genres and Contexts 3 Prime Time Terror: The Case of La Jetee and 12 Monkeys 53 Marion Herz 4 Mediated Terrorism in Comparative Perspective: Spanish Press Coverage of 9/11 vs. Coverage of Basque Terrorism 69 Teresa Sadaba and Teresa La Porte 5 National Politics of Belonging and Conflicting Masculinities: Race and the Representation of Recent Wars 91 Antje Schuhmann v vi Contents 6 Terrorism and the Exploitation of New Media 107 Bruce Klopfenstein Discussion Questions for Part 2 121 Part 3 Frames and Contexts 7 Critical Media Theory, Democratic Communication, and Global Conflict 125 Todd Fraley and Elli Lester Roushanzamir 8 Terrorism, Public Relations, and Propaganda 145 Nancy Snow 9 September 11, Social Theory, and Democratic Politics 161 Douglas Kellner 10 International Communication after Terrorism: Toward a Postcolonial Dialectic 179 Anandam P. Kavoori Discussion Questions for Part 3 199 Index 201 About the Contributors 205 Preface It was a defining moment for us as citizens, students, and scholars of global television: Live coverage of the first Gulf War, where the world became com pressed into the life-space of the CNN crew in Baghdad. In the years since, numerous books have been written and documentaries produced on how that war changed all the rules around Media and War. Today, we can see the effects of these new rules-a global news environment, a 24-hour news cycle, the growth of sectarian broadcast media, a deeply polarized political leadership, and the emergence of new technologies of information. Now, the events of 9/11, the unfinished second Gulf War, and the open-ended "War on Terrorism" have brought into sharp relief the contradictions and processes put into motion by the first Gulf War. As students, scholars, and media practitioners, we are im mersed every day in trying to understand how to make sense of the daily events and find a vocabulary-both professional and scholarly-that will make sense. This volume is an attempt to provide that vocabulary-that sense of how to contextualize the daily cycle of violence and spin, to frame "military action" and "terrorism," to assess "news coverage" and "commentary." We invite you to read these chapters collectively or singly; use the discussion questions at the end of each part to frame your understanding of these topics and begin an open-ended conversation that creates the critical vocabulary that is needed around issues of media, terrorism, and theory. Part 1, Orientations, tries to meet just that goal-to orient the reader to both the scope and conceptual context of the chapters. This first section has the chapters "Televising the 'War on Terrorism': The Myths of Morality" by Daya Kishan Thussu and "Mediatizing the Global War on Terror: Television's Public Eye" by Simon Cottle. Daya Thussu's chapter draws on the mythmaking function of global news to present a series of legitimizing narratives about the war on terrorism. He vii Vlll Preface argues that the myths circulated by television news help consumers of mass media to construct a worldview that plays into the values and interests of U.S. and British corporate media and the political interests they represent. Drawing on the late Marjorie Ferguson's work on the "mythologies of globalization," he argues that there are five dominant myths that structure our understanding of the war on terrorism: the myth of Islamic terrorism, the myth of madness, the myth of nuclear threat, the myth of atrocities, and the myth of (American) morality. He contrasts these myths with the complexity that underlies reality, and his chapter concludes with a call to accountability and a refocus on the disjunctures that have appeared in events such as the global protest movement and the numerous studies that have called into question both U.S. foreign policy and an uncritical news media. Simon Cottle's chapter examines the process of "mediatization"-the very specific ways in which the "communicative architecture" of television jour nalism functions to shape public perception of the war on terrorism. Drawing on an analysis of news content from six different countries, twenty-seven television channels, and four international service providers, Cottle's chapter accomplishes an enviable task: Providing a theoretical accounting of "tele vision's Janus-faced relation to systems of domination and democracy." His findings examine the processes of mediatization through the communicative frames of conflict (namely, dominant, contest, contention, campaigning, and expose/investigation) and consensus (community service, collective interests, cultural recognition, and mythic tales). Cottle invites us to reconsider the de mocratizing possibilities that inhere within television journalism's existing communicative architecture, which is now routinely deployed in countries and by satellite TV around the world, as well as the systematic use of communica tive structures that permit dominant views to go unchallenged. These two chapters structure the overall collection-one oriented to dis cursive closure (along lines of global political power, corporate interests, and the power of media technology) and the other to those of disruption (along lines of disjunctive reception, internal ruptures in discourse, local and regional readings, and the democratic potential in both mainstream and alternative me dia). These two themes are elaborated in the chapters that follow in the next section-organized around a single genre or medium-and then reworked in the final section of the book through their connections to contemporary social theory, media literacy, and international communication. Part 2, Genres and Contexts, contains the chapters "Prime Time Terror: The Case of La Jette and 12 Monkeys" by Marion Herz, "Mediated Terrorism in Comparative Perspective: Spanish Press Coverage of 9/11 vs. Coverage of Basque Terrorism" by Teresa Scidaba and Teresa La Porte, "National Politics of Belonging and Conflicting Masculinities: Race and the Representation of Preface ix Recent Wars" by Antje Schuhmann, and "Terrorism and the Exploitation of New Media" by Bruce Klopfenstein. The chapter by Marion Herz is a reading of two films, 12 Monkeys (starring Bruce Willis) and an avant-garde film, La letee. Drawing on the theoretical work of Freud, Lacan, and Foucault, the chapter offers an original insight: 'The producers of catastrophe films are of course terrorists, simply in a milder form." Herz argues that the quality of terrorism exists in the ability to tum a TV image into a medium of terror that "unites the extradiegetic reality of the spectators with the intradiegetic reality of the incident, and which sus pends the distinction between fictionality and factionality." He explores this distinction by a close reading of both films and offers an analytic for the un derstanding of contemporary terrorism whose impact lies not just in the realm of politics but also in the personal realm that the films deal with. He sug gests that we understand the relation between media and terrorism by examin ing issues of phantasm and fantasy, dreams and trauma, personal agency and responsibility. Sadaba and La Porte's chapter examines Spanish press coverage of the events of 9111 and that of Basque terrorism. Framed within the theoretical framework of "glocalization," the chapter eschews any "national" or essentialist frame work for the comparative reception of these two realms of reporting on terror ism but rather articulates a nuanced reading based on issues of local/national party affiliation, competing media ideologies (referenced to Spanish politics and global corporate culture), and localization. Stories from El Pais, ABC, El Mundo, El Correa, and Gara are examined with an eye for examining the problematics of traditional categories of local/global and of a homogenous globalization (Americanization). In one instance, for example, the localization tendency is examined in the use of Basque language to make puns, plays on words, and punch lines, framing Basque leaders such as Batasuna as members of the Taliban. In sum, the chapter is a counterpoint to much contemporary discourse about how the events of 9111 "changed everything." Issues of local reception (such as the Spanish one) orient the rest of the world much differently from how mainstream American political and media corporate narratives have defined terrorism in recent months. Antje Schuhmann's essay explores the idea of localization with a differ ent conceptual lens: Gender politics and issues of feminism and masculinity as they relate to the German experience with terrorism. The chapter exam ines both sides of how nation-states are constructed through mass media internally and externally. Internally, issues of German identity are discussed through examples of German national politics, immigration, and Bavarian identity. External constitution of German identity is examined through a wide range of examples, from the war in Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to x Preface Gennan concentration camps to the conflicts in Kosovo and Afghanistan. In each case, the focus of the analysis is on how gendered notions of whiteness and masculinity/femininity are used in the articulation of Gennan identity, further ing a national politics of belonging. The concluding chapter of this part by Bruce Klopfenstein is a context setting one-articulating an overall framework of how we can understand "new media" and "terrorism"- both tenns that are used in a range of ways, with little in the way of systematic accounting. Klopfenstein examines both terrorist organizations' use of new media and the role of such media in the war in Iraq and develops a model examining how the medium constructs messages with different conceptuaVcultural vocabularies for internal and external audiences. The concluding section, part 3, Frames and Contexts, contains the chapters "Critical Media Theory, Democratic Communication, and Global Conflict" by Todd Fraley and Elli Lester Roushanzamir, "Terrorism, Public Relations, and Propaganda" by Nancy Snow, "September 11, Social Theory, and Demo cratic Politics" by Douglas Kellner, and "International Communication after Terrorism: Toward a Postcolonial Dialectic" by Anandam P. Kavoori. The chapter by Fraley and Roushanzamir sets the tone for this part of the book, which takes the task of theoretical redirection of "media and terrorism" as a defining theme. Their focus is not directly on terrorism but on its reflection in the realm of democratic communication under current conditions of global conflict and global corporate media. Fraley and Roushanzamir offer a model for critical media consciousness in place of the traditional models of critiquing corporate media content, and they suggest alternative ways of gathering infor mation, different organizational arrangements, and so forth. Using evidence such as the role of alternate production and delivery (for example, in the Iranian Revolution) and the role media continue to play in the current pan-Islamicism, they highlight how the application of critical media consciousness may show ways of organizing outside the dominant corporate paradigm. Nancy Snow parses the relationship between terrorism, public relations, and propaganda and provides a framework for understanding these oft en misunderstood tenns. Drawing on a range of theoretical material and examples from the world of media coverage, public diplomacy, advertising, public rela tions, and strategic infonnation campaigns, Snow articulates both a descriptive and prescriptive set of criteria that can be used while evaluating the range of media messages that make up public relations, public diplomacy, and propa ganda. Her perspective eschews an unproblematic critique of public relations or a simplistic analysis of propaganda but rather draws on her extensive work experience with the U.S. Infonnation Agency and her status as a well-known scholar of propaganda to articulate ways out of the current quagmire of under standing media reporting and public diplomacy.
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