Abstract
We argue that the concept ‘media events’ has renewed the relevance of many existing studies, sharpened the significance of other studies, and inspired a stream of research. We then review our work on media events in relation to the grand narratives of national interest and collective memory. To reinvigorate the conceptual viability of ‘media events’, we put forward four questions for consideration in the larger theoretical, technological, and globalized contexts.
The concept of ‘media events’ (Dayan and Katz, 1992) gives shape, force, and clarity to a range of phenomena that many scholars might have vaguely sensed but failed to articulate. In our view, it has made three notable contributions. First, it renews the relevance of many existing studies. What has been called ‘critical events’, for example, may be reframed in terms of ‘media events’, to highlight the crucial role the media play as a platform of discourse, a definer of reality, and a site of contestation. Second, the concept throws a sharper light on such seminal studies as Lang and Lang (1953), by revealing how televised spectacle – a constructed second-hand reality of a media event – varies with participants’ experiences. Third, the concept has inspired a stream of research by furnishing a useful conceptual point of departure and a methodological venue for research design. If a pseudo-event exists ‘for the sole purpose of media publicity’ (Boorstin, 1962), a media event may often connote symbols of political and cultural import, fertile for hard struggles over meanings, values, and interests.
In our work, we have tried to tie media events to the grand narratives of national interest and collective memory. In 1989, China’s suppression of a pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square on June 4 ricocheted all the way to the downfall of the Berlin Wall 5 months later. Both momentous events redefined global politics while posing different implications for the US-orchestrated ‘new world order’. In analyzing ‘anniversary journalism’ of the New York Times and the Washington Post over a span of two decades, Li and Lee (2013) concluded that the post–cold war ideological frame of elite US journalism, despite shifting rhetoric, inherited the cold-war prisms pointing to the failure of Communism and the triumph of the West. These two premier newspapers also invoked Tiananmen as a ‘news icon’ in the post-1989 era. Lee et al. (2011) found that ‘Tiananmen’ first symbolized Communist dictatorship, then referred more specifically to examples of China’s human rights abuse, and gradually faded away as part of ritualistic memory that could nonetheless be reignited to vent out moral outrage.
With memories of the Tiananmen crackdown painfully fresh, Britain was to return Hong Kong to China’s rule in 1997. This marked a first major media event of East–West confrontation after the end of the cold war, attracting 8000 journalists from around the world to cover the ceremony. Lee et al. (2002) compared how eight opposing national/media communities seized this particular site and moment to express, and thus reinforce, their enduring values, national interest, and dominant ideologies in a global game of discursive struggle. While China celebrated nationalist triumph, the British displayed imperial nostalgia, and the United States proclaimed itself as a new guardian of Hong Kong’s freedom.
As an ongoing project, Li and Huang (in press) examine the process in which the Chinese authorities proclaim a National Memorial Day to honor war victims in Nanjing massacred by the invading Japanese army. China’s Memorial Day was ironically inspired by Japan’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony. By aligning with memorial days from Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, and Poland, China has legitimated its own practice and invented a hybridized form and ritual of ‘media event’. An international team, with one of us (Lee) as a member, also anchored its five-nation comparison on such media events as the London Olympics (Hayashi et al., 2016) and presidential elections in Greece, the United States, and China (Curran et al., 2017).
If ‘media events’ is one of the guiding lights in media studies in the past 25 years, what will its prognosis be? We opt to raise the following issues for consideration in hopes of reinvigorating its conceptual viability:
Dayan and Katz (1992) conceptualized three integrative types of ‘media events’: conquest, contest, and coronation. They have since added disruptive cases of war, terror, and disaster (Katz and Liebes, 2007). In redefining ‘media events’, Hepp and Couldry (2010) also developed three categories of ritual, conflictual, and popular media events. Typology aside, the questions are threefold. First, what sets off media events differently from non-media events in the media-saturated environment? Second, what empirical questions and propositions are to be raised? Third, how do we develop a coherent analytical framework inclusive of more diverse events yet without being so loose as to sacrifice its explanatory power?
Instead of being cast in the static functionalist framework, ‘media events’ are embedded in the active and dynamic process of Gramscian hegemony. Williams (1977) elucidates how ‘dominant ideologies’ seek to renew, defend, and revise themselves by selectively absorbing ‘alternative ideologies’ while weakening ‘oppositional ideologies’. Such contestation runs through the entire life cycle of a media event. How do we account for the causes, processes, and consequences of hegemony in relation to ‘media events’ that are invoked to express core values and positions? In the process, what is the role of ‘media events’ in forming and transforming what Williams calls ‘emergent structures’ and ‘residual structures’ against the onslaught of ‘dominant structures’? How do media events figure in the dialectic of global struggle between cultural imperialism and resistance (Said, 1993)? How do media events, through the change of meaning, eventually get etched on the memory of history? Why do some media events, but not others, have the making of a ‘global iconic event’ (Sonnevend, 2016)?
Dayan and Katz (1992) elevated the broadcast media as our new ‘high holidays of mass communication’ (p. 1). Changing media ecology and communication technology has, however, ushered in dense networks of digital connection in national, transborder, and globalized contexts. Images of the ‘Arab Spring’ – and to a lesser extent, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong – were vividly displayed worldwide, generating a contagious sense of ‘global solidarity’ before collective cynicism and disenchantment sank in. In the United States and Europe, media events are being deployed to incite identity politics, anti-globalization sentiments, and nativist scapegoating of immigrants. Cyber security, privacy, and global peace are all at risk. These issues warrant closer scrutiny.
The rise of Trumpism and right-wing populism in the United States poses intriguing conceptual challenges. As Pickard (2016) notes, over-commercialized visual media’s penchant for spectacle, the flow of fake news on Facebook, and the ongoing crisis of American journalism have helped to put Trump in the White House. A proven master of creating and manipulating media events, Trump has abused TV and Twitter to stir up controversy, to appeal to his partisan constituencies, to attack real and imagined enemies (including the media), as well as to dismiss inconvenient ‘truths’. Within Twitter’s 140-word format, he exhibits little restraint in firing off terse, hyped-up, decontextualized, and frequently inaccurate narratives. He defies civility and ignores political protocol. His ‘new politics’ offers an opportunity to reassess the effects of ‘media events’ on agenda-setting, echo chamber, selective perception, and spiral of silence. In creating an ethos of ‘alternative facts’, what does Trump’s style of governance mean for diplomacy, democratic politics, and sound journalism?
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.