Abstract
Much has been written about the relationship between discourse, terror and politics. These two volumes make useful additions to this area of study by addressing how temporal aspects can be constitutive of discursive framing for issues of security in the 21st-century media culture, and the political implications of these resulting discursive frames. Institutional norms, such as the 24-hour news cycle and constant media scrutiny of any terrorist threats post-9/11, have meant that discursive resources used to frame the events by political institutions and the media itself are important areas of analysis to better understand how these events are perceived and how various actions are legitimized. As each volume is written from a different disciplinary background, they address the issues of security, discourse and the media from varying perspectives, which will appeal to researchers, teachers and students interested in discourse analysis, media/communication studies, journalism, international relations, peace and security studies.
Television and Terror problematizes the crisis in television news discourse by examining how constructions of time and space act as structuring devices to shape events regarding terror and security. The norms of reporting that have developed in conjunction with news values for the 24-hour news cycle, frame events of threat, terror and security in distinct ways, which in turn shapes public perceptions of the events. Hoskins and O’Loughlin put forward a series of binary oppositional features of TV news discourse to explain the framing potential of time and space to transform these issues in ways that go beyond a mere presentation of events, such that the re-telling of the story often becomes the event itself. Chapter 1 lays the interdisciplinary framework drawing on theories from media and communication studies, international relations and both critical and multimodal discourse analysis to explain the conceptual framework used to analyse TV news discourse.
Chapter 2 focuses on the ability of time and space to be transformative with regard to news values and how this in turn constructs media frames used when reporting terror. It introduces several key concepts such as televisuality (the relationship between news production and news texts) and the economy of liveness (the validating of content through production practices) that ultimately serve opposite functions, such as both stabilizing and destabilizing the reporting of terror on television. The volume is also notable for its attention to a working definition of security that encompasses a broader conception of the term to include aspects of human security (as well as threats from direct violence) and delineates the importance of agency in relation to the creation of both security and insecurity. Chapter 2 is also useful for the breadth of theoretical frameworks (such as media studies, journalism and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)) that it draws upon to describe the concepts mentioned above, which are then used throughout the book to support the central argument. The volume thoughtfully considers concepts such as the CNN effect (the simultaneous shaping effect of 24-hour news coverage on live events as they are being covered) and Bell’s discourse structure of news (1998) and how they function within the demands of today’s 24-hour news cycle. It also includes a thorough re-examination and updating of Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) seminal discussion of news values with regard to what is expected in the production process today. The resulting conceptual framework is both insightful and extremely useful to scholars with interests in any of these areas, due to its innovative and sophisticated responses to these earlier works.
Chapter 3 focuses on the causal links between media coverage and policy, and again draws on various theoretical frames such as the CNN effect and others to better understand the anatomy of a news event and how the norms of media coverage today can serve to constitute the event. Chapter 4 looks at the relationship between political and news discourse and how concepts such as terror and security are legitimized through discursive framing. Its analytical frame explores how linguistic, multimodal and space/time structuring devices construct media frames to this end. Chapter 5 applies the concept of televisuality by taking a schema approach to show how TV coverage can simultaneously amplify and contain terrorism through its presentation of events. This chapter provides a useful discussion of the broader meanings of security by examining how insecurity is manifested through the privileging of certain discursive frames. Chapter 6 turns to the visual presentation of the human body in conflicts, to show how its representation can often obfuscate a more detailed analysis of events and in effect weaponize television coverage by amplifying insecurity. Chapter 7 focuses on the interaction order which structures on- and off-screen security events and ultimately affects the audiences’ perceptions and the public consciousness about terror and security threats. It compares the discursive reality and re-mediation of security events that are depicted in popular TV dramas and documentaries and shows how this relates to the framing by the public of actual events. Chapter 8 examines the relationship that is constructed between the media’s representation of terror/threats and the audiences’ perceptions of the same events to question how different perceptions of reality emerge, and how these in turn relate to the formation of security policy. Chapter 9 draws together the central argument that TV news discourse is in crisis as a result of the contradictions in the coverage of terror, threats and security. The binary oppositions are: stabilizing/destabilizing to an overall sense of security; undermining/giving credibility to threats; and amplifying/reassuring the perceptions of events through the visually intensive interaction order that is required in today’s television coverage. The authors state that: Ultimately, television news has to contain and render familiar and safe the terror that it imagines and delivers, for if it did not do so it could render itself obsolete, unable to attract and maintain the audiences who largely collude in the safety of sanitization and massive selectivity, as enforced by the medium’s ‘standards of taste and decency’. (p. 188)
The volume makes a convincing argument for the constituting force of news structures and values in today’s 24-hour news cycle, and the resulting discursive frames, that both shape and are shaped by terror and security events. The authors comment that ‘Television news today actually pursues and presents as ‘‘news’’ a feedback loop of ‘‘meaning’’ through a contradictory aggregation and disaggregation of responses to events’ (p. 190). By making this claim it also situates this argument within one of the central characteristics of Critical Discourse Analysis as social practice, as set out by of Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 258), which ‘implies a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), institution(s) and social structure(s) which frame it’.
The volume can be considered truly interdisciplinary in its approach to the reporting of terror and security, and as such it will be useful to students, researchers and teachers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, interested in how meaning is mediated and negotiated through contemporary television news practices. Although the volume necessarily makes reference to the visual aspects of news production, it is unfortunate that more explicit references to the multimodal characteristics of television are not explored more fully. However, this is a minor point as the strength of the volume lies in the synthesis and re-examination of various media models in conjunction with discursive framing to produce a compelling analytical framework for understanding the assumptions, complexities and resulting perceptions of television news discourse. The broader view of security that is used when analysing TV news discourse allows for a more nuanced reading of reporting practices regarding security issues, making it a welcome addition to previous works which had tended to focus on security from direct violence only, and how it has been framed in the media. The volume will have equal appeal to students and researchers of media/communication studies, international relations, critical discourse analysis and multimodal analysis.
Jarvis’s volume Times of Terror also seeks to link the concepts of discourse, terror and politics by showing how temporality is used to both cohere and legitimize events relating to Bush’s War on Terror. He chooses to focus on how the seminal event of Bush’s War on Terror was represented in key texts from the Bush administration (including speeches, interviews, testimonies and policy documents), and how these then constituted political discourse which privileged certain political, civil and legal institutional norms through the characteristics of the discursive framing. Chapter 1 begins by laying out definitions for the conceptual framework that is developed in the volume, starting with defining discourse as a coherent and meaningful structuring force that is capable of constituting and organizing aspects of the social. He then situates the War on Terror as a discourse that shapes the event’s social meaning and historical significance through how it is framed, with particular emphasis given to temporal frames relating to the past, resent and future. These temporal frames have the capability to give the War on Terror significance, legitimacy, structural coherence and identity.
Chapter 2 identifies four reasons to study the representations of temporality that are implicit in the discursive framing of Bush’s War on Terror, by first situating this volume within other works on discourse and terrorism to show how different historical contexts can both legitimize – and simultaneously make impossible – violence. Second, by using temporal aspects as a lens of analysis for the War on Terror, it can reveal how necessity and inevitability are constructed around various developments and security measures that were taken. Third, by exploring the importance of temporal claims to the discursive construction of the War on Terror it can illuminate how slippery concepts such as security and violence come to be reproduced in relation to the War on Terror. Finally, an analysis of the temporal reveals it as a political phenomenon. After explaining the key benefits of a study of temporality, Jarvis then puts forth various definitions of time, drawing on scientific, social science and literary traditions to explain the dimensions and shaping forces of both social and narrative time. Jarvis makes connections between the experiencing and managing of social time with the political. He comments that: In this sense, discussions of social time are fundamentally interested in questions of politics and power: engaging not only with issues of management and control – who determines the presentation and manipulation of time in relation to particular contexts and issues? – but also with questions relating to the receipt or internationalisation of specific temporal issues. (p. 32)
He concludes this chapter with his central argument that ‘this event’s status and import was not an inevitable product of the attacks themselves . . . but rather these framings must be approached as constitutive of those entities’ (temporal, social and political) position and indeed, their significance’ (p. 35). He then introduces three temporal shapes that will form the basis of his analysis of how the Bush administration represented the War on Terror: radical discontinuity, precedented continuity and timelessness.
Chapter 3 explores the temporal shape of radical discontinuity and how it positions the War on Terror as exceptional, new and as a form of historical rupture from all that had come before. The qualities of this temporal framing of singularity for the War on Terror allow it to become a transformative event since it constituted rupture of not only historical time, but also a rupture of discursive practices in how it was discussed, described and interpreted. Similarly, the radical discontinuity of the event also allowed a rupture of the norms of political conduct and actions relating to the event, including how it was memorialized and remembered. This break from the past allowed the event to mediate temporal shifts in society concerning periods of past security and current insecurity; the inevitability of the subsequent military and civil actions taken; and the transformation of American society from an individualistic to a collectivist orientation.
Chapter 4 explores the second temporal shape of precedented continuity which frames the event within a directional, ordered and linear conception of time. In this framing, the War on Terror is constructed as being part of an orderly and stable process which allows for it to be seen as the latest in a history of threats to the United States, thus obfuscating alternative explanations for the attacks and continuing to demonize the agents that were responsible. This temporal construction of the events serves to legitimize the subsequent security measures that were introduced after the attacks, and also gives confidence to the resulting military actions by measuring them as a progressive victory against those that would choose to harm US interests.
Chapter 5 looks at the final temporal shape of timelessness to show how the War on Terror is constructed as a perpetual return to a specific set of values and actions through reincarnation of historical events. This shape characterizes the War on Terror as a recycling of the age-old conflict between good and evil, and also as the latest installment in the recurring battle between freedom and fear.
By focusing on the temporal aspects of how the War on Terror was constructed, the analysis makes an important argument about how they give significance, coherence and legitimacy to the initial and subsequent events and actions taken by the Bush administration. The analysis itself is content-based and although it does make reference to the characteristics of the language that convey these senses of temporality, it does not present a fine-grained textual analysis of the corpus of texts collected between 2001 and 2004 from the Bush administration. By focusing on texts from the Bush administration, it does produce an important corpus of texts that were the sources of much of the media coverage for events during that time period. As such it provides an interesting perspective on not only the concept of temporality, but also on how intertextuality is created from these source texts and how the framings identified in the analysis were then picked up by the media. However, its main contribution to the analysis of political discourse about the War on Terror lies in the philosophical sophistication of its central argument and in the attention to detail that is brought forth through the temporal dichotomies that are identified in the discursive construction of events.
Both texts strongly identify, albeit through very different methods of analysis, the ability of discursive frames to shape the very nature of events of terror and security in the 21st century, and in so doing they form useful additions to previous work in this area. They elaborate how an understanding of the discursive characteristics of speeches, interviews and the nature of television reporting practices cannot be ignored when discussing these events. As such, they show how the discursive frames are intertwined with the actual events and are themselves political constructs which are fundamental to the ublics’ perceptions of the events.
They both also contribute to our understanding of the concept of violence as being more than just direct violence, through attention to the distancing mechanisms implicit in the structuring of television news narratives and the downplaying of alternative explanations for these events. Jarvis points out how the temporal framing of singularity of the War on Terror once again obfuscated other forms of violence in society: For the most pernicious, and destructive, bringers of human suffering are typically those author-less tragedies that pass us by largely unnoticed with depressing familiarity. Read against such an alternative backdrop of broader structural violence, 9/11’s singularity would, again have been increasingly difficult to defend. (p. 59)
Both volumes are comprehensive responses to the inquiries that they set out to explore and clearly show the necessity of interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the intersections between the discourse, politics, media coverage and issues of security and terrorism.