“We, the media: Pedagogic Intrusions into U.S. Mainstream Film and Television News Broadcasting Rhetorics”, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main / New York, pp. 418. Author: ALAN TAYLOR

“Altogether this is a very thorough, penetrating study that furnishes a valuable perspective into the American media system”.

Book review author: Art Silverblatt, St. Louis (MO).

“Alan Taylor’s penetrating study examines how the U.S. media shape the public discourse and, consequently, American foreign policy.

Employing a European perspective, the author contends that the U.S. mainstream news is reported in ways that serve the wider corporate interests. Taylor identifies how cross-ownership is used to reinforce this ideological message - specifically, how film is used to reinforce the legitimacy of another medium: news broadcasting. The author also shows how the American media employ rhetoric that maintains the illusions of freedom of speech in the United States. Taylor takes a historical approach to the evolution of U.S. corporate media, from the beginning of the U.S. broadcast system in the 1920s to the media coverage of the Iraq war, paying particular attention to the events of 9/11. The author declares: “The question to ask is: have we invited a press to witness a war, or have we created a war to prove that this freedom of expression is possible?”

Taylor employs elements of a number of approaches - Rhetorical resp. Dramaturgical Perspective, and certain key elements of the Auteur theory - sometimes moving from one approach to another. He establishes a historical overview, generating a chronology that demonstrates the development of the concentration of ownership n the U.S. media. He also makes a convincing case by citing a case study, focusing on the Universal film studio and how its films reinforce the illusion of freedom of speech in America.

The author argues that the cumulative message of U.S. media ultimately discourage participation in the democratic process, contributing to American student lethargy. One of the objectives of the book, then, is to encourage a more active citizenry: a “wakeful political literacy”” that promotes critical understanding of the current state of American mainstream media. The book also examines the pedagogical implications of this ideological function of the U.S. mass media., calling for a curriculum that encourages critical thinking skills.

Altogether, this is a very thorough, penetrating study that furnishes a valuable perspective into the American media system”

ART SILVERBLATT,St. Louis (MO).

• http://www.webster.edu/medialiteracy/faculty.htm

Review Publication, December 2006

The review itself was published in the German Media Journal PUBLIZISTIK (Vol 51, #4, Dec 2006), in a shorter PDF version here:

• http://www.vsjournals.de/index.php;do=show_article/sid=176562543945ed83dcbd860623227501/site=pub/area=kom/id=1133

• 

From Chapter Eight: the 1980s, Wars, White House & Media Mergers

“The world of corporate takeovers and mergers that was so brazenly outlined in surreal broad strokes by Lumet and Cheyefsky in 1976 became the characteristic feature of the real U.S. media landscape in the 1980s and was actively driven by former actor and President of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan. The rapid emergence of major media conglomerations was promoted and encouraged by the deregulatory rhetoric of the Republican agenda from 1981 to 1989 that across the United States’ economy vowed to get “the government off the backs of the people” by rolling back the New Deal and Great Society agendas of the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations respectively (Sloan, 1999; Friedman, 1995).

The linked rhetoric of freedom for the individual, however, deftly included the legal status of the corporation as an individual in the eyes of the law that rested on favourable leading Right-Wing interpretations of the Constitution. A series of such rulings, that extended back into the 1960s, are summarised thus:

• 1962: Fong Foo vs U.S: Freedom from Double Jeopardy - AMENDMENT UNDER QUESTION: 7

• 1970: Ross vs Bernhard 1970: Jury Trial in a Civil Case - 5^th

• 1976: Virginia Board of Pharmacy vs Virginia Citizens Consumer Council 1976 Commercial Speech- 1^st

• 1978: First National Bank of Boston vs Bellotti 1978 - Political Speech- 1^st

• 1986: Pacific Gas & Electric Co vs Public Utilities Commission- Negative Speech- 1st

(The selection of rulings clarifies the gradual shift towards redefining the scope and substance of the corporation with an increased focus on the First Amendment principles of free speech. (from Nace, 2003, p. 17 see also Peritz, 1996, p. 297)

Another driving ideological motive was the resurgence of a more reactionary America determined to reverse the sense of unease and self-critical enquiry that for many overshadowed the country since the humiliating retreat from Vietnam and the profound impact of the Watergate affair that led to the successful impeachment of Richard Nixon (his attorney was none other than Donald Rumsfeld who would return later in the guise of Secretary of Defense in George W. Bush’s war cabinet of 2003.) Howard Beale’s extended diatribes in Network (1976) were said to voice this sense of national malaise corroding the heart of the Republic.

Broadcasting Free Market 1980s Rhetoric

In the area of actual media regulation, policymakers argued that, with the burgeoning of new media outlets in the form of cable to satellite, the deregulatory process would open the broadcasters to a more competitive market environment where supply and demand was the best measure to evaluate the public interest. A selection of such federal government legislative rulings are given in Table 4 below.

Amongst the more visible changes for cinemagoers was the reversal of the Paramount Decrees that now permitted studios to acquire their own theatres again - thus smoothing the vertical integration process that neatly linked script development to screen exhibition. As Gomery (1998a) puts it,

“During the mid-1980s the major Hollywood studios went on a spending spree, acquiring theaters before the deregulation-minded Ronald Reagan left the White House. In 1986 the Department of Justice quietly agreed not to press the long-time restrictions against theater purchase by Hollywood embedded in antitrust decrees signed 40 years before.” (Gomery, 1998a, p. 141)

SELECTED RULINGS

Key 1980s Regulations for the Communications Industry

• 1982: Removal of anti-trafficking three -year-rule
• 1983: Removal of regulations on children’s advertising
• 1984: Removal of regulations on the length of advertisements
• 1984: Replaces 7-7-7 rule with 12-12-12 rule (TV, Am & FM)*
• 1984: Betamax decision allows home taping
• 1985: Citizens permitted to own satellite dishes
• 1987: Fairness Doctrine abolished
• 1988: FCC reimposes syndicated exclusivity rule

Of the several studios that entered the “spree” we can include one that, since the 1930s, had made significant professional and business associations with Ronald Reagan through owner Lew Wasserman (Sharp, 2003); thus, for Gomery (1998a),

“…the bombshell hit when in January 1986 MCA, parent company of the giant Universal Studios, acquired a major interest in the second largest circuit of theaters in North America, Cineplex Odeon… Once gain, Hollywood’s majors were top powers in the theater end of the business.” (Gomery, 1998a, p. 141)

Media Mergers of the 1980s

Reagan’s FCC signalled a major change in rulings that through the 1980s would support this market model into the 1990s and beyond. During the rolling leadership of Mark Fowler and Dennis Patrick, the FCC would permit the following mergers:

• NewsCorps bought Metromedia (6 television stations) - $1.6 billion

• Turner Broadcasting bought MGM/United Artists - $1.5 billion

• Capital Cities bought ABC television - $3. 5 billion

• General Electric bought RCA - and NBC - $6.4 billion

• National Amusements bought Viacom - $3.4 billion

• Sony bought CBS records - $2 billion

• Time inc. merged with Warner Communications $14.1 billion

• Sony acquired Columbia Pictures & Tri-Star movie studios - $4.8 billion

• Matsushita buys MCA (Universal Studios, Geffen Records & Motown - $6.6 billion

• U.S. West bought a quarter share of Time Warner - $ 2.5 billion

• Viacom bought Paramount Communications - $ 8.3 billion

• Viacom bought Blockbuster - $4. 9 billion

• Cox Cable bought Times Mirror Cable - $2.3 billion

• Westinghouse (CBS) bought Infinity Broadcasting (radio) - $ 4. 9 billion

• NewsCorps bought News World Communications Group. Inc - $3.6 billion

• US West bought a main interest in Continental Cablevision - $10.8 billion

(from Croteau and Hoynes, 2001, p. 75-76)

The rapid and often destabilising corporate changes of the early 1980s coincided with a series of visible changeovers at the networks. At CBS Walter Cronkite was to be replaced by Dan Rather (1981) and in 1983 Tom Browker became lead anchor at NBC, and Peter Jennings, who had anchored from 1964-1967, returned at ABC.

Despite the industry changes, however, the illusion of apparent continuity prevailed: as outlined in Chapter Three, Rather had been with CBS since 1962, and Browker had been first NBC reporter since 1966 and anchor of NBC News Today from 1976-1982 while over at ABC, Canadian Jennings had, in 1964, become the youngest ever news anchor.

Their consistent visible presence, thereafter, would be of valuable rhetorical potency in the decades to come as budgets and staff would be cut, foreign offices disbanded, promotional campaigns ironically expanded, and news credibility gradually diminished. Indeed, the strategic presence of the anchors at the focus of major international events belied the actual curtailment of foreign news coverage and investment by the stations generally.

All the President’s Men - ABC, the CIA and the White House

For watchers of political intrigue, one particular merger - the 1985 acquisition of ABC by Capital Cities - is of some notable interest. In 1954 William Casey, corporate Wall Street lawyer and former wartime manager of OSS (Office of Special Services), became a partner of Capital Cities by buying a block of 51,000 shares which by 1966 were worth $2 million. In subsequent years, Casey would serve in several capacities under Republican President Nixon - as Chair of the Security and Exchange Commission, President of the Import-Export Bank, Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, and member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. By 1981, when his stocks in Capital Cities were valued at $4.7 million, Casey was appointed as the Director of the CIA by President Reagan - the first such Director to sit in Cabinet - and proceeded in that capacity in helping to arrange the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal which Reagan would answer for in August 1987. With Lt. Colonel Oliver North, Casey also set up a funding operation for Reagan’s secret war in Central America (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 60-61). In fact one of his first duties after Reagan’s first election victory was to oversee the new President’s 1981 Executive Order 12333,

“…under which the CIA is permitted to operate domestically for the first time in order to collect “significant” foreign intelligence within the United States as long as the effort does not involve spying on the domestic operations of U.S. citizens and corporations.” (Ranelagh, 1986, p. 673).

In his 1987 Los Angeles Weekly article “The Seizing of the American Broadcast Company” Andy Boehm would suggest how Casey was in the position to capitalise on his Washington, D.C. and industry links by driving down the ABC stocks prior to the sale and thereby add to the considerable pressure that was building against ABC President Leonard Goldenson to sell the “poorly managed” broadcast station as a “friendly merger” to Capital Cities - a company oddly three times smaller than the broadcast giant; Warren Buffet for Berkshire Hathaway and major Disney shareholder would underwrite the eventual deal. In support of this contention, Mazzocco argues, is the fact that CIA Director Casey refused to place his Capital City stock of 70,000 shares in a blind trust, and so was able to reap profit $ millions from his investment in the Capital Cities/ABC deal while still Director of the CIA (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 95). The picture shows William Casey with Reagan in the Oval office, Jan, 23rd, 1983.

However, while $ millions of profits were made in Reagan’s cabinet, the situation for the working journalists of the Fourth Estate became increasingly more acute. Batholemew Sparrow (1999) reported from workplace surveys that the decline

“…in newsroom resources has dampened morale in the three major broadcast networks… ABC News, under the cost- cutting of Capital Cities…closed its bureaus in Chicago, Atlanta, St Louis, Miami, Denver, and San Francisco in the late 80s; its employees are “paranoid” and their morale “terrible”.” (Sparrow,1999, p. 87)

The resultant cost-cutting practices of these takeovers on actual news content were immediately palpable both in areas of print and broadcast news and particularly, as we will discuss, in the crucial area of foreign coverage, a fact neatly disguised by the physical presence of globe-trotting anchors whose interviews with world leaders remain significant landmarks in their résumés (Auletta, 1991).

One lurking concern in our account of broadcast news and its representation on film is how the ‘open market’ moves of the 1980s (that ultimately made news divisions more directly accountable to the market and the advertisers) had a determined political agenda that was highly effective in undermining the scope and activities of a ‘radical’ press now peopled by a new generation of critical journalists buoyed from the apparent success of the Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein (Redford and Hoffmann) but who would be kept off the backs of both administration at home and the military abroad (Foerstel, 2001).

Towards “Favorable Objectivity” in Peace and War

“In confronting the challenge of international terrorism, the first step is to call things by their proper names, to see clearly and say plainly who the terrorists are, what goals they seek, and which governments support them.” William Casey, speaking while CIA Director and major ABC stockholder. (Livingston, 1994, p. 1)

To assess the changes in foreign affairs reporting in the 1980s and to the present, we need some contextual background that looks briefly back to news coverage of the Vietnam war during the late 1960s and early 1970s that created frissons between the-then administrations of Johnson and Nixon and the news broadcasters. For this we can look to both Chomsky and Herman (1994) and Carpenter (1995), who provide lucid accounts of U.S. television representations of the Vietnam war.

With close reference to Hallin (1986), Chomsky and Herman (1994) convincingly summarise how, contrary to popular assumptions, the U.S. broadcast culture never veered from its initial agreement with the official ideological frame that regarded the war as a valiant, noble and selfless fight against the enemies of democracy. It was only within this overall frame of general complicitness that the profession of news journalism characteristically adopted the more technical angle of questioning critique that focused more on the failure of logistical means rather than any deeper questioning of ideological ends. In support, Carpenter (1995) comments,

“The irony of the government’s campaign to discredit the Saigon “press rebels” was that most of those correspondents were in fact supporters of the war effort.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 138)

Hallin’s (1986) extensive analysis of news reports and broadcasts reveal the high level of congruence between media and government agendas. However, there remained a powerful perception that the American domestic will to persist in Vietnam was seriously deflated by media representations of the war which seemed counter to the Pentagon world view of Defense Secretary McNamara and Presidents Johnson and Nixon. For example, Edward Jay Epstein in TV Guide vividly recounted how,

“Over the past 10 years, almost nightly, American have witnessed the war in Vietnam, on television… Since television has become the principle - and most believed - source of new for most Americans, it is generally assumed that the constant exposure of this war…was instrumental in shaping public opinion… It has become almost a truism, and the standard rhetoric of television executives, to say that television…caused the disillusionment of Americans with the war… This has been the dominant view of those governing the Nation during the war years.” (in Chomsky and Herman, 1994, p. 199)

An early signal of changes to come emerged from the plains of Des Moines, Iowa earlier in November 1969 where, in a speech penned by Patrick Buchanan, Vice-President Spiro Agnew highlighted a perceived,

““…credibility gap…not in the offices of government in Washington but in the studios of the networks in New York …(and)…a narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news”.” (in MacGregor, 1997, p. 133)

Ted Galen Carpenter (1995) contributes a detailed account of how since Vietnam - and across the Republican wars in Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury, 1983), Panama (Operation Just Cause, 1989) and Iraq (Operation Desert Storm, 1991) - the media corporations have, despite largely token individual journalist protest, been willingly seduced into the role of supportive stenographers of Defense Department handouts and staged press conferences. The process, that began with,

“The myth that hostile and unfair media coverage had been a major cause of the defeat in Vietnam festered throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Members of the military hierarchy, as well as conservative political figures, were determined that journalists would never again undermine a U.S. war effort… During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, attempts to intimidate the press or deny coverage of controversial foreign policy actions increased.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 159)

What seems to have galvanised the Reagan officials was an article by Arthur A. Humphries in the May-June 1983 issue of Naval War College Review. Humphries, a public affairs specialist for the U.S. Navy, focused on three elements, 1. The apparent and perceived failure of the Vietnam war, 2. The success of the U.K. Falklands Campaign of 1982, and 3. the more advanced communications capabilities and world-wide public media audiences increasingly alert to their rights to freedom of information. Looking to (likely) future scenarios involving U.S. military forces abroad Humphries outlined how,

““It is essential that a government and its military branch give regular briefings to representatives of all news organizations, as practicable, in order to sustain a relationship of trust, to foster the flow of correct information, and to halt faulty speculation…the news media can be a successful tool, or even a weapon, in prosecuting a war psychologically, so that the operators don’t have to use their more severe weapons”.” (in Carpenter, 1995, p. 167)

Carpenter (1995) confidently underlines the significance of Humphries’ article. Towards the aim of “favorable objectivity”, news information would be packaged and broadcast coverage would be both assisted but, as a consequence, severely restricted - for the security of the armed forces and the safety of the journalists. The article quickly became,

“…a blueprint for controlling news access to war zones and for managing the news that eventually emerges…and many of its suggestions were put into effect when the United States invaded Grenada. Not all of the elements were implemented, however, until the Persian Gulf War.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 167)

The emergence of the national ‘pool system’ - which was heavily biased in favour of the main broadcast organisations - helped rationalise a process of filtering (unwanted) journalist access to war zones and ultimately ensured a,

“…news monopoly to members of the mainstream media, who were unlikely to be vehement opponents of America’s interventionist foreign policy. That arrangement greatly benefited the interests of the national security bureaucracy.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 173)

In its treatment of the press during the Grenada ‘invasion’, (delayed transport and communications services), the Reagan administration translated into active policy the stated preferences that key Pentagon officials such as Humphries had misguidedly harboured against the mainstream media since Vietnam (Carpenter, 1995, p. 163).

Creating the Rhetoric of Victory

The corporate mergers detailed above provide another contextual layer which, combined with the determined effort of the Reagan administration to curtail unwanted press coverage, would neatly synergise with the national security bureaucracy agenda that since has been successful in shaping, packaging and disseminating Humphries’ (1983) “favorable objectivity” in war news coverage. For example, the pressure for broadcasters to compete in the market for decreasing viewers, was, of course, in the interest of the administration since news agencies and individual reporters could not afford not to be included in the pool list or, worse, receive a red card that would deny access to ‘the theatre of operations’. For obvious dramaturgical and commercial purposes, news operations have to show to their respective audiences that their reporters are at the battlefront front or, at the very least, live even if it is from a four-star hotel roof, irrespective of the value of news content being communicated. In the case of Grenada in 1983, therefore, the,

“…lack of meaningful coverage appeared to be precisely what the military wanted. As one CBS producer noted later: “In watching U.S. television of Operation Just Cause, we noticed constant updating of U.S. casualty figures, without mention of Panamanian dead or injured; the playing of stock scenes of heroic American soldiers in helicopter gunships or parachuting onto the beaches but no scenes of hospitals with civilian casualties, the upbeat news conference by President Bush…the constant descriptions of Manuel Noreiga as a voodoo-practicing pervert and drug runner, never as a long-term U.S. ally…”. In short, the military was able to put the proper “spin” on the Panamanian operation and ensure that only a positive, sanitized version of events reached the American people.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 180)

The plot reversal against the networks that was anticipated in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration began with these staged scenarios of Grenada.

This process would be more finely tuned in the ‘First’ Gulf War of 1991 that was brought to some narrative closure with the daylight retaking of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City and as performed by the Pentagon. The display proved,

“The point is that television was an important site for the production of consensus and the execution of the war. Indeed, so central has television become to the implementation of foreign policy that the conclusion of the Gulf War was carefully staged to feature the retaking of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City via helicopter, an inverted image of the chaotic American withdrawal from Saigon in 1974…the figure of the U.S. helicopter hovering over the embassy in victory was intended for a global audience as if to suggest a reversal of the so-called Vietnam syndrome.” (Curtin, 1995, p. 258)

Similar scenarios - with loaded references to Hollywood films and World War Two imagery - would be performed, filmed and broadcast live with the fall of Baghdad itself in the Spring of 2003 (Chapter Nine). More importantly, and considering as we will the 2003 invasion of Iraq in particular, we must ask ourselves how far the degree of successful news management by the ruling administration with a (largely complicit) corporate news broadcasting system increases the likelihood that such military interventions can be confidently planned and executed in the first instance.

Administering News Product - The White House as Studio

The scope of the news journalists’ beat, then, during the 1980s became sharply constrained - both abroad and at home - under straightened newsroom budgets that curtailed extended investigative endeavour in favour of the more immediate flotsam of celebrity news coverage, combative talk shows - or live but staged White House press conferences to which leading star-name journalists are still invited. It was in the interest of the Reagan administration, for example, to provide such events wherein the (televisual) medium quickly became the only message both domestically and abroad:

“Both during the campaign and after the election victory, the Reagan team showed remarkable skill at manipulating media coverage by providing television with an irresistible visual to support “the line of the day”. In this way, they could direct the coverage - at least in visual terms - by making it efficient for the news media to use the visual settings they had orchestrated. The administration even coordinated the 1986 bombing of Libya to coincide with the start of the evening news (Kellner, 1990).” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000, p. 233)

At the centre of the show, of course, was Ronald Reagan, ‘the Great Communicator’, whose carefully honed skills in presentation since the late 1930s made a virtue out of a ‘natural’, effortless bumbling authenticity. As his own close friend and Chief of Staff Regan (1988) would note how,

“Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word was scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks. The President was always being prepared for a performance, and this had the inevitable effect of preserving him from confrontation and the genuine interplay of opinion, question and argument that form the basis of decision.” (Regan, 1988, p. 248)

Indeed, one vivid example of the above was provided in an article for The Washington Post as penned by Reagan’s own media advisor Michael Deaver (1988) who took control of news agendas for a reluctant White House administration by creating televisual mise-en-scenes that would fit neatly into tightened news agendas, hence,

“In our morning issues conference, a meeting much like those held in the editorial offices of newspapers and television networks and stations all over the country, I decided to “lead” with the housing story. But rather than have the White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes hold up charts or issue a press release, and thereby bury the story in the business segment, we took the President to a construction site. There, wearing a hard hat and standing in front of homes under construction, he announced the housing start numbers and what that meant to the American people and the national economy. Naturally, the story played big in the evening news.” (Deaver, The Washington Post. 30.10.1988: C 7)

These disclosures merely confirm commentaries that have underscored the White House press operations (Livingston, 1994). However, by representing him and his staff as mere reactors, Deaver’s article made pains to lay the burden of guilt (if there was any) for the market-led journalism on the broadcasters themselves. The article, entitled “Sound-Bite Campaigning: TV Made Us Do It”, stands as a classic example of fake innocence and ideological deflection.

What emerged during the 1980s, therefore, was a form of market journalism increasingly dependent on the structured programming of created events - from the micro as above, to the macro. The latter would include the sanitised United States invasion of spurious and noticeably light enemies such as Grenada, Panama and then Iraq that were helpfully designed, orchestrated and timed for easy media production and consumption by the administration/studio to the U.S. television audiences (MacGregor, 1997).

Of significant irony, of course, is that while actual investigative news journalism content and scope was being deftly curtailed, the actual level of corporate media executive activity in the form of mergers and acquisitions was vastly increased. The ‘new’ markets that ‘opened’ were to ‘serve’ the needs of the new ‘sovereign’ consumer who, via cable, satellite and the internet advances, quickly became, we are told, information ‘rich’.

Fairness Abolished - From Free Speech to Showing Talk

The frenzied merger activity of the early 1980s, however, needed to pass across the table of the independent Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In this respect, the 1985 acquisition of ABC by the smaller Capital Cities is of particular significance since by that year two of the five FCC commissioners were former Vice-Presidents of Capital Cities - with Mark Fowler already installed by Reagan as the Chair.

The 1986 presidential appointment of Patricia Diaz-Dennis further synergised the long-term interests of corporate media - and ABC/Cap Cities in particular - with the free market ideology of the Reagan administration since Diaz-Dennis was former West Coast Vice-President of Labour Relations with ABC (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 112). The Right-Wing agenda for media deregulation was clearly signalled thereafter in the contest over the Fairness Doctrine that the FCC now felt secure in forwarding. While deregulation of the ownership patterns was having a structural impact on the news broadcasting industry, so media regulators at the FCC took a more direct interventionist stand on the vexed issue of media content.

Amongst those changes that directly impacted on news and current affairs content during this time was the 1987 FCC move to repeal the Fairness Doctrine which, since its appearance in 1949, required broadcasters to devote a “reasonable” amount of time to the discussion - in the form of studio interviews, for example, of community or national issues. A core principle in news content which the Doctrine upheld documented clearly,

“…that such programs be designed so that the public has a reasonable opportunity to hear different opposing positions on the public issues of interest and importance in the community.” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2001, p. 217)

As Croteau and Hoynes (2001) remind us, the Doctrine did not precisely demand or expect a crude division of equal time for opposing views, and definitions of ‘public’ and ‘reasonable’ would hamper its real intent; however, there is a broad consensus of opinion that points out its effectiveness in preventing broadcasters from continually airing only a single view. It stood as an explicit attempt to ensure the coverage of public issues and ensure the adequate coverage of alternative voices about those issues. The move to rescind this rule, however, would be in keeping with the free-market principle of keeping the government off the backs of the people. In response to the FCC repeal of 1987, though, Congress members appeared to counter by making the threatened Doctrine a Federal law. Despite wide acceptance in both the House of Representatives, where the proposal enjoyed a three-to-one margin, and the Senate, where it was accepted by a two-to-one margin, the proposed law was decidedly scuttled by a Reagan veto which upheld the original FCC ruling for rescindment of the Doctrine.

The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine was justified by its pro-market detractors on the questionable grounds that the scarcity argument on which it was founded no longer reflected the reality of mass media use in the 1980s (technology advances bringing wider public access to wider choice of news) and, further, that it curtailed the free expression of ideas (equating the free speech rights of the media corporation with that of a free citizen). The judgment of the FCC, for example, was based,

“…on two main claims: that the Doctrine’s procedures placed unacceptable limits on broadcasters, violating their First Amendment rights, and that it had a ‘chilling effect’ on the reporting of controversies, as editors sought to avoid being drawn into the complexities of expressing balanced views.” (Harvey, 1998, p. 547)

In the light on how these arguments were structured and presented one has liberty to question how natural and innocent was the development of media technologies since the 1970s since it prompted the crucial rhetoric of access that the media giants had sought since the 1920s when the regulatory rulings were put into effect on the grounds of frequency scarcity.

The impact of the 1987 repeal on actual news content will be discussed more fully in our account of Fox News in Chapter Eight; for the present we can briefly register how, during the years since, America has witnessed a fragmentation of voices on its airwaves which in balance favour the free-market ideologies of the corporate state.

As an example, we can measure the sudden emergence of talk-show host Rush Limbaugh who in 1988 was hired from a Sacramento AM radio station by former ABC radio network President Edward McLaughlin to lead the ABC/Capital Cities flagship station WABC (AM) in New York. According to Mazzocco (1994),

“Limbaugh, a vigorous supporter of Reagan’s ultra-conservative vision of a totally privatized corporate America reportedly came to McLaughlin’s attention through industry contacts. The commentator’s spirited, daily defense of Lt. Colonel North, William Casey and the rest of the Reagan administration had begun to attract large conservative audiences in Sacramento during the Senates 1987 Iran - Contra hearings… He blames all of America’s problems on “big spending Democrats, the lazy poor, and trouble-making minority rabble rousers”. As one of the most prominent, unabashed Reagan supporters on the national media stage, he usually delivers the same message: support corporations and the wealthy, cut taxes, make the military stronger, and boost the so-called free-market economy.” (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 136)

From the above we can deduce that the long-lasting impact which the scuttling of the Fairness Doctrine has had on the public debate in America cannot be overestimated. As the scope of debate seems to have narrowed, so, in consequence, the tone of exchange seems to have become more virulent. From their perspective Croteau and Hoynes (2000) were able to reflect on how,

“Since the abandonment of the Fairness Doctine, the FCC no longer requires stations to seriously address issues of public interest. If stations do address public issues, they can now create entire program schedules that communicate a single viewpoint without ever seriously considering alternative opinions… We must also remember that commercial interests drive almost all mass media. It is likely, therefore, that corporate owners of media outlets, unfettered by balance constraints, will feel no need to air the views of consumer advocates and business critics.” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000, p. 100)

 

Instead, what did emerge across the decade was a paradigm shift in the “talk show” (The Oprah Winfrey Show, 1986, The Jerry Springer Show, 1991, Ricki Lake, 1993). Their co-present mode of production that engineered regular vociferous vocal confrontations between ‘ordinary’ but screened guests seemed to promote the vivid impression that the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech rights was alive and well - but only, it seemed, to be found in the controlled social space of the television studios where interpersonal grievances could be dramatically aired and anchored by the controlling host”

CODA

2007 Update: The following sequence from Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs War on Journalism (2005)  underlines the consequences that followed the changes in media ownership rules, the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine of the 1980s. Richard Ailes, Fox News’ first CEO was former White House press aide to Richard Nixon and election manager for Ronald Reagan:-

Where to Now?

How About Corporate Media Beginnings?

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1920s-us-media-beginnings/

END

From Chapter Six: Case Study Analysis: Deep Impact (1998)

“Deep Impact (1998) is a variant on those blockbusters that emerged towards the end of the second millenium and which explored explicit Judeo-Christian apochrophal themes. Cynics would argue that they also capitalised on such fears. Within this doomsday genre, for example, we can include Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998), and, of course, Titanic (1998). In many respects, the film is a close version of Meteor (1979) which dramatised, however inadequately, the attempt by both U.S. and Russian astronauts to deflect a renegate meteor from its collision course with Earth.

In Deep Impact (1998), the autuerial stamp of Steven Spielberg is evident in its emphasis on family, God, community and heroic self-sacrifice, a character emphasis which leads in the last reel to a final saving purgation that returns America back to a land of renewed promise, still under God. Additonally, in an ironic Prodigal reversal that tracks his own corporate rise to the position of Exective Producer at DreamWorks, he was able to oversee the Z

anuck and Brown production team who twenty three years earlier had hired him as director for Jaws (1975).

Anchoring the Plot

One specific narrative feature, however, positions the film within those texts already cited. Though not strictly set within the conventions of the journalist genre, its epic narrative centre pivots on the career ambitions of another (white) female television/researcher/journalist (Jenny Lerner/Téa Leoni). It is her character arc to MicroSoft/NBC network star that holds the numerous narrative threads together - much in the same way that her function as news anchor secures the trust and that sense of security for the global television audiences as the asteroid hurtles towards Earth.

However, to secure this trusting effect for the film audience as well requires a very deft performance from Leoni the actress who must blend Jenny’s ‘real’ earnest persona ‘off’ camera with her new-found role as main anchor on television. Leoni’s own modest star status - with little carry-over from other films - makes her perfect casting for such a Cinderella role. The effect of transparency in performance, then, is vital if both film and television narratives and special effect images are to merge into an aesthetic whole and thus make both film and featured television audiences ‘one’ in the face of the coming catastrophe.

In this respect, the film and Leoni’s performance differ from Up, Close and Personal (1996) which goes some length to mark the tortured march Atwater must make from cable weather girl in Miami to network anchor in Philladelphia. Therefore, in Deep Impact (1998) there is no room for marked deconstructive ‘ironic’ juxtapositions between image and reality. On the contrary, as we will explore, it is part of the film’s overall agenda to secure in the mind of the film audience the reality of the epic encounter with the asteroid and the narrative events that surround it.

In the process - and as part of its rhetorical function - it also attempts to secure in the minds of the film audience that sense of trust in the news corporations which bring the news in the first instance. The fact that Paramount is owned by Viacom which owns CBS should not be far from our contextual frame. In addition, it also provides incidental moments of journalist research that, interestingly, go no further than a quick two-minute Internet browse.

The opening prelude allows us, the film audience, insight into the coming catastrophe - as scientists and amateur astronomers discover vital information that confirms the fateful collision between the asteroid and Earth eighteen months hence. A one-year jump cut takes us to the offices of MSNBC Washington, D.C. and a scene familiar to all journalist film genres - namely the day’s lead where assembled writers and their seasoned but engaging editor-in-chief haggle and pitch stories that might lead the coming day’s news agenda (Ehrlich, 1997). The chosen mise-en-scene here, however, reflects a lighter more engaging representation of corporate news journalism. While the board room suggests a corporate hightower building with the usual bank of television screens covering a back wall, this is neatly subsumed by a colour coding of soft pinks, light blues and gentle greys across office furniture, cups and wardrobe. The assembled cast of Black, Asian and Caucasian reporters of mixed gender all talk reasonably, listen thoughtfully and reflect wisely in considered phrases and weighted professional pauses. Set decor, polished performances and smooth editing all support the representation of a non-threatening harmonic professional working environment - without staff cuts, budget restrictions or pushy commercial sponsors lurking in the corridors.

Jenny is embedded at the back of the room amongst a number of researchers within the opening frame. Her first shot at prominance, however, comes with a statement that suggests a working, eager mind in operation when she informs the surprised reporters that the wife of the Secretary of the Treasury is an alchoholic and not sick, as they assumed. The information adds to the confusion concerning his recent resignation and will lead her, unknowingly, into uncovering the truth, as withheld by the government, that a collision with the comet is unavoidable. During the meeting she raises the possibility of taking a nighttime anchor role with her line manager, Beth/Laura Linnes. The resultant nettled exchange puts her career ambitions in quick check since she is firmly reminded that she is yet to establish her professional portfolio and that her expectations should, therefore, be more realistic. As Beth picks up her baby daughter from the office nursery and is asked by Jenny “are you protecting me or just holding me back?”, Beth asserts a short, clear but ambiguous “Yes” that stymies further discussion and returns Jenny dutifully back to her dull research routine. Following typical mainstream plot functions, this career block on the budding ambitions of our talented heroine helps establish audience sympathy and empathy for Jenny. More pertinant, though, is how this quick career appraisal in the corridor is undertaken by another, older white woman.

So while the plot point serves traditional functions, its gender inflection here positions the film firmly within a knowing 1990s contextual frame that serves two functions. First, it neatly and effortlessly underlines certain successes in the move towards securing greater equality in the (middle class) working environment that positively promotes the career chances of women. We should be mindful, however, that this remains an assumed and still qualified success, particularly in the media industry (Benokraitis and Feagin, 1995). Secondly, however, it serves to position such women in the traditional role of older villain to the heroic ambitions of the younger female generation. The sequence therefore neatly captures what Dow (1996) would recognise as the classic double-bind in the representation of minority figures within mainstream narratives that support and help structure hegemonic discourses. While one narrative level speaks for and seems to support Liberal agendas (look! nurseries in corporate offices!), a second, more sinister level of suggestive meaning, limits and controls that emancipatory move within more orthodox narrative frames: 1) you must get through the wicked witch to claim your goal, and, 2) it is still the mother who picks up the child. The fact that Jenny is also struggling and white would suggest by implication how successful the 1970s Feminist agenda has been in forwarding the careers of non-white females - of the kind we have already seen featured as star reporters in the White House conference room. In the competitive environment that seems the given, Jenny is therefore, a liminal character who must secure her rightful place over and above other women.

Having set the career obstacle within a skewed Feminist frame, the narrative then underscores Jenny’s difficulty with yet three other troubled woman - namely her smoking/drinking mother Robin/Venessa Redgrave, the alchoholic wife of the Secretary of State and Jenny’s new young step-mother.

Her meeting with her mother underscores their loving relationship at the moment Jason their father/former husband is getting married - “you now have a new step-mother”, Jenny is reminded, “who is two years older than you”. After a warm exchange and loving words, the camera then holds and pauses on the watching mother as she thoughtfully watches her daughter leaving the riverfront restaurant. At this point film audience and mother share the same point of view that frames Jenny in a departing lingering long shot.

With her personal life (subplot) now locked into the main plot, Jenny persues her research into the life of the Secretary of the Treasury, Alan Rittenhouse/James Cromwell. From his wife she learns of the name Ellie who everyone assumes is another woman and thus the reason for his sudden resignation. Her confused interview with the Secretary himself - busy loading his yacht for a long-term sea journey - is rich in narrative foreshadow. Initial attempts by Jenny to make friends with his young daughter are notably unsuccessful. Despite her wrong assumptions about Ellie, the former Secretary soon realises Jenny will unknowingly uncover and make public “the biggest story in history” (and indeed in a short time she will discover it as E.L.E. - Extinction Level Event). He therefore makes a final quiet appeal to justify his resignation, “…Look,“ he says, after pausing to consider his young daughter, “I know you’re just a reporter…but you used to be a person, right? I just want to be with my family, can you understand that?”.

The awkward exchange of looks across the scene from reporter to daughter are rich in subtextual weight and close the scene as the daughter is carried away by her loving, wary and anxious father. This subtextual motif of family togetherness very quickly weaves the epic scope of coming global catastrophe around Jenny’s professional and personal life - a life that will end in the arms of her father looking out to sea.

The invitation, then, to share her father’s recent marriage is more gruelling since it comes at a narrative point where, through her own investigative initiative on the Internet, she has fathomed the truth about E.L.E. - but for sound professional and security reasons, cannot share it. So while her father celebrates his future, she is aware of the severely limited time they all have available and urges him, much to his confusion, to return to his wife and her mother. The family dilemma underscores Jenny’s insecure hold on adult life - and what remains of it. Her parents’ estrangement makes her an orphan without a home, a woman lacking secure identity at a time of possible global destruction and interestingly in this regard we never see her domicile, her place of retreat and privacy. This gap is answered by her move towards news anchor at MSNBC which provides an arena of security that allows her to speak and perform the role of adult to her own parents, and, in time, the world. Her special invitation to the White House press conference provides such an early platform.

“we will prevail…”

It is at the conference that the President Beck/Morgan Freeman explains in graphic detail the path of the approaching asteroid and the Russian-American plans to deter it away from collision with the Earth. Jenny, now suited in sharp red, is allowed the opening questions and the extended exchange with the president that follows and which she leads brings her stage front before envious colleagues, family and in full view of a nationwide/global audience of television viewers. Her performance during this sequence remains wholly consistent with Leoni’s screen persona so far achieved - honest, unswerving, forthright, selfless - and leads as if naturally to the all important anchor position deemed essential if under such extreme conditions the news is to be fully trusted and understood by a worldwide audience. She has, after all, confirmed with President Beck himself that, “I’m not interested in using E.L.E. to further my career…” and, further “I always thought the truth was in the nation’s interest…”

Thus, distinguishing herself from the perceived stereotype of the hustling career obsessed journalist, she can shine above the fray and, in the glow of pure untainted professional competence, perform as a modest but forthright hero in her own right - a model of grace under cataclymic pressure. The film even goes to some length tracking her smooth competency in data mining the Internet where the worldwide web seems the only reliable means of sourcing information - her character does, after all, work for MSNBC itself.

This promotion comes five months later at another office conference where she sits at the table alongside Beth/Laura Innes. Her first anchor role is to cover the daring attempt by the astronauts of the Messiah mission to destroy the asteroid. The opening shot of her programme pans uncertainly down from the screen headlining her name and then holds on her eyeline delivery to the film audience who are - by extension - interpellated by her direct delivery as an assumed television audience as well. The uncritical weaving of both aesthetics is a feature already touched upon in Up, Close and Personal (1996).

Her initial uncertainty and slight stiffness gives way to a polished yet very human performance wherein Leoni’s role as Jenny Lerner meshes brilliantly with her new television role as lead anchor. This meshing of performance, then, supports the film’s own strategy of integrating film and (staggered) television audiences as combined watchers for whom Lerner performs as reliable witness, confidant and explainer of the mission tasks as they turn from hope through uncertainty to final disappointment and then disaster; for as she reassures the watching millions and without irony “we will stay on the air - we will stay with you through all of this…”.

Supporting this representation of professional naturalness is the absence in the script and on the screen of any studio factors that would otherwise remind us of the manufactured environment of news delivery as all shots or references to auto-cues, prepared scripts, or backroom countdowns to commercial breaks are rendered invisible by this film representation of broadcast news, circa 1998. In other words, the mise-en-scene of television’s representation of events is echoed and duplicated by the mise-en-scene of the film to the point where both narrative and film frames coalesce into one. In this respect, the film seems to make viable Fiske’s (1991) understanding of news broadcasting and the role of anchor, wherein,

“The relationships which are established between programme and audience, which set the viewer in place in a certain relation to the discourse here, a relation of identity and complicity - are sustained…by the presenters, who have a key role in anchoring those positions and in impersonating - personifying - them.” (Fiske, 1991, p. 54)

In our case, a Hollywood narrative produced and distributed by Viacom/Paramount, owner of CBS and featuring MSNBC, makes attempts to secure this process of legitimisation via the controlling mechanism of the widescreen cinema. The ‘master’ text, therefore, interpellates the film viewer as television viewer into accepting the authenticity of the ‘minor text’ which is the news telecast.

This theme is itself neatly fashioned as we enter act three and Jenny is given the responsibility to cover the last attempts to destroy the approaching asteroid. With the failure comes the news of a “New Noah’s Ark“ - the plan already in place to select and draw by lottery 1,000,000 representatives and secure their future and, through them, the hope of mankind in the caves of Missouri.

One element of the plan, though, deems that all those selected by lottery must be younger than 50 (this is another aspect of secret government planning that journalists and the film seems to uncritically accept). As Jenny delivers the news as a professional anchor we cut across a range of audiences for assumed responses - and particularly her own mother now watching and listening (in appropriate solemn sepia) to her daughter delivering the news that she will not be amongst the chosen few.

Both text and subtext merge as we acknowledge both the public and personal message that Jenny must deliver within the same frame and to the same camera lens and ‘directly’ to her mother. At this point a lens turn to close-up narrows the film frame to fully encompass the television frame and so we, as her mother, see Jenny the performer and Jenny the daughter becomes one in delivering the ominous news. Ironic juxtaposition is then employed in cutting from her mother’s darkened isolation to the colourful nursery where Beth watches the screen with her own daughter in her arms.

The cut across daughters and mothers foreshadows Jenny’s own fateful last-minute decision to substitute herself for the daughter of her line-manager, Beth. Her sudden grasp of the child and her leading run to the waiting helicopter posits her for the first time in a parental role. Her valiant selfless act of bravery foreshadows then the heroic self-sacrifice of the astronauts that splits the asteroid in a way that brings some major destruction to the East Coast of the United States, but saves Earth from destruction.

Genre Representation of the Female Reporter

The theme of identity is of course common amongst those films that track the female news journalist’s rise to success. While male journalists track the story, as in All the President’s Men (1976), females, alternatively, must negotiate the binary oppostion that sets professional against private role as already noted in both Broadcast News (1987) and Up, Close and Personal (1996).

To support this developmental character arc, the film employs visual and narrative motifs that attempt to explain in a more sophisticated way what actually propels Jenny towards the role of news anchor in the first instance - a role which allows the performer to achieve true self before millions of unseen watchers. It is a crucial motif which is introduced by her father as a last-minute attempt at reconciliation and after her mother’s lonely suicide towards the denouement of act three. Reference to one other important strand in contemporary film theory can help structure this specific analysis at this point.

Lacan on the Beach - Motivations and Identity Creation

The motif in question lies in the beguilingly simple black-and-white A4 phototgraph of her father on a beach with a five-year-old Jenny held aloft on his shoulders, and is the same photograph which her mother lovingly takes to her own carefully prepared death. He presents it to Jenny as “proof” that she is not an orphan, a record of “..a beautiful day…such a good day for all of us…don’t you remember…?”. But, still the little girl, she affects not to remember.

The photograph, then, records a primal scene of family togetherness, made all the more resonant by the choice of natural location - a desolate white sand-duned beach - and whose significance is sharpened by the fact that the source image maker is the unseen mother who frames and captures this singular moment of family ecstasy, since “there was no-one there to hold the camera…but she insisted…”.

References to female identity, ‘images’ and ‘primal scenes’ lean invariably towards a theoretical discourse that embraces Lacanian film theory and, indeed, it could be argued, the film operates, however crudely, as a narrative outline of key Lacanian principles as explored in media/literary theory. From this critical frame, then, this frozen moment can be seen to exist in that unified imaginary world which for Lacan functions ambiguously but very powerfully as the mirror stage. The realm is an ambiguous one since,

“The child finds itself reflected back to itself a gratifyingly unified image of itself and although its relation to this image is still of an ‘imaginary’ kind - the image in the mirror both is and is not itself - it has begun the process of constructing a centre of self.” (Eagleton, 1992, p. 164)

In this universe, the self is an abstract sign, always constructed by the surounding language which, like any other sign, finds only temporary surity amongst the flux of changing, often more dominant contexts. In this respect, Jenny’s earlier quest for meaning from her surrogate mother Beth - “are you protecting me or just holding me back?” - is doubly frustrated by the clear yet highly ambivalent answer of “Yes” that denies such helpful context from her line-manager. The corporate line-manager thereby makes entry into the adult world impossible since, ideologically speaking, contexts and identities change only within the guiding determinants of overriding power relations that here, in the case of Beth, denies Jenny access both to her chosen career and her adult life. So, in this particular narrative frame towards the end of the film, the photograph takes on increasingly weighted significance. In this respect we are reminded - however tentatively - of Fiske’s (1991) own account that pointedly describes how,

“Thus a photograph of a scene (which maybe understood as a “fixed“ reflection) is often more pleasurable to look at than the scene iself, for it can close the gap between the imaginary and the real, and pleasure derives from the extent to which the unity is achieved, this gap is closed.” (Fiske, 1991, p. 59-60)

However, the object of identity confirmation - whether it be a photograph, another person, or, for 1970s film scholars, a film sequence - functions through the process of interpellation that hails ourselves yet remains somehow alien to ourselves.

For clarification in what can be, for some, a notoriously tortured account of psychoanalysis as applied to literary/film theory, we can return to Eagleton (1992)

“The imaginary for Lacan is precisely this realm of images in which we make identifications, but in the very act of doing so are led to misperceive and misrecognize ourselves… As a child grows up it will continue to make such imaginary identifications with objects, and this is how its ego will be built up… For Lacan, the ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify.” (Eagleton, 1992, p. 165)

That process propels the growing ego towards changing loci of identification throughout life, always approaching but never arriving, with only momentary assurances of self that never quite satisfy the lingering lack of former assumed completion. Beth’s “Yes” is the positive and negative that fixes us uncertainly both ambiguously ‘in’ and ‘out’. In the broader field this may explain the extended longevity of U.S. broadcast anchors whose regular appearances over the decades provide for the television audience this very sense of unitary selfhood that, particularly in times of crisis, merges the ‘you’, the ‘we’ into the ‘us’.

So, as the remains of the giant asteroid swerves to crash into the Atlantic, Jenny evacuates her office, but returns momentarily to retain the beach photograph. With it, she arrives at the primal scene itself - the same beach where her father waits amongst the sand dunes for the inevitable coming end. Despite her earlier protests to the contrary, in her reconciliation with her father she admits that,

JENNY

When you came to the studio and brought those pictures, I lied when I said I didn’t remember. I remember everything. I remember we were right over there and that’s when mum got the picture of the house. It was a perfect happy day.

Their sense of momentary family wholeness is achieved ultimately in submitting to the tidal wave of death that engulfs them (we should note again how the scene is neatly foreshadowed in act one in the weighted comment by the Secretary of the Treasury who, in the knowledge of coming doom, wanted simply to be with his family: “can you understand that…?” and by Chloe’s own most recent decison to be with her mother)

In this way Jenny’s work before the television camera is an attempt - and, in Lacanian terms, an inevitable failed one - to duplicate that imaginary wholeness that father and daughter celebrate in their photograph and try to accomplish in death. Her mother, of course, oversees both images - as creator of the defining photograph and as viewer of the televisual image.

So, under this critical paradigm, it can be tentatively argued that while Jenny persues her enquiries as a researcher and while she then becomes the safe and secure voice of calm and authority in a world given to growing panic and despair, she is at the same time trying to secure some permanent sense of self-fulfillment at the focus of the studio camera eye - and, moreover, the controlling and defining presence behind it, her watching mother.

“They trust you” - The Female Anchor as Everyman

With just four weeks and two days to go before the fatal impact, both mother and daughter walk peacefully along the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. for what will be their last screen time together. Under telling stately shots of Capital Hill and the Lincoln Memorial her mother calmly reflects on, “…how liberating it is not to be called…”. Jenny, though, is characteristically racked with modest self-doubt, claiming “It seems kinda unfair that I got picked…I’m not a doctor or a scientist…”, to which her mother confidently answers, “…people need continuity, everyone knows you and they trust you…”

That sense of continuity is clearly emphasised in those scenes showing the professionalism with which Jenny calmly reports the mayhem and global panic that then engulfs the world during the final days before impact. However, such mayhen seems not to touch the safe secure zone of her own television studio where (less) people still have meetings and drink designer coffee from large paper cups.

The claim that Jenny represents continuity and trustworthiness exposes the film’s ideological agenda that furthers the cause of corporate news broadcasting in America at a time in the 1990s when, as we have gathered, public and academic concerns about such corporate ownership was growing. In this respect we can summarise a number of points that position the film firmly within the corporate culture which it claims to represent and realistically portray and for which, as a product of that culture, it speaks.

We have already touched on Leone’s finely tuned performance(s) that seamlessly web her worthy selfless character profile to her effective trustworthy anchor position. The same can be said of Morgan Freeman’s President Beck who meshes his roles on and off the television camera. In one interesting instance during his first press conference he actually performs the role of television anchor himself by interviewing the crew of the Messiah, thus giving further legitimacy both to the role Jenny will later take and the thankless task of news anchor generally. In addition, we should be alert to the dramaturgical significance of the news conference itself - which, beyond the screens (or only ‘on’ them), exists as a simulacrum in the real world of Washington, D.C. politics, an entirely fabricated forum specifically designed to provide only certain access to the White House administration updates yet which serves only to canal ‘information’ to hailed journalists who perform their assigned role as invited supporting players. The realistic and non-critical duplication and representation of such a staged arena merely serves to legitimise this highly questionable process of White House news delivery and journalist practice/capture.

Transparency Fallacies

To return to earlier themes, the representation of broadcast news itself is in keeping with this agenda of transparency. As Jenny seems always ‘on’, so the script never allows for costume change decisions, make-up calls or line rehearsals, no on-air instructions from the control booth direct her delivery, no technical glitches interrupt the smooth flow of the broadcasts and no executives confer about ratings or advertising revenue. Indeed there is no reference to any commercial break - which is significant in an operation depending entirely on such a vital income source. The broadcaster, we are led to believe, seems only focused on delivering relevant public service news programming to the mass audience, thereby fulfilling its mandate as a responsible and responsive public utility with a social conscience free of political or economic agendas. Performance and mise-en-scene work towards a visual aesthetic that in its representation on film supports news television’s claim to record and report unmediated reality.

The first Presidential conference is notably interesting in this respect since it cuts seamlessly from the ‘live’ event to its reception amongst various groups in the United States - these include families, Jenny’s parents, the Messiah crew in Houston and crowds in New York’s Time Square (foregrounding a billboard for Panasonic). The representation of audience response - always engaged, receptive, believing - is itself a crucial element in the interpellative loop that attempts to co-align the film audience with staged television audiences and their belief in the unfolding drama. By seguing the action and dialogue across both film and television screen reifies the Realist aesthetic that underpins their overall ideological projects of both film and television modes of address - something which both MSNBC and Viacom/CBS would have a vested interest in.

The casting of Morgan Freeman as a black President Beck alerts us to the film’s surface Liberal coding, though in keeping with mainstream agendas this is continually contradicted by more traditional and orthodox plot strands that ensure a final closure that ideologically seems to settle these tensions. The only young couple who are foregrounded to survive, for example, are white, they marry and are last seen atop the Adirondacks with a shrouded baby having undertaken their perilous Biblical flight from “the waters”.

Freeman’ casting, though, as the honourable and dignified U.S. President Beck who believes in a (Christian) God and the power of prayer, should alert us to a more significant ideological manoeuvre that touches on the representation of Washington, D.C. politics in general. In this context, the film aligns itself with a range of Hollywood films that serve to remind the lawmakers of how central the mass media is in securing their own legitimisation in the public sphere. This is particularly the case when, as at present, Hollywood films are more than ever produced by the same media conglomerates that produce news broadcasting in the first instance (ABC/Disney and CBS/Viacom) and whose expensive commercial air time the politicians must submit to during election times (McChesney, 1999).

Hence, though the film makes initial gestures towards questioning Washington, D.C. practices and agendas - the Secret Service and White House staff are presented in act one in threatening postures, even colliding with Jenny’s car - the film soon turns towards a more reconciliatory representation of Washington, D.C. politics that shows the media obligingly report policies that have already been secretly set but which emerge only when circumstances deem appropriate. The Noah’s Ark scenario, for example, wherein 200,000 special representatives are chosen, is dutifully explained but never questioned by the station’s journalists, or the film itself.

The transparent effect, then, that weaves actor performance, mise-en-scene and twinned aesthetics takes on wider more worrisome ideological ramifications since it neatly segues the ‘innocent’ operations of the corporate media with questionable central administration policy that legitimately withholds vital information highly relevant to the future of the planet. The aforementioned shift by the role of President to anchor/interviewer would be symptomatic of this overall alignment of special political, ideological and aesthetic interests.

Deep Impact (1998) was one of several blockbuster epics which emerged in the closing years of the second millenium. Like those films it became itself a media event that ritualised the fears that many had about the coming Armaggedon, and like several other films on our list it had as its representative Everyman a television news anchor.

One other title, Costa Gravas’s Mad City (1997) explored the nature of threat in more pedestrian terms - as something emerging not from outer space, but from the inner contradictions of the Republic itself.”

Where Now?

How about another film, this time from 1986:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1970s-case-study-film/1980s-case-study-film-broadcast-news/

END

Alan Taylor has been delighted to be invited by Uni. Prof. Dr. Winfried Fluck to teach at the prestigious J.F.K Institute for North American Studies, Freie University of Berlin for the 2007 Spring/Summer Semester. A further course in FIlm Studies will follow for the Fall Term of 07-2008.

July 16th 2007: The course has now come to a close, though we do have 23 students currently working on their Research Papers. In fact, as of July 17th 2007, the first are coming through the system (!). Suggested reading list for essentail sequence analysis: Film Art (Brodwell) & How to Read A Film (Monaco). Both books stand side-by-side in the JFK-I library.

For a review of the course, here is the Weekly Schedule, though subject to changes as we proceeded: at-jfk-i-sum-07-week-schedule.pdf …and, as requested, highlights from the PowerPoint Presentations:at-film-jfk-i-sum-07-pp-hilites.pdf

Details of the Fall 2007-2008 Film Studies Programme at the J.F.K.I can be found here: http://kinowords.edublogs.org/jfk-fu-berlin/

Requirements for a Schein for the Spring Term - ‘The Conference Project’

1. Regular attendance (80% pus)

2. Productive and regular seminar contributions that forward and deepen our interest area, and which would be highlighted by a short descriptive account in the paper below…

3. “No text without context”: A research paper (20 pages). The hypethetical (or real?) audience for the paper is to be one of the many 2007 conferences on our subject and as listed, for example, in the links below. There will need to be a recogniseable U.S context to the paper.

• http://www.nordicom.gu.se/eng.php?portal=conf

• http://www.conferencealerts.com/film.htm

Submission of the research paper would of course be supplemented with an introductory descriptive account of the chosen conference details, its assumed audience profile, expectations and the contemporary relevance of the research to such an audience.

One core element will be a descriptive analysis of a film/media text and, of course an abstract that will be undertaken as a first draft.

DEADLINES & GUIDES

THE DEADLINE for the Research Paper (RP) is Sunday September 30th, 2007. All necessary details (content, structure and contact/delivery procedures) are now here:

• rp-jfk-i-su-07-guide.pdf

::::::::::::::::::::::::::TICKERTAPE UPDATES:::::::::::::::::::::::

• June 2007, JFK-I Newsletter profile on Course Leader, ALAN TAYLOR, page 11, by Tobias, JFK-I Student Journalist: http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/newsletter/newsletter04.pdf

• In construction: As of May 2007 we have a latest J.F.K.-I student website that incudes reviews, research plans and sample work: http://americannight.uniblogs.org/ (the title might change..).

• For added interest, our course is now listed amongst others that promote the advancement of Media Literacy across Europe http://www.euromedialiteracy.eu/index.php?Pg=index&Ug=allnews …and the advancement of new technologies in education, the Pro-Learn Virtual Competence Network: http://www.prolearn-online.com/links.php

• Berlin/NPR from the U.S.: The U.S. National Public Radio broadcasting channel (no ads!) now extends to Berlin. The 24 hour schedule of radio news, views, insights and reviews from Washington. D.C is excellent: http://www.npr.org/worldwide/berlin/ …as is their website.

OUR SUMMER 2007 SCHEDULE WAS AS FOLLOWS:-

WEEK 1. April 16th

• Coverage: Broad overview, issues and debates, core texts & film samples, ie:

•  

•  

•  

•  

• Links of the Week: US media histories, cultural theory & 2006/7 journalism…

• Excellent PDF Map on U.S. Media Today: http://www.thenation.com/special/2006_entertainment.pdf

• Kenneth Burke: http://nightfly.googlepages.com/kennethburke

• http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i32/32a02601.htm

• Gramsci: http://www.victoryiscertain.com/gramsci/

• USA Media now: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/

• US Media & Iraq War. Timeline from FAIR: “This timeline is an attempt to recall some of the worst moments in journalism, from the fall of 2002 and into the early weeks of the Iraq War. It is not an exhaustive catalog, but a useful reference point for understanding the media’s performance.”: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3062

WEEK 2. April 23rd

• Coverage: US Mass media beginnings: Signal Corps,GE, RCA, NBC, CBS, radio developments, Radio Act 1927, “toll broadcasting”.

• Links of the Week: RCA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA

• Communications Act of 1934: http://www.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf

WEEK 3. April 30th

• Coverage: From Radio to TV, into the 1930s, to the 1940s.

• Link of the Week: http://www.mztv.com/mz.asp

WEEK 4. May 7th

• Coverage: 1950s, the TV network & Hollywood, Universal Pictures.

• Link of the Week: http://vlib.iue.it/history/USA/ERAS/20TH/1950s.html

WEEK 5. May 14th

• Coverage: into the 1970s, advertisers or terroritsts? Network, 1976

• Link of the Week: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29

WEEK 6. May 21st

• Coverage: The 1980s, Reagan, media deregulation, new technologies, Fairness Doctrine, Broadcast News, 1987

• Link of the week: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm

Week 7. NO SESSION MAY 28th

However, core reading for next week is: The Communications Act of 1996: http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html

Search also, Bill # S.652/ENR, 1996 below.

Also, now that we are engaging with vital developments in Film Theory since the 1970s, all students and researchers would do well to review coverage on Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure, by Laura Mulvey, ie:

• http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/research/staff/staffMembers/MulveyLaura

WEEK 8. June 4th

• Coverage: the 1990s: Washington & Hollywood. Independence Day, 1996, Up, Close & Personal, 1996; Contact, 1998.
• Link of the Week: Search Communications Act, 1996, in 104th Congress, Bill # S.652/ENR:
• http://thomas.loc.gov/home/multicongress/multicongress.html
• John Gregory Dunne’s MONSTER, Living Off the Big Screen. Scripting the Film. http://www.amazon.com/Monster-Living-Off-Big-Screen/dp/0679455795
• PM Film: MAD CITY

WEEK 9. June 11th.

• Coverage: Detalied whole film anaylsis, staged viewing of Deep Impact, 1998, part one.

• Link of the Week: on Corporate Media of the 1990s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_media

• PM Film: EDtv 8(1998)

WEEK 10. June 18th

Core feature: Deep Impact, part 2….

• Tonight’s film:

WEEK 11. June 25th.

Round Table: Students now on the research project have an opporunity to introduce their work in progress; ie:

1. Conference source…?

2. Theme - the general aea of interest…why important…?

3. Core area of analysis…sample texts…

CL will show a sequence from a film as a core sample…

• Tonight’s Film: The Insider (1999, dir. Mann)

WEEK 12. July 25th, 2007

A pick-up on general themes, subtexts, narratives, representations, histories…Core analysis:Wagthe Dog (1997). Part One

 

The FINAL Evening screening will be Quiz Show (1994, Dir. Robert Redford)

 

• Links of the Week: Female Journalists in Herstory: http://www.goddesscafe.com/FEMJOUR/femjour.html

• 2007 Katie Couric & CBS: http://www.nypost.com/seven/03152007/tv/couric_picks_up_speed_tv_adam_buckman.htm

WEEK 13. July 9th.Screening, part 2 of Wag the Dog (1997)

WEEK 14. July 16th

• Coverage: Reviews, Conlcusions, Extract Specials
• July 16th 1969, commemoration sequence of Apollo 11 launch
• Review of 1990s broadcast news insights - Bosnia, USA
• Review of film sequence from Deep Impact (1998)
• Final (!) FOX News Sequence, Guerilla Shopping & Bible sales, 2001
• The final sequence from the Heroes Charity, 2001: Hollywood sings farewell

• Links of the Week: http://www.corporatewatch.org/
• Excellent On-Line exhibition from the Museum of the Moving Image on the History of Televised Presidential Commericals entitled The Living Room Candidate, & running through 2008…
  Download

And as our course comes to a close, we note the contemporary relevance of our study: MSNBC makes its own news about the news….June 2007:

• http://zeitgeist.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/06/29/249575.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

• And the You Tube recording of Mika Brezezinski’s on-air contention against the prevalence of celebrity WAS here, now deleted (!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAcU3HSMKPU. Amongst other things, we can also consider the uncomfortable gender relationships that is also revealed in the exchange with her ‘fellow’ male leads.
• Here is the Act 2 follow-up report from MSNBC, as posted, again on YouTube and, again WAS here, since deleted…
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQAmMBQSLj4&mode=related&search=

• Finally, an excellent authoritative snapshot report of US Journalism/Media, 2007:
• http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/

AND: North American News Outlets and Related Government Websites from The Guardian, UK:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldnewsguide/northamerica/0,,618255,00.html

ADIOS Amigos

For Details of 2007 Fall Term Seminar Programme, Hollywood on Hollywood, and Evening Screening Programme odf Documentaries, see:-

• http://kinowords.edublogs.org/jfk-fu-berlin/

Where to Now?

How About When Redford and Cruise came to visit us here in Berlin?:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/2007-lions-for-lambs/

END

This weblog is based on the 2005 publication, “We,the media…”, a history and working practices of US broadcast news, cable news and Reality TV and as represented by Hollywood  since the 1970s. Published by Peter Lang…London, Vienna, Frankfurt, Brussels, New York, Berlin, and Oxford.

Further such representations continued into 2008:

 

REVIEW…

“Alan Taylor’s penetrating study examines how the U.S. media shape the public discourse and, consequently, American foreign policy…

Taylor identifies how cross-ownership is used to reinforce this ideological message - specifically, how film is used to reinforce the legitimacy of another medium: news broadcasting.. .

Taylor takes a historical approach to the evolution of U.S. corporate media, from the beginning of the U.S. broadcast system in the 1920s to the media coverage of the Iraq war, paying particular attention to the events of 9/11. The author declares: “The question to ask is: have we invited a press to witness a war, or have we created a war to prove that this freedom of expression is possible?”…

Taylor employs elements of a number of approaches - Rhetorical resp. Dramaturgical Perspective, and certain key elements of the Auteur theory - sometimes moving from one approach to another. He establishes a historical overview, generating a chronology that demonstrates the development of the concentration of ownership n the U.S. media…

One of the objectives of the book, then, is to encourage a more active citizenry: a “wakeful political literacy” that promotes critical understanding of the current state of American mainstream media. The book also examines the pedagogical implications of this ideological function of the U.S. mass media., calling for a curriculum that encourages critical thinking skills…

Altogether, this is a very thorough, penetrating study that furnishes a valuable perspective into the American media system”

(Art Silverblatt, Dept of Media Literacy, Webster University, Missouri, 2006, see sidebar for full transcription).

A special welcome, therefore, extends to BA and MA students of that organization, as well as visitors from across the five continents…

OVERVIEW.

George Clooney’s independent “Good Night and Good Luck” (2005) takes its important place in an established genre lineage that, since the 1970s, has concerned the developments in U.S. commercial news broadcasting. The film’s focused insight into the strident protests of renowned Edward E. Murrow against the dubious operations of the profiteering networks in the 1950s clearly alludes, as well, to contemporary concerns over the quality and direction of U.S. commercial news operations in the 21st Century.

The film’s critical and commercial success - as topped by 2006 Oscar recognitions - confirm how relevant these issues remain for present-day audiences.

“We, the media…”: This 418-page study helpfully places “Good Night and Good Luck” in a deep historical context by focusing on thirteen Hollywood films that, from the 1970s to the 1990s, also assumed - in various ways - to represent the working practices of the U.S. corporate broadcast & cable news media.

The book argues that such corporate film output - from Disney to 20th Century Fox - became carefully authored public relations manoeuvres - while posing, at the same time, as leading examples of trends from a more knowing post-modern Hollywood.

It becomes a more genuine irony that such corporate films - particularly after the Communications Act of 1996 - became rhetorical counterstrokes to growing public disquiet about media ownership, gender representation, mergers, free speech, new technologies, war coverage, and the influential powers of market journalism itself.

This structured genre analysis is enriched by contextual histories which, since the 1920s, consider relevant legal, institutional and political interventions in the early development of the U.S. public media. Later chapters are dedicated to recent news coverage post 9/11.

2008 UPDATE: U.S. LIBRARY ACQUISITIONS

We are pleased to note the increased sales of the book, particularly across U.S university libraries; these are but a few: Arizona State/Atlanta/Brown/East Carolina/Emerson/ Georgia State/Harvard College/ Indiana/Iowa//MIT/New York/ Ohio/Penn/Regents Rutgers/UCLA/University of California at Irvine, San Diego & Santa Barbara/Central Florida/Illinois/Miami/Oklahoma/Washington, Lee & Yale…

 

 

 

 “Since when has the paragon of investigative journalism allowed lawyers to determine the content on 60 Minutes?”.

The following sequence from Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999) should provide a helpful trailer to this on-going study.

 This is the Act 2 plot point where CBS 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman/Al Pacino confronts his compromised managers with the seedy side of corporate media mergers at CBS itself (we should note that the film was made by Touchstone/Disney, owner of CBS rival ABC):-

 “We, the media…” is designed, therefore, to serve the related interests of media educationalists, specialists in film, and students of U.S. media law and broadcast news histories.

 Film titles under analysis in this blog include, Network, Broadcast News, Up, Close and Personal, Deep Impact, and The Insider. These are complete chapters from the published book, copyright retained. Other film titles analysed in the book are: All That Heaven Allows, All The President’s Men, Quiz Show, Independence Day, Mad City, EDtv, The Truman Show, and Wag the Dog.

 

 

 

Where Now?

How about the Introduction?:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/introduction/

Or A Case Study film from 1998?:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1970s-case-study-film/1998-case-study-film-deep-impact/

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Finally, in dedication to Charles Swann, American Studies, Keele University

“To be taught by him, to know and care for him was not to be comforted; rather it was to be nudged towards the intense pleasure of rethinking by a generous and courageous intellectual presence.”

 UPDATES: http://kinowords.wordpress.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Update October Bulletin & Film Review on The Berlin Premiere

“The Kino International Berlin on the Karl Marx Strasse - still rightly proud of housing one of the finest screens in Europe - was completed in 1963, the same year Robert Redford struck his first property claims in the Utah mountains and one year after Tom Cruise was born. In October 2007 both movie icons converged on the magnificent former GDR cinema showcase to attend a full evening’s exclusive premiere presentation of Redford’s latest directorial work, Lions for Lambs (2007) - as sponsored by Der Spiegel and the might of Hollywood synergies: 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Cruise’s own United Artists (Oct 23rd, 18.30-22.00).

The film was then followed by a podium discussion featuring Stefan Aust (Manager, Der Spiegel), Professor Heinrich August Winkler (Historian, Humboldt Berlin), Joschka Fischer (former Foreign Minister, Germany), and, sat between them, Mr. Redford himself.

Three hours before, though, the fresh October night was favourable to the hundreds of on-lookers who flanked the red carpet outside the International Kino, overseen by the Alexanderplatz TV Tower that glowed purple, gold and green in the Berlin night sky (original picture by author).

 

By 6. 40 Cruise, Forbes magazine’s most powerful world celebrity in 2006, was posing with his wife Katie Holmes for the bank of frantic camera personnel from Sat 1, Reuters, Spiegel, and Pro Sieben (right, orignial picture by author)

Studio Boss

When he and his production team as led by Paula Wagner arrived on stage to a packed audience at 7.50 empty beer bottles could be already heard underfoot clinking their way to the stage. Firstly, Cruise was quick to praise his director and co-producer, an artist and man he greatly “admired” and proud that their film together was the first off the block from the “new United Artists”, the company he bought soon after his 14 year relationship with Paramount was terminated in August 2006 by VIACOM CEO Sumner Redstone.

Studio Chief Cruise took the stage to kiss good-bye to Berlin where, for the last two months, he has been filming Valkyrie. Awkward press coverage on set accidents, injuries and location prohibitions were soon forgotten as he claimed to have “…studied and tried to understand the history of your country”, that it had been “a unique experience” and that he and his family were “…not ready to quite let go” of the city and the country that had been so hospitable. “When we leave tomorrow you will be missed” he made clear. With a warm applause and his prompt departure from the stage, the monumental silver laced curtains widened slowly and the celebrated trailers for News Corporation’s 20th Century Fox and MGM heralded the start of the film.

 

The Berlin event, then, following similar openings in New York and London, was more than just about a film. It was a statement of industry presence.

Redford in Reflective Mode

It easily escapes notice that despite the number and range of films (over 30) Redford has only directed himself in one other film - The Horse Whisperer of 1998. Now, at the age of 71, what fires the core conflict in his latest work centers upon the younger generation, which he feels, has been “distracted” by the onslaught of new technologies - the Internet and entertainment TV, he mentioned specifically as examples, and “for reasons we won’t go into tonight”. Concerns about the derelict state of U.S broadcast media, of course, are not new to Redford. Since producing and playing Bob Woodward in All The Presidents Men (1976) Redford has had a keen interest in the mix of corrupted politics and a failing standards in U.S news media.

In the seventies he depicted a noble presidential grassroots campaign ground down by polls, ratings and televisual good image (The Candidate, 1972), in the 1990s he undercut the seductions and subtle evasions of contemporary Reality TV in a retrospective unveiling of the NBC quiz show scandals of the late 1950s (Quiz Show, 1994); and two years later he played opposite Michelle Pfeiffer as the jaundiced cable news producer Warren Justice in Up, Close and Personal of 1996. The commercial pressure under which the former ace Washington D.C reporter must grudgingly operate - “if it bleeds it leads”- is a knowing measure of the failed aspirations of 1976 where two valiant underdog journalists (Woodward/Redford, Bernstein/Hoffman) were shown to be central in detonating the vilely corrupt Nixon administration.

 

Since then, as we know,  CBS is part of VIACOM, NBC belongs to General Electric and Disney owns ABC.

 

Answering the auteurist call, then, Redford, returns in Lions for Lambs (2007) to a theme he has been warming to for forty years - as hyphenate producer, director and actor in his own right. Again, according the genre, it’s the same tortured wrangling over media ethics, political deviations from truth, and played out against another foreign war.

As Redford acknowledged later, the film tries to tackle a central dramaturgical challenge, since there are “…very few films that use dialogue as a dynamic…(it was a) challenge to take the dialogue down to the bones”. This becomes increasingly apparent as the film crosscuts between two extended interview exchanges: in his California office Professor Stephen Lacey (Redford) tackles with the failing commitment of a promising student (British actor Andrew Garfield), while at the same time over in his Washington D. C office, Top Gun Senator Jasper Irving of West Point and Harvard (Cruise) attempts to convince broadcast journalist Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) of a new military initiative for Afghanistan - a story exclusive which she is expected to cover. What stitches these exchanges together is the third corner of the “triptych” (Redford), Irving’s military initiative now turning to disaster on a mountaintop in East Afghanistan. Here, African-American Arian (Derek Luke) and Hispanic-American Ernest (Michael Pena) and, as it happens, two of Lacey’s former students, are stranded Rangers fighting a nighttime contest against wounds, snow blizzards and the encircling Taliban. Within minutes, therefore, we are swiftly parachuted into the three main centres of power and influence that connect education, politics and media - the rich brew that, according the U.A marketing, generates Redford’s “wake-up call to America”.

Whatever  Happened to ‘Show, Don’t tell’?

Yet it soon becomes obvious, that’s where scriptwriter Mathew Michael Carnahan wants us to stay, and in a film, which for Redford, is designed to make us “stop and think”. However, the High Noon momentum (both office meetings are scheduled for an hour) is punctured by flashback scenes in classrooms, lecture rooms, and a restaurant, which leads to Lacey’s frustrated attempt to derail his student’s (respected) voluntary enlistment. These sequences, though crucial for the plot and the shading of Arian and Ernest, merely stagger the little progress that’s made on the West Coast - where Lacey now tries to engage with his student’s cynicism and on the East where Roth/Streep is confronted with her own complicity in the post 9/11 rush to war. The news media as a Windsack, as Irving caustically puts it.

The kaleidoscopic coverage of headline themes, the wasting consumer culture, political disengagement, news bias, Washington D. C ambitions, war as industry by other means, is for a brief moment lightened as we scan Irving’s office and zoom with Roth/Streep on a supportive press image of Irving/Cruise with Bush 43.

Despite such moments, the story as a drama quickly becomes a domestic labour of angst that, for two hours, entraps its audience in an extended trek through post-60s U.S cultural history, and with none of the sexy outtakes. The visceral effect of such claustrophobia is an ironic one, since while we remain genuinely concerned about the nighttime fate of Ernest and Arian on the other side of the world, tension is finally relieved in tracking Steep’s post-interview daylight escape into the Washington D.C streets. Look! Taxis, movement, air!

In fact, there was a point - perhaps twenty minutes into the film - when this writer put aside his notes (Acts 1, 2 and 3 were already demarcated but left blank) and closed his eyes. It was a useful test. The film ran perfectly well, in fact better. I wasn’t anchored to endless medium shots in Lacey’s agonized tutorial, I didn’t have to struggle with actor Streep as she dug (brilliantly) deeper into her limited role, nor have to admire Cruise mimic someone else’s smooth sell. The intractability of the rich but stodgy material was confirmed by Redford’s later acknowledgement that it “…was a difficult film to edit…difficult thing to work together“. This no doubt explained the special thanks to Oscar winner Walter Murch that is tucked way in the end titles. In hindsight, the grand location and honorific manner of the exclusive presentation in Berlin seemed bloated and inappropriate in the case of a film which tries nobly to be smaller, more intense and intimate than the combined studio marketing of Fox, MGM and U.A. would allow (in an effort to please everybody, the film’s protracted end credits - that might compare with those of Ben Hur (1959) - even include ‘Mr Cruise’s Bus Driver’).

Screenplay or Radio Script?

Despite post-production tinkering from the estimable Mr. Murch, Lions for Lambs (2007) remains an awkward display of strangled star turns that, despite grand marketing displays across the world are stuck in a constricted Hollywood production that, in another world, would otherwise easily pass as an excellent radio script.

Its advance to a workable film script would require, for example, a condensation of all present elements into what, in the old days, would be the five minute opening credit sequence. Mr Murch would ride supreme on that material. With the set up in place, we would then follow through to the Classic centre - the teaming of West Coast Professor Lacey and East Coast Journalist Roth and follow then their noble attempts to thwart the Presidential ambitions of Irving. But that might reek of John Grisham and the kind of film that Cruise might feel he needs to mature away from. Or, more positively, it would be suggestive of the old United Artists of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin which, between 1955 and 1977, won 10 Best Picture Oscars and gave truly great character studies such as us High Noon, 1952: Marty, 1955; One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest, 1975; Network, 1976; and Raging Bull, 1980.

As it is, the present film has its eye on both keeping the Cruise/Wagner production budget within effective limits and following through with Mr Redford’s political commitments that value “Democratic values…of debate and dissent…” which, he emphasised at the beginning of his podium appearance, he has always “taken very seriously…” In this respect, at least, the new U.A shares a vital heritage with the old. As such, it could have been written by any one of the current crop of Democratic candidates - establishing its clear anti-war principles, while being pro-troops, and therefore, in its own way, pro-American.

On reflection, and in consideration of Redford’s disillusionment with news media and the current administration (“Anything but what we got now”), his film seems to attempt the kind of direct prolonged engagement with audiences that U.S. television used to champion as its prime remit. Networked points of stopping and thinking.

The Director in Berlin

The uncertain dramatic arc of the present film may have explained the audience’s respectful but limp applause at its falling end. They were expecting a second act. What we are left with is a young man with a decision to make. However, Redford’s spirited appearance on stage, dispelled any audience qualms about the film (in a surreal mirroring of the film itself, he and Cruise were choreographed separately across the evening, never actually appearing together).

Answering questions about the relevance of art in general, it could function, Redford said, “…as a translation of cultural situations…to put before the public issues that can be seem more clearly and more strongly…” Not that Redford is naïve about the power of film itself or art in general to change any status quo. Drawing on his own arc of realization that began with The Candidate (1972), Redford repeated earlier accounts on the failed ambitions of that film: that its message would have an impact, “As you see. No”.

Sitting forward towards the audience, Redford cast across his life - from World War 2, through the McCarthy Era, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contra to the present, and outlined his main aim in his present film…to make clear the “repeated pattern of the same mind set” at work. Since Sept 12th 2001, for example, “they were playing the fear card very heavily”.

Towards the end of the discussion, Redford tried to lighten the mood by suggesting that the only direct influence that film had was in the area of fashion - his Sundance moustache of 1968 became a celebrated example in what was obviously a patterned closing trope.

The savvy deflection towards self-mockery worked. On that engaging note, the bouquets arrived, thanks and plaudits were exchanged, and Mr Redford, renowned filmmaker, Oscar winner, environmentalist, political provocateur, inspiration, and actor edged through the assembling crowd to exit in a side door and back to Utah.

For this writer, Redford has taken a quick opportunity to make an eager righteous film, based on what could be a passable radio script, which would be more suitable for what used to be classic TV drama. And there might be something in this as Redford’s wary Professor Lacey finally closes to his demanding student and to the worldwide audience beyond the camera lens: “Here’s my last bid”, he says slowly, “ So bear with me”.

Hopefully, if reports are right, this won’t be the director’s last bid. A re-make of The Candidate (1972) is on the table, and, with the Presidential Elections of 2008 approaching, a timely opportunity for Redford to stake his claims on those genuine creative risks, which his own Sundance Institute expects of others. Looking to the enormous appreciation of the Berlin audience that applauded him back to Utah, there are many yet who will bear with him in such crucial times.

As for Cruise, the Berlin stage is now set for his coming Valkyrie, and as produced by a Wagner.

Coda

There is, however, room for reconsideration on Redford/Lacey’s extended scene with his intractable student. It’s a perspective that side bars the political discussions that attempt to frame the reception of the film, and which takes us back to the 1950s when Robert Redford, himself an 18 year-old, suddenly lost his mother. He quickly distracted into a binge of wasted years, a student of uncertain direction, a young man on the abyss. Crossing East Berlin following the screening of Lions for Lambs (2007) I wondered - and hoped - that the 71-year-old director had finally managed to connect with that young man who - like many today - so nearly lost his way”.

Original Publication here & YouTube Trailer

• http://www.weltexpress.info/index.php?artikel_id=64441&lan=en&rubrik=4

And the YouTube marketing push:

The “We, the media…” Case Study Analysis of Up, Close and Personal, 1996,  is here:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/case-study-film-up-close-personal/

Pictures of 23rd October 2007 Berlin premiere rights of owner.

END OF REPORT

From Chapter Five:  Case Study Analysis : Broadcast News (1987)…

“James Brooks’ wry and perceptive angle on the 1980s media developments is helpfully seen in the context of a parallel concern emerging in academia about the “now…this!” corporate news discourse. Neil Postman, in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1987), scored early points. Here, the late Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at New York University fulminated how, under the pressure to deliver audiences by the minute and even second, the “now…this!” syndrome prevailed,

“…in its boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.” (Postman, 1987, p. 102).

Postman’s (1987) argument pivots on the notion that all cultural communication conforms eventually to the leading paradigm - the format - as defined by broadcast television - that it must entertain and look good. The point of proof for Postman (1987) was in broadcast news where - across news items, music jingles, commercials and even kooky weather reports - the real and the fictional, the serious and the trivial become hopelessly blurred, kept into some ‘meaningful’ focus by the reassuring staged presence of the news anchor. Similarly, in the case of Broadcast News (1987) David Ansen (1987) began his review of the film with a timely, and for us, useful, contextual account that summarised how,

“In the last few years, network news has entered the Twilight Zone. With NBC General Electrified, ABC in the clutches of Cap Cities and CBS dished and Tisched, the news traditionalists have lost yardage to the bottom-line boys. Massive cutbacks and layoffs threaten the quality of news journalism. Ratings fever gives rise to showbiz razzle dazzle (Ansen, Newsweek. 28.12.1987: 44)

Broadcast News (1987) explores in powerful close-up the tension between journalist integrity and those powerful commercial expectations to perform both on the screen and thence in the stock market. Within this frame, the theme of authenticity becomes central since it is both the (visible) corporate asset that broadcast news depends on for its own legitimacy and provides that narrative frisson which the filmmakers rely on for lacerating dramatic irony, for as the script would say of Tom Grunick/William Hurt, “He seems authoritative, compelling, even in a low key way. We trust him…

Anchor: “…an object used to hold something firmly in place, a source of

stability or security.” (Hanks, 1990, Collins English Dictionary)

The broadcaster’s claim on news authenticity is vital if their appropriation of the public airwaves - as licensed by the FCC - is to be justified. The human ability to convincingly convey information truthfully is the core asset in justifying the broadcaster’s right to transmit programmes for the “public interest, convenience, or necessity”. Ratings, revenue and individual resumes all ultimately depend on this intangible but vital asset that, if anywhere on the schedules, depends on the assured and credible performance of the central news anchor who serves - eye-to-eye - as the only public face of the broadcasters anywhere on those schedules. Maintaining the apparent symbiosis that connects truth-telling to the viewer on one hand and viable corporate brand logo to the advertiser on the other is the key function of the million-dollar salary news anchor.

In this respect, James Brooks’ 1987 film - that scrutinises the role of a highly successful news anchor who knowingly and admittedly lacks any intellectual or emotional connection with the news he communicates - also serves as a knowing metaphor on both the contemporary commercial news environment of the 1980s (and since) and, more pertinently and implicitly, as a knowing metaphor on the staged dramaturgy of the U.S. Reagan Presidency itself.

Television to Film - A Director’s Journey for James L. Brooks

The first and lasting instructions to any screenwriter is: write what you know about but write also what you care about. James Brooks’ critical and box-office success with Broadcast News (1987) would certainly stand as a useful example of this adage.

By the time he focused his sights on a three-way Romantic comedy set in a Washington, D.C. newsroom he had been a highly reputable writer, director and producer of the major TV hits The Mary Tyler Moore Show then Lou Grant, both newsroom-based soap comedies which he created, the former with Allan Burns. His only actual industry contact with the real world of news delivery seems to be in the early 1960s when he worked as a copy boy for CBS in New York (Ansen, 1987). From this we might rightly assume that what Brooks brought to the screen in Broadcast News (1987) was a thorough and clear understanding not only of contemporary U.S. news broadcasting - but the workings of successful television soap drama as well. He also brought a certain credibility earned in Hollywood as the Oscar winning writer and director of his first feature Terms of Endearment (1983).

Genre Binary Oppositions

In keeping with Brooks’ television predecessors, Broadcast News (1987) is carefully attuned to the genre conventions of the screwball journalist film (Ehrlich, 1997). The Romantic triangle becomes a demanding noose that tightens around news producer Jane Craig/Holly Hunter who must decide between the competing opposites - her long-term professional associate and friend Aaron Altman/Albert Brooks or the newly appointed news anchor, bland, beautiful but beguiling WASP Tom Grunick/William Hurt. For the committed Jane, however, the character portraits represent the alternative values of news journalism that are becoming more evident in the newsroom as market forces impact on both news content and dwindling staff numbers. The dark, curly haired Altman works, eats and thinks as the representative but untelegenic news journalist who is committed to context, accuracy and risking life, while Grunick, the lithe but illiterate WASP is loved - but only by the studio camera and the watching millions. But ultimately they will all owe their careers to Grunick’s success in the ratings war The construction of such conflicts that generate plot development and theme turn on well formulated syntactical dualisms that have characterised the news journalist genre since The Front Page (1931/1973).

As examples, the holy grail of journalism is, of course, Truth (objectivity vs subjectivity) and certain character attitudes to this (idealism vs cynicism) help determine our empathy with the stars as they contest the conflicting values of home vs work, the public interest vs corporate interest or industry interest vs private interest (Ehrlich, 1997). How each film etches and colours these binary oppositions through character representation and plot developments signifies, on the broader palette, contemporary cultural tensions - both conscious and unconscious. Looking momentarily to the genre lineage, for example, Ehrlich (1997) observes how,

“The 1970s saw a resurgence of the journalism movie, responding to a changing political culture. Disillusionment over Vietnam and Watergate helped foster the so-called conspiracy films… In All the President’s Men 1976) and The China Syndrome (1979), reporters are heroic figures who help expose such conspiracies. But in The Parallax View (1974), the reporter’s attempt to uncover truth ends with his death. And in Network (1976), corporate greed subsumes journalist integrity, culminating in an anchorman’s murder on live television.” (Ehrlich, 1997, p. 272-273)

One common stereotypical element in a number of our film texts is, of course, the role of the committed ambitious female as she contends with her patriarchal environment of ‘hard’ news journalism. The formulaic plot pattern - from Network (1976) and Up, Close and Personal (1996) to Deep Impact (1998) - presents the female journalist with the home vs work dilemma, not the crusading male. Dow (1996) argues that “traditional thought prescribes that woman are best suited for the private realm, and men for the public, professional one…”, and critically considers how Brooks’ earlier The Mary Tyler Moore Show (amongst several others) is an example in television entertainment where this ideology is continually reproduced, despite often laudable surface gestures to the contrary. So, even though ‘Mary’ is at work, and as a secretary, she nevertheless plays the stereotypical “caring nurturer” in the happy family of mainly overstretched male bosses (Dow, 1996, p. 268).

In our 1987 version, plot (Jane’s problem) and theme (truth/reality) are neatly fused within the first five minutes during her earnest but unsuccessful seminar in news ethics delivered to a largely unresponsive selection of new-era well-groomed television news journalists:

JANE

Our profession is in danger. Yesterday’s compliment has somehow managed to become today’s kiss of death. To be considered a serious journalist is no longer flattering. It presents the risk of being labeled ponderous, or worse yet, elitist, right? We are being increasingly influenced by the star system. The network anchormen are so powerful they compromise our last best hope. The current group is clearly qualified, tied still to our best traditions, but who follows these men?

Jane’s earnest critical overview of the contemporary news broadcasting environment chimes both with critical commentaries in academia (Postman, 1987) and, in narrative terms, establishes very effectively what McGee (1999) would describe as the moral universe through which the film will take us. It is a moral universe that negotiates across the set of binary oppositions we have outlined from Ehrlich (1997), and particularly that opposition which specifically underscores the tension between public interest and corporate interest. Underlying Jane’s professional emphasis, of course, lurks related oppositions (home vs work) and the unspoken private but very obvious issue of finding a man not in the office, but in life.

So, Jane is quickly positioned, as screenwriting guru Robert McGee (1999) would have it, as an empathetic protagonist who is,

“…living a life that’s more or less in balance…life is in relative control…then…suddenly an event occurs that radically upsets its balance, swinging the value-charge of the protagonist’s reality either to the negative or to the positive.” (McGee, 1999, p. 190).

Jane is both a successful and well-established news producer but remains fighting the uphill battle to rescue the heritage of American news broadcasting from the surrounding marketers (as if this is a new development). The contest is vividly dramatised as she confronts the lethargic faces of her audience and counters the sighs of those already leaving the auditorium for an early lunch. In rising frustration, Jane turns quickly instead to a contemporary example of news broadcasting - fresh, perhaps, in the minds of the film’s own 1987 audience:

JANE

Oh, I was going to show you a tape - a story that was carried by all networks on the same night. The same night not one network noted a major policy change in Salt Two nuclear disarmament talks. Here’s what they ran instead.

Alongside her live audience, we see a sequence showing the Japanese Domino Championships as broadcast by all the networks in the Spring of 1985. The multi-lines of dominoes create waves, crossing tiny bridges and setting off little fireworks. Despite her intentions, however, Jane’s audience applauds loudly and enthusiastically and it is against calls for more of the same that she battles:

JANE

I know it’s a good film. I know it’s fun. I like fun. It’s just not news. Well, you’re lucky you love it, you’re going to get a lot more just like it.

A stray voice answers back “good!” as the media workers of the future leave for their ‘network’ lunch. Jane is now perfectly pitched by Brook’s script as the successful but idealistic news producer having to work within a counter commercial culture turning quickly towards the rewards of easy and cheap entertainment. So we have a Hollywood film critically assessing how the entertainment values of commercial cinema are being appropriated by the news divisions. Her moral and private dilemma is dramatically focused with the quiet, modest but alert intervention of Tom Grutnick/William Hurt - cable sports anchor - who remains after the hall has quickly emptied and woos her to her bedroom and yet departs without making any of the unseemly moves which her years in the business have come to mostly anticipate, dread or, in his case, hope for. However, her fey attempts at seduction fail to divert him from his professional concerns, and the uncertain outcome of the scene arcs across their relationship throughout the film. Her moral universe is then quickly turned around when, much to her confused frustration, she learns that the illiterate Tom has been appointed as her new star anchor in situ - Mc Gee’s (1999) “sudden event”.

Their opening sequence at the conference that fuses plot (the need for a new man) with theme (truth/reality) has been turned, tightened and let loose to screwball the frenetic operations of her private and pubic life across act two where plot and subplots meet and clash to ever greater dramatic effect. The Romantic melodrama that comprises the main plot is neatly secured within a number of knowing and highly charged subplots focused on the working operations of the news division and culled from the contemporary setting which include the United States’ military contest with Libya and the radical changes to news broadcasting operations in the wake of those very mergers and acquisitions of the mid-1980s of the kind we have documented. These narrative impacts occur at two key plot points: Tom Grunick’s first real test as an anchor and, by contrast, Aaron’s failed rehearsal for the same role.

Film Representation of News at War

A phone call during an office party prompts the news division into an emergency - a Libyan jet has bombed a U.S. military base in Sicily and regular anchor Bill Rorich/Jack Nicholson is absent on vacation. The choice between experienced Aaron and novice Tom is an easy one for Paul, president of the news division (veteran NBC correspondent Peter Hackes). Despite Jane’s ardent protests that point to Aaron’s recent interviews with Colonel Quaddafi, Aaron must step aside and Tom must step forward from the shadows and carry the show with Jane acting as first-time executive producer. The filmed representation of the frantic backroom drama that brings the show smoothly to the screen is itself a finely balanced dramatic treat pulled off with some directorial panache by Brooks. It begins with Jane’s own self-conscious wariness about her new responsibility and her uncertainties about Tom’s ability and ends with a general acknowledgement of his highly tuned and composed professional skills both by her and the entire news division. Her strength of character and flair for leadership and his polished assured performance will effectively make it the Tom and Jane Show.

Tom, Aaron and the Hot Seat

A sleek camera dolly-in first presents Grutnick against the polished studio backdrop of warm orange and silver global map and then, once behind him, a gentle uncut 360 degree camera turn reveals the array of cables, monitors and off screen support staff of unfazed technicians, make-up and script personnel, with carpenters and sound engineers who hold the frail operation together. Tom’s performance is now in full view of the film audience. Across the sequence that follows, Tom neatly balances live interviews to outside broadcast units at the White House and confident camera address with rushed intercut video footage of Colonel Quaddafi and sea borne aircraft carriers. Frantic sound prompts and urgent instructions across studio and Outside Broadcast Unit personnel add to the rich visual mix while, at the centre, Tom maintains his professional calm focus, the epitome of polished unsweating grace under the live pressure of a national crisis. As the shot moves in to a tight close up showing the white earpiece firmly in place we begin to hear the barely audible crackle of Jane’s voice as she tells him roughly what to say and how long he has to say it. The two characters are thus intimately networked head-to-head in a way not possible elsewhere in their busy professional lives.

The real dramatic frisson for the film audience is how at this point Tom’s performance clearly relies almost entirely on those urgent prompts from Jane looking down from the monitor room and as based on points of fact and information provided by the drunken Aaron - who phones from home where he is watching the newscast. From Aaron at home through Jane in the monitor room to Tom in the studio comes a stream of historical understanding about the Middle East and relevant technical knowledge about those Tomcat jets in action over the Mediterranean, all picked up and mimicked with calm unflinching surety by Tom to the (unseen) watching millions.

The whole sequence underlines Tom’s obvious brilliance in selling himself as a performer who brings both credibility to other people’s ideas, opinions and perceptions and an appropriate authentic emotional pitch to that performance. However, as he gets the professional plaudits and Jane’s professional confidence and becomes studio star attraction, Aaron - the backroom bearer of knowledge and context - remains isolated at home, unknown to the public and under-appreciated by his bosses.

The contrast between Tom and Aaron is further exacerbated with the next major plot point that takes us to act three - the looming $24 million budget cut and the severe staff layoffs that must follow. The new regime-change prompts Aaron to actively consider a future life as an anchor and so he enlists the support of Tom (“just for superficial performance things”) as he rehearses for a weekend test spot. The scene serves as a working masterclass that provides our first insight into Tom’s working methods as it allows him to calmly and surely tutor the anxious Aaron in the fine art of successful news anchoring - by sitting on the jacket tail to assert the authoritative poise, or:

TOM

Don’t let your eyes go from the beginning of the sentence to the end like that. You don’t want to look shifty, do you? And the left side of your face is the good one. Go again. And try to punch one word or phrase in every sentence. Punch one idea a story. Punch. Come on. Try not to move your head or wrinkle your forehead. This is good, very good.

Finally, Tom’s last words of advice are punched for their own dramatic effect as if life and performance in him are unconsciously one. They remind Aaron, high priest of informed context and personal commitment, that:

TOM

…you’re not just reading the news or narrating. Everybody has to sell a little. You’re selling them this idea of you. You know, what you’re sort of saying is, trust me. I’m, uh, credible. So whenever you catch yourself just reading…stop and start selling a little.

Despite Tom’s earnest attempts, though, Aaron’s performance is a painfully wrought disaster - his fine prose cannot be emphatically punched, and so emerges as a complex and unfocused academic delivery. Added to this is Aaron’s anxiety under the intense heat of the studio lights that engenders a dripping flop sweat, demanding a rushed change of clothing from his bewildered back-up crew. The scene is finally complete with the swinging backdrop that comically results when costume and make-up personnel collide with cheap studio cardboard directly behind him. The fabricated world of the network studio becomes for Aaron a crazy jungle of comic misadventure and subsequent failed career hopes from which no magical pen - or rod - can save him.

Moments of Authenticity in the Postmodern Tear

A third subplot which signals the film’s 1980s credentials revolves around the issue of sexual politics and this becomes the more vital element in Jane’s decisive moment in act three where, in agreement with genre formula, she must decide between the failed Aaron and the newly promoted Tom - now London correspondent. Since the Hollywood paradigm resists a compromised life that would unite Aaron and Jane, the only uncertain outcome is her commitment to Tom - and all that he represents. Her wavering seems to be secured earlier when viewing his documentary on date rape. For both Jane and Tom, the subject is rich in subtextual allusion since it functions to anchor in her mind his original (noble) intentions in act one when on their first encounter in her hotel room they met so promisingly but from which he broke away so abruptly.

The documentary subject and the interview within it is wholly constructed by Tom, and represents both his professional commitment to earnest investigative journalism and, at the same time, his New Man tender sensibilities - and it works. What seems to close their professional (and therefore private) differences is the moment of truth when Tom dabs a single tear during a particularly painful interview with a female victim of date rape. To all appearances he seems to have answered Jane’s lonely call from the conference podium by perfectly combining the binary opposition between the noble legacy of the past (Edward E. Murrow) and the commercial demands of the contemporary news market - an esteemed news anchor and committed investigative journalist in one.

However, her later viewing of the original footage, (prompted by Aaron), reveals to Jane the very opposite. On closer inspection, the passing camera-shot of Tom’s touching tearful response is checked by Jane as a cheat cut-away, rehearsed and performed by Tom, scrupulously shot and carefully edited into the one-camera interview that would make such a reaction shot in real time impossible. While the cut sequence might underline Tom’s evident acting potential (and directorial skills in managing a news crew) for the ideal Jane it finally exposes his unflinching lack of authenticity - as a professional and as a possible life-partner. The issue that divides them is over professional integrity - the line between adherence to truth telling and truth-selling:

JANE

Working up tears for a new piece cutaway. You totally crossed the line between…

And his sharp defensive riposte speaks volumes about the industry of which they are a part since,

TOM

It’s hard not to cross it; they keep moving the little sucker, don’t they?

The positive/negative moral dilemma that has seen Jane waver from Aaron to Tom finally reaches a conclusion that, in a reunion seven years later, shows Aaron, now married with children but condemned to local news coverage in Portland and, by contrast, shows Tom, now having secured the prestigious New York anchor position and the 5^th Avenue social life that goes with it. Jane, however, remains the tireless but slightly more weary working professional, still unwed, childless but dating, she insists, outside the profession.

 

Flat, Shallow and Very Smart - Benchmarking the Postmodern

“We filmed on a Friday afternoon;that same day everyone at CBS was let go.” Albert Brooks (Ansen, Newsweek. 28.12.1987: 44)

Like its genre predecessor, Network (1976), Broadcast News (1987) garnered a clutch of awards - four from the New York Film Critics and seven Oscar nominations - 1985 Oscar-winner Hurt was a nominee for his deftly nuanced portrayal of Tom (believed to be patterned on real-life anchor, Tom Brokaw). Positive critical reviews and box-office success followed: for Steve Grant (2003) it,

“…is knowing about the wisecracks, back-stabbings, political shifts, and innate decencies of the media game…and underpinning what is a charming protean love-triangle is a serious statement about the function, value and direction of television news.” (Grant, 2003, Time Out. p. 159)

One sequence that supports the film’s critical position covers the news production cycle from Nicaragua jungle ambush that Jane and Aaron undergo with Contra soldiers to its final studio transmission a few days later. Aaron’s assured delivery to camera under fire provides contextual background, informed comment and a poignant dramatic element. His wisecrack after the shot is characteristically knowing:

AARON

Can you believe it? I just risked my life for a network that tests my face with focus groups.

Back in Washington, D.C., however, he and Jane can only watch as his extended delivery is cut at the last minute. The drama of the report is further heightened by razzle-dazzle map graphics and a sharply edited voice-over from Aaron’s shadowed outline. His ominous words about approaching gunfire are left hanging as a narrative enigma to hook the audience across the intervening commercial break that is signalled by the station’s brief signature tune. The sequence that began as an insight into the Nicaraguan conflict by two committed investigative journalists ends, thereby, as a ploy to dramatically capture the evening audience as positioned to watch commercials for kitchenware.

 

Broad Strokes

However, like its engaging lead characters who want to play but not commit, the film seems sharply critical of the contemporary news broadcasting landscape yet wants to remain firmly within the Hollywood narrative paradigm that seeks for some satisfactory closure and the elimination of real-life contradictions that these critiques prompt. It is a narrative that glides but never plunges with a tone that, like its protagonists, celebrates knowingness over acquiring knowledge.

To begin our own critique, we can easily question the film’s initial equation that sets the contemporary commercial news environment against the noble legacy of its mythic roots in the 1950s. From our own brief overview in Chapters Two and Three it is clear how those roots were ceded to the commerical imperatives of the broadcasters as far back as the 1930s when major concessions to the commercial ethos were staked out in The Radio Act of 1927. In this respect, the film seems to share Jane’s own faulty assumption about this history, ignoring how the legacy of professional news journalism by the late 1950s was already compromised by the push for ever greater Nielson ratings.

The inaccurate binary opposition thus set in place determines the shading of the characters who are stereotypically sign-posted to personnify these attributes. Most awkwardly for any pedagog are the assumptions which are made and upheld early in the film that focus on the nature of literacy - that Aaron’s intelligent superiority comes naturally from his mastery over the Word, and that, by contrast, Tom’s lack in basic reading and writing skills makes him bland, morally shallow and illiterate. The easy - and false - equation is even voiced by Jane, and agreed by Tom, in their first acquaintance:

JANE

So, you’re not well educated and you have almost no experience and you can’t write.

To which he nods in agreement. Presenting Tom as a sleek puppet was for David Friedman (1987) “perhaps the Biggest Fib yet told about TV news” in the film, since,

“It teaches us that men and women who tell us the news each evening are mindless, wooden head puppets manipulated by all-knowing producers…the TV news business is too competitive and the financial stakes too high, to allow it. What the news divisions are selling each night - to sponsors as well as viewers - is credibility.” (Friedman, Newsday. 23.12.1987: 11)

However, Friedman (1988) misses a key point developed by the film in act two and secured by the film’s conclusion. Tom’s direct and clear mentoring of Aaron underscores a level of literacy about his medium, confirmed by his easy mastery over the techincal equipment around him. So despite our earlier skepticism, Aaron’s later failure - fully ‘explained’ by the film - seems to confirm and justify Tom’s manifest competent edge with the visual medium. His later career success in the art of modern communication suggests another potent level of literacy and understanding which, in common with the-then U.S. President, proves he and his like should never be underestimated.

As another indication of the film’s Janus-like aspect, we can look as well to how it represents the technical delivey of news broadcasting. In one particular early scene that quickly follows Tom’s arrival at the news centre, a last-minute rushed deadline for an insert story tracks a video tape from the editing console to the studio desk from where it is immediately sequenced into the live report as transmitted from New York. The frantically paced adventure across busy office space and packed corridors is, in film terms, a technical and dramatic marvel in itself - attempting to translate to the screen audience and the watching Tom the real-life tensions of network broadcasting. However, the lurking irony remains that the live programme has become dependent upon video taped sequences that have themselves been narratively shaped, edited and timed well in advance. The film sequence, therefore, tries to secure the continuing myth that, despite the advances in video technology, there still remains a live aspect to the exciting thrill of news broadcasting with all the customary uncertain outcomes. Incidentally, the taped story is a heavily truncated account of a war-weary U.S. mercenary returning from Angola as an unknown hero to his roots. Penned and voiced by Aaron, it ironically foreshadows his own disappointing career arc after his return from the jungles of Nicaragua as an unacknowledged hero of the mighty pen.

In the light of our earlier overview of 1980s news containment, the film’s representation of how broadcast news constructs foreign news reports is worthy of some extended analysis - though this is largely beyond our present limited scope.

However, of the three stories already mentioned (Nicaragua, Angola and Libya), the coverage of the Libyan bombing of a U.S. naval station in Sicily warrants some comment. The story is at the centre of the celebrated scene that displays Tom’s anchor skills at their best. It is breaking-news because American forces are under direct attack in the Meditteranean:

TOM

Good afternoon. A Libyan fighter plane attacked a United States military installation early this Morning…. and was, itself, shot down by American F-14 Interceptors. The Libyan Missile destroyed an Army warehouse which, just thirty minutes earlier, had been crowded with servicemen. No one was injured.

The satiric point of the script is, of course, in the last line. The busy rush of combined film and news visuals clouds a simple truth that at the centre of the drama, there is no story - and what there is has already happened and is being reported by the U.S. military and commented upon at a significant remove by journalists standing in the cold winds of Pennsylvania Avenue. What escapes the satire, however, is any question why American military forces are in Sicily in the first instance. While Aaron provides the technical details which support Tom’s command over the broadcast, his report does not suggest or even question the existence of the military base that is within striking distance of the Libyan coast and which might be the reason for the pre-emptive strike in the first instance.

However, what is pertinent about the representation of the show by the film is how the manufactured national crisis creates the “we” that works to identify the corporate news broadcasters with “their” national viewers. The light satirical touch is provided as the network boss proudly points out at the successful conclusion:

PAUL

This was important for Tom - there’s that bonding thing that happens with the public and an anchorman during a crisis. It’s not the conventions anymore; it’s this kind of moment.

The observation, loud and clear on the script page, however, is layered so smoothly into the end sequence mise-en-scene that its potential bite is lost as the main plot of the Romantic Triangle is again foregrounded and we learn of the “great sex” that Tom had with Jane through his earpiece. Sharp and telling satire is thereby sweetened.

Lastly, just as the news sequence that it satirises fails to deliver its final punch, so the film itself fumbles its own closure where it lurches heavily towards a mainstream ending that neatly allows the grim reality of downsizing in the broadcasting industry to function as support mechanism for the required happy ending. The compromised ending is deftly massaged when we learn that Aaron retains his professional integrity (and manhood) by happily resigning and moving to Portland, Tom is slated for the London office and groomed for the prestigious New York anchor post, and their boss Ernie/Robert Prosky happpily volunteers to step aside prior to his imminent retirement and so promote Jane, with no rivals in sight, to her new executive position as Bureau Chief. Indeed, by the film’s denouement, she will eventually move to New York to be Tom’s editor. Hence,

TOM

What did they do to you?

ERNIE

It’s what he did. I’m proud of him.

AARON

They told me they’d keep me because they could plug me into any story and my salary was in line.

ERNIE

The cost-efficient reporter.

AARON

So I quit.

The widespread forced redundancies that were suffered by journalists working in the commerical broadcast industry at this time in the mid-1980s are presented here, therefore, as a positive change that, like a ritual, brutal but necessary cleansing of the system, assists the leading characters towards their rightful place in the industry.

Significantly, there is a marked absence also of any reference to the kind of organised protest and newsroom activism during these years and as detailed by Byerly and Warren (1996). Similalry, unlike Network (1976), the Feminst agenda of the 1980s has become more easily accommodated within the mainstream - with a sexually unthreatening Holly Hunter as the representative successful career woman who at heart remains just one of the guys who chases in the closing minutes of the film other people’s children (a calculated book-end echo of the opening scene where in jogging suit she chased left-to-right after the morning newspapers).

Addtionally, the film’s own narrative jogging between biting satire and neat mainstream closure is interestingly mirrored in its chosen visual aesthetic. We have already outlined Brooks’s previous work in television situation comedy - itself a recurring motif in the standard reviews at the time. One such review from Michael Scheinfeld (1988) negatively assumed that the film’s glossy sheen was a creative failure by a director who had no real visual sense:

“Despite the photography of the esteemed Michael Ballhaus…the look of Broadcast News, like its subject, is flat and one-dimensional. Shots are framed and scenes staged with almost no consideration as to what cinema (as opposed to TV sitcoms) is all about, or capable of.” (Scheinfeld, 1988, Films in Review: 165)

Whether determined or not, it would be the position of the present writer to suggest that the non-cinematic look of the film that Scheinfeld (1987) accurately describes matches perfectly to its narrative theme and stands as a statement in itself about the uncertain status of film and television modes of address in the mid-1980s - where ‘film’ was more likely to be seen on television than in the theatre. The adopted flatness that Scheinfeld (1987) criticises neatly cushions the impact of the television sequences within the chosen film format, thus creating an aesthetic blend that helps position the film audience more fully as a television audience as well. In support, we can consider the ingratiating tinkly piano soundtrack by Bill Conti that satirically echoes - I would say deliberately - those tele-plays that had become the standard product on American television. The chosen visual aesthetic becomes, contrary to Scheinfeld (1987), another knowing angle in the director/writer’s pallete. Indeed, this form of sharp postmodern knowingness would be celebrated in the 1990s with The Simpsons which Brooks produced for the new Fox Channel. Its major success was pivotal in positioning NewsCorps cable system against the established broadcasters.

However, in this and virtually all levels, the film, like its characters, is relentlessly and frustratingly ambivalent - there is always an awkward ‘however’ to be made on each and every point of issue and where no final judgment is immune from compromise. Hence, the highlighted significance of Tom’s tear which was ‘faked’ for the camera but based, he assures Jane, on a real tear that fell earlier but which was not picked up by the camera. Jane’s moral dilemma in determining truth from fiction, real action from performance, is extended to the film audience which is priviledged at certain times to ‘witness’ Jane deliberately manufacture her own private ‘real’ tears within the tight daily schedule that she imposes on herself.

In addition, Brooks maximises the dramatic irony as Jane wells up her own tear on inspecting Tom’s own performed out-takes. Holly Hunter’s performance - like the film’s adopted televisual sit-com style - positions the audience in the very world of necessary compromise experienced by the characters - we are thereby implicated in a postmodern knowing awareness of the ‘truth’ of the performance and its own filmic constructedness, and we are encouraged by the homely mise-en-scene to enjoy both.

 

Some Critical Questions about Knowing and Knowledge

This form of smart knowingness - the sense of being brought ‘into the know’ - became for Gitlin (1998) a highly suspicious cultural characteristic in the postmodern hipness that coloured public discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. Gitlin was struck, for example,

“…by the growth of ‘knowingness’, a quality of self-conscious savy that often passes for sophistication…a state of mind in which any particular knowledge is less important than the feeling that one knows and the pleasure taken in the display of this feeling.” (Gitlin, 1998, p. 226)

Rather looking to a crude effects model, Gitlin (1998) considered how television, through its form, helped condition the tone and temper of American culture. That form was dictated by the opening markets following the deregulation rulings and exposed the American television audiences to a wider range of programme ‘choices’ wherein,

“A viewer engages less with the content of one program than masters an attitude of superiority to them all. Rather than learn one subject well, he or she acquires a sophisticated repartee and light banter good for discussing anything and everything that comes up - a style in which…to seem quick and knowing is more important than what one knows.” (Gitlin, 1998, p. 228)

The “fun culture” that this inspires, however, is shaded by a darker more sinister tone which, for Gitlin (1998), was celebrated by the promotion of David Letterman at CBS which indulged in the postmodern play that both worked and deconstructed the familiar talk show genre. The stylistic mode for Gitlin (1998) seemed to resonate across the culture where,

“Relentless if superficial self-disclosure is one of the conventions of television today. The audience is simultaneously alerted to the contrivance, transported behind the scenes, and pleased by both - and by the possibility of enjoying both.” (Gitlin, 1998, p. 229)

Gitlin’s (1998) observations in this regard on television, uncannily echo the dual tone we have explored in Broadcast News (1987) - where the perfectly balanced self-consciousness of the characters continually turn earnestness into parody and back again, a feature we can detect in the script samples chosen. It is a nuanced knowingness that differentiates the film from its more Modernist and committed 1970s predecessor Network (1976). Indeed, the closing shots of Broadcast News (1987) contain,

“…no revolt, no walking on water, and no raving mad man as in Network to symbolize the absurdity of it all, just a quiet retreat into individual lives as Tom continues what Aaron calls the longest running success story in history.” (Scott, 1994, p. 280).

In its ultimate compromise to being flat and happy Broadcast News (1987) anticipates those later films of the 1990s, Up,Close and Personal (1996), for example, where even the warm satirical edge of Brooks’ vision will be dissipated.

Part Three

Into the 1990s - Moving What Line?

It is one central argument in this analysis that the development of news broadcasting in America was not an independent activity prompted by disinterested public servants working for the overall benefit of their fellow citizens. From its inception, the framework of the system was grounded on certain commercial considerations - shared by military interests and business interests - that guaranteed enormous profits for the broadcasters in return for some nominal gesture towards “public necessity” in the form of community service news and information delivery. The deregulatory measures since the early 1980s in particular have exposed this fundamental principle (the pivotal role of William Casey as CIA Director and major stockholder in ABC/Capital Cities serves as a poignant reminder of those links which founded the system after the World War One). Indeed, the neo-conservative success in dismantling the Fairness Doctrine, impacts directly on all forms of news and current affairs discourse in the United States to this day, a theme which becomes of major relevance with our analysis of Fox News in Chapter Eight.

Of building concern for our study is how news content since Broadcast News (1987) has been more nakedly and explicitly driven by commercial considerations - even to the point where informed political debate can be curtailed thus indirectly forcing election campaign ‘discussion’ to appear as aggressive electioneering on (expensive) commercial broadcast time. With this in mind, the recent 2004 Presidential election ‘race’ purported to be a boon for the television networks who, since 2001, had been suffering a downturn from conventional advertising income. This financial burden on the democratic process as imposed by the commercial networks - and supported by 1993 FCC ‘lowest unit charge’ rulings - can only be met by the hundreds of millions of dollars now needed as a result by those few U.S. Presidential candidates (or their corporate sponsors) who can afford the bill. By March 2004, George W. Bush’s election fund had reached $100 million and was targeted towards $170 million (the overall figure for both parties would exceed $500 million).

Such considerations bring questions about the political economy to bear on any textual study of media programming, whether they are news items or film representations of the industry that makes them. Deliberative news management by 1980s White House administrations and regulatory reviews conspired with invisible market forces to create a news environment choked of true investigative enquiry.

Under such free-market circumstances, the media, and news broadcasters in particular, play an ever more influential role, perversely, as social engineers in the very cultural and political national and international theatre on which they affect to report so objectively through their news broadcasting outlets. In short, both by calculated design (FCC rulings) and structured default (deregulation), the world of events about which the news broadcasters report is one that the political system of post-capitalism has, by and large, created in the first commercial instance.

With the Cap Cities acquisition of ABC leading the way, Paddy Cheyefsky’s Network (1976) satire no longer seemed outrageously implausible. The symbiotic relationship that yoked the political agenda of the fictional Ecumenical Liberation Army with the commercial needs of Diana Christensen’s news entertainment network became the subject in real life of those political and media commentaries in decades to come which, like Livingston (1994), argued how market theory created the social stage on which real bombs would be delivered by people said to envy “our freedoms”. If there is a real-life case study that highlights these trends it would be in the operations of the ABC network which, during the 1980s, seemed to merge the ideologies of the ruling administration with the media logics of market journalism.

 

The ABC of Networking Terrorism

We have already undertaken some gauge of how the U.S. media was positioned to cover U.S. foreign ‘wars’ during the 1980s. It should also be emphasised that such military interventions were rhetorically sharpened against terrorist bases or those states said to be supporting such bases. As an example, the ‘invasion’ of Grenada on 25^th October 1983 followed two days after the deaths of 241 U.S. marines in Lebanon and was justified at the time because Grenada, according to the President in his 27^th October 1983 speech to the nation,

“…was a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time… Not only has Moscow assisted and encouraged the violence in both countries, but it provides direct support through a network of surrogates and terrorists.” (Birdsell, 1990, p. 201)

Despite the staged military deflection, however, hostage crises emerged later in 1985 (Beirut), 1986 (the ‘Achille Lauro’), and airport massacres occurred in 1985 (Rome and Vienna). That same year bombs exploded on TWA flight 840 (2^nd April 1985) and in a discothèque in West Berlin (5^th April 1985). These two events particularly - and their investigations and reactions - became the consistent focus in television news which ended on 15^th April 1986 with the bombing of Libya by the United States.

Building on our Chapter Four coverage of Network (1976), we can readily identify a number of critical commentaries which during this time constructed arguments that implicated the operations of the media with the events so depicted. Clutterbuck (1975), Gal-Or (1985), Laqueur (1987) would, for example, concur in what became the “contagion theory” - that is, the notion that, “…the media were instruments used by terrorists to create a theater of terror, commanding publicity, gaining a following, and spreading information about terrorist tactics…” (Dobkin, 1992, p. 18) Considering how the media contributes to the definition of terrorism and how such definitions frame the narratives of news reports, Dobkin (1992) confirms that,

“Many scholarly descriptions of television news mention the entertainment value sought by news organizations, but few address the specific characterizations of news presentations as they reinforce and validate particular conceptions of foreign policy.” (Dobkin, 1992, p. 81)

In answer to this perceived absence, Dobkin (1992) made extensive research on this question using a range of news output from ABC during the 1980s as case study examples. In summary, she was able to affirm how, standard dramatic units in,

“…ABC news stories about terrorism include the tendency to nominalize visual referents of terrorism, portray government effects to combat terrorism as ineffective, mobilize viewer emotions through the use of video postcards, and speculate about the effectiveness and probability of military retaliation.” (Dobkin, 1992, p. 81)

However, by looking at the dual rhetorical function of such coverage, Dobkin (1992) critically observes how (and in allusion to the bombing of Libya in 1986):

“News narratives can criticize public officials, thereby reifying an illusory watchdog function while simultaneously suggesting policy options that may support the goals of those officials. Combined, these dramatic units create a narrative exigency for military action taken by the United States against a target that symbolizes terrorism…these news narratives become structurally aligned with an ideology of foreign policy driven by military strength and intervention. Television news coverage of terrorism thus contributes to the building of public support for military intervention rather than the formulation of policies that can effectively address the causes or prevention of political violence.” (Dobkin, 1992, p. 81).

Dobkin’s (1992) assessment provides a tenable and timely contribution to our closing observations on U.S. media of the 1980s and as it began to more explicitly duplicate themes in Network (1976) that underscored the duplicitous nature of the news broadcasters as innocent recorders of events and actants in the creation of those events. Furthermore, what makes her detailed research even more interesting is that it is undertaken with no reference to those media mergers of the 1980s which saw the ABC network purchased outright by Cap Cities during the years in question. Likewise, there is no reference to how the dramatic coverage of U.S. foreign policy of the kind outlined above may have contributed to the significant rise in the ABC profit margins during this time (Figure 20). Indeed, as way of suggestive allusion, we have already made reference to William Casey’s dual role as key ABC shareholder and as Reagan-appointed Director of the CIA during these years and the work of early ABC directors in financing Reagan’s political campaigns since the 1960s (Chapter Three).

If there is a cogent link across these points, it might lie in Dobkin’s (1992) intriguing account of how upgraded official terrorist figures from Casey’s CIA became unquestioningly reported through the obliging ABC media outlet. Her insight in this respect is worth quoting in full, since,

“…the criteria for labeling an act terrorist is neither clear nor consistent. The media’s role in privileging particular statistics and creating dramatic facts is evident from the beginning of the Reagan administration. For instance, on March 11, 1981, ABC World News Tonight featured a CIA report that documented a “jump in worldwide assassinations” and a doubling of terrorist incidents from 1978 to 1980… Additionally, in 1980 the CIA revised its figures to include both a broader range of data sources and statistics on threats and hoaxes, which led to a “dramatic upward revision of figures” on terrorism (Wilkinson, 1986)…this shift in statistical inventory was not mentioned in ABC’s nightly newscast.” (Dobkin, 1992, p. 35-36)

The account from Dobkin (1992) that points to the co-mingled operations of the CIA and ABC reporting highlights the degree to which this broadcaster in particular was eager to forward the neo-conservative agenda. How far this specific agenda had a direct bearing on the rising profits that the company amassed during these years is a matter of speculation (Dunnett, 1990). What can be said is that the adopted news agenda did not detract from these profits. Indeed, the rich mix of new technologies, recent mergers and sympathetic political ideologies provided all the temptations and opportunities to test the line of journalist integrity as ABC met the challenges of the 1990s.

In 1989 for example, under continued pressure to perform for higher ratings under the new corporate regime, the ABC Evening News became the first media conglomerate to dramatise its stories using specially faked footage. This transpired when it ‘exposed’ a story that was only based on allegations from anonymous sources at the FBI and State Department against the former American diplomat Felix Bloch - who was suspected of spying but never formally accused. A July 1989 statement from trusted anchor Peter Jennings was aired that apologised for the deliberate deceptive use of dramatised fiction. Considered more critically, however, the ritual of apology could be rhetorically positioned to suggest that everything other than faked news footage on ABC was, by definition, objectively right.

As a measure of how far such ‘objective’ programming was rhetorically used to serve the corporate agenda of the broadcaster, Mazzocco (1994) provides a telling insight into how, by the end of that same year,

“In December 1989, at a time when decisions on crucial FCC regulatory waivers were pending, ABC’S “20/20” broadcast a prime-time report touting the benefit of government deregulation in the telephone, airline, gas and oil, trucking, and other industries…“the competition of the free market held down costs better than government did, but the bad news drowned out the good news of deregulation,” argued “20/20” consumer reporter John Stossel. All in all, “the total gain to the country is huge”. Stossel compared U.S. government regulation before Reagan’s 1980s election to the centralized planning of the former Soviet Union.” (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 111).

The ABC 20/20 report coincided with intense lobbying at the FCC that succeeded in repealing the financial-syndication rules that would bring $ billions of additional revenue to the broadcasters from the domestic and international syndication of off-network programming. By the close of the decade, ABC became the highest rated U.S. news television service and entered the 1990’s in characteristic fashion: by 1993 ABC anchor Peter Jennings would introduce the video conference tape by U.S. General Schwarzkopf which provided his account of how the allied forces had won the Persian Gulf War - it would sell 80,000 copies - and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show was being broadcast across the American airwaves through ABC’s 500 affiliate stations, with more listeners than any other competitor. That same year Peter Jennings was reported in a TV Guide interview that his show would pay more attention to the conservative agenda since “their ideas are ‘more provocative and less predictable on some issues’” (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 128).

 

Working up the Corporate Tear on ‘60 Minutes’

Lastly, we should pay passing notice to another media event that took place in the early 1990s which conveniently for our study had at its dramaturgical centre a single camera shot whose subject focus is not coincidental to our earlier discussion of Broadcast News (1987).

In November of 1993, CBS 60 Minutes celebrated its 25^th anniversary. In a bizarre form of corporate intertextual webbing, celebratory interviews with ace anchor Mike Wallace and producer Don Hewitt took place on CNN’s Larry King Live, and even the rival NBC hosted the entire cast of Hewitt’s show for a full hour interview with Phil Donahue.

The widespread media coverage of 60 Minutes was a measure of how fully CBS was maintaining its prestige as broadcast leader in the area of reputable news journalism, securing its reputation for investigative reporting as established by the benchmark example of Edward E. Morrow back in the late 1940s and forwarded now by lead anchor Mike Wallace, (we have already sketched the careers in Chapter Three of both Wallace and, particularly Hewitt, who had himself been instrumental in CBS news successes since 1948). Despite the lineage that rhetorically finds its locus in the reputation of Murrow, however,

“Like innumerable local TV station managers, “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt dreaded boring viewers. He preferred what’s got good pictures, what’s got sex appeal,” he told TV Guide in 1973. Personality was paramount. “I hate issues per se”, Hewitt told Kahn. “I’m not interested in the issue of the environment but I’m interested in somebody who is dealing with the environment”. Hewitt carefully edited investigative pieces to have the dramatic storybook structure of a beginning, middle, and end. Closely choreographed correspondents became in effect performers delivering lines.” (Baughman, 1992, p. 165-166)

A measure of Hewitt’s 60 Minutes market strength over the years is gained from Dunnett (1990) who records that the programme was continually amongst the highest rated network programmes - in the 1982-3 season, for example, it was the most popular network television programme, coming ahead of even Dallas, Magnum, P.I., and MASH (Dunnett, 1990, p. 64).

On the occasion of its 25^th anniversary, therefore, much national attention was especially focused on the real thing - the CBS anniversary show itself that was transmitted on 7^th November 1993. Notably, the programme featured mini-vignettes - packaged video sequences covering the reporter’s professional working lives and, of interest, insights into their ‘private’ lives as well. In the case of Mike Wallace himself this last element focused predominantly on the weighty revelation that he had lost a son, Peter, thirty years before at a time when he, Wallace, was forging a successful career, not as a journalist, but in the sullied world of commercials. As shown in the ‘documentary’ and as detailed below by Stein (2001), this turning event in his life forced upon him,

“… a pledge to quit his lucrative work in commercials and, as he told it, “…quit all the things I was not proud of and see if I can’t go back to work in news, doing something that is useful. And if I have to take a big cut in salary, fine. But I’m going to do something that would make Peter proud”.” (Stein, 2001, p. 257)

According to script, then, the noble and selfless rise to professional success and national Everyman began, Phoenix-like, with a devastating personal loss in the 1950s that turned into a determination to right social injustices in a form that would become 60 Minutes in the late 1960s with Don Hewitt as producer. The programme insert then proceeded to figure Wallace as crusading tough investigative reporter now approaching mythical paternal status as the “national district attorney”.

With individual and professional histories merged as a personable corporate asset, the vignette then proceeded to narratively fuse both within a potent patriotic context that extended the motif of pained loss across both personal and national biographies from the 1950s and into the 1970s.

Our chapter ends on a paused consideration from Stein (2001) of a single shot that made authentic pains to render Mike Wallace,

“…even more the mythic, paternal hero and consequently even less subject to criticism. Kuralt informs us that, “to those who know him best, Mike Wallace has a reputation for kindness and generosity when others are suffering”. This narration is read over footage of Wallace at the Vietnam memorial, ending with a close-up of a tear rolling down Wallace’s cheek.” (Stein, 2001, p. 257)”.

Where To Now?

How about the 1980s in Context?:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1920s-us-media-beginnings/1980s-wars-white-house-and-media-mergers/

 For future reference, an updated 2008 version of a female news producer, Sigourney Weaver, is featured in Vantage Point (2008), also starring William Hurt:-

END

From Chapter Two: U.S. Mass Media Beginnings

“Without some knowledge of the developmental and historical factors, one cannot understand the present or predict the future.” (Bensman, 2000)

Part One

The Corporate Self

“The following account covering the emergence of mass media in the Untied States from the end of the First World War to the end of the 1930s is best framed within an initial understanding of certain legal definitions that touch on the standing of the corporation in American public life. As we will note, this is particularly significant when associated with vital issues of free speech and political accountability. In this context, the following account has direct bearing on contemporary issues and debates in America today that touch on issues of citizenship (Schiller, 1996; Buckingham, 1997), political accountability (Schultz, 2000) and freedoms of speech (Schudson, 1997a; Schudson, 1997b; Boggs, 2000).

To begin our critical consideration of the corporate culture, a useful condensed insight is offered by legal commentator Perlitz (1996) who reminds us that,

“As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, corporate law was the site for mediating between, on the one hand, individualism and its associated visions of the corporation as a “person” or an entity and, on the other hand, the material reality of corporations as associations of people joined as groups, as aggregations for commercial purposes. For most of the century, policy makers have imagined the corporation as having a separate existence, at least in the sense that corporations are distinct “persons” or “firms” or “groups functioning in commercial markets”. (Perlitz, 1996, p. 284-285)

The acceptance of a corporation as an ‘entity’ is based on the definition as laid down by Chief Justice Marshall (Dartmouth College vs Woodward) who deemed in 1819, that the “creation” of a business corporation was based on certain principles, the most important of which were,

“…immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality, properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered the same, so that they may act as a single individual.” (Leete, 1982, p. 778)

Marshall’s precedent was later tested in 1886 (Santa Clara vs Southern Pacific) when the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Waite confirmed without argument or opinion that the Fourteenth Amendment that guaranteed equal protection of citizens did apply to the railroad monopolies as representatives of their shareholders. As a direct result,

“Corporations were now armed with constitutional prerogatives. And so armed, they proceeded to the development and exploitation of a continent in a manner never equaled before or since…these unexplained decisions are now so implicit in the financial and industrial undertaking of the nation.” (Corley, Black and Reed, 1981, p. 21)

The framing of a corporation as an individual is, of course, fundamental to the operations of all media organisations since, a fact felt most strongly by writers who at the point of financial success must, according to copyright laws, cede their ownership of their work to the corporate producer. As Streeter (1994) underlines persuasively,

“…giving the corporations the status of persons under law grants them the ability to stand in for ‘authors’ in the framework of copyright, thus transferring the bulk of control over media ‘works’ from individual creators to large bureaucratic institutions. Programs are thus created, produced, owned and exchanged by corporate bureaucracies…(which) have taken the place of individuals in the eyes of the law and in the process of cultural production.” (Streeter, 1994, p. 102)

From Nace (2003), however, we are reminded that the existence of the corporation was, from the very beginning of the Republic, viewed with wary suspicion as its potential threat to the common good was acknowledged and then curtailed within strictly defined charter law. The lists below provides a useful summative guide that contrasts the tightly constrained nature of the corporation before 1860 and its more Liberal descendent of the 20^th Century (Nace, 2003).

ATTRIBUTES

CLASSIC FORM OF CORPORATISM - before 1860.

Birth: Difficult, required a custom charter issued by a state legislature; Lifespan: Limited terms ’Shape shifting’ Corporations not allowed to own stock in other companies and restricted to activities specified in the charter; Mobility: Usually restricted to home state; Adaptability: Restricted to activities specified in the charter; Conscience: Actions constrained by shareholder liability and a threat of charter revocation; Will: Managerial action hampered by legal status of minority shareholders and corporate agents; Size: Limited by charter restrictions Constitutional rights: Functional only.

MODERN FORM OF CORPORATISM - since 1900.

Birth: Easy, general incorporation allows automatic chartery; Lifespan: No limits Corporations free to pursue acquisitions and spin-offs; Mobility: No restrictions; Adaptability: Allowed to pursue multiple lines of business and initiate or aquire new ones at the company discretion; Conscience: Fewer constraints due to limited liability, disuse of charter revocation; Will: Legal revisions enable consolidation of management powers; Asset limits removed, antitrust laws generally not effective Constitutional Rights: Steady acquisition of constitutional rights

The comparison provides a useful oversight of how the persona of the corporation became increasingly legitimised through Supreme Court interpretations of the U.S. Constitution from the 19^th to the 20^th centuries. For Nace (2003), such legitimisation ran counter to the wishes of the original Constitution framers whose faith was in the assumed strength of charter law to constrain corporate development.

The strength in corporate economic status and political power which soon emerged after the Civil War was vividly marked into the American consciousness at 12 noon on 18^th November 1883 when the nation’s clocks were standardised across the new four time zones. It was made possible by synchronising all the clocks in all the railroad stations which were linked by telegraph. However, national time zones emerged, “…neither from an act of Congress nor from an executive order by the President, but rather from a joint decision of the country’s railroad corporations.” (Nace, 2003, p. 69).

The telegraph, like the new media that would soon follow, was a clear challenge to those static inhibitions of mountains, valleys, and imposed state boundaries that the framers of the Constitution thought sufficient enough to curtail the dangerous potential of the corporation. The assertion of the corporate symbolic strength came about, as Burke (1966) might have it therefore, by creating things from words.

From Railroads to Airwaves

“…an imperishable corporation with its own territory, an empire within a republic, more powerful than a Sovereign state, and absolutely inconsistent with the purity of republican institutions, or with the safety of any government…with the prodigious development of corporate wealth, resistance must be vain.” (Henry Adams, in Schlessinger, 2003)

Henry Adam’s diatribe from the July 1870 edition of the North American Review was directed against the-then rapidly developing strength of the New Pacific Railway corporation but could very easily be set within contemporary concerns that focus on another form of invasive tentacle - the power of those few media corporations that would soon dominate the United States ether landscape beginning in the 1920s.

The rapid development of mass media technologies in the hands of a few corporations in the 1920s rested on equating corporate identity with the rights usually conferred to individual citizenship and from that emerged an interpretation of free speech principles that impacted on the nature and function of broadcasting content first on radio and later television in the 1980s. In concrete terms, equating television product - including advertising - with free speech ensured that corporations could evade government restrictions since, according to the Constitution itself, “…congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”.

It was - and remains - assumed that free speech existed ‘naturally’ when not constrained by government edict only. Looking to how this inflects on issues of media power in the 21^st century, Foerstel (2001) underlines how the media oligopolies, or,

“…new private information power centers have successfully persuaded the public that their corporate control of the media is an exercise in individual free expression. The effective use of the First Amendment for a shield of corporate power relies in large part on a century-old Supreme Court ruling that a corporation is an individual and on the subsequent corporate presumption that abridgement of expression can only come from the state.” (Foerstel, 2001, p. 12, italics added)

Precisely how that persuasion takes place is the focus of our later analysis.

In such a condensed media environment, the prevailing definitions of free speech emerge principally from the media corporations themselves and so serve clearly defined corporate aims and objectives. This debate runs as a constant surface motif throughout the developing histories of 20^th century U.S. media - from The Radio Act of 1927 to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 - and exists, further, as subtextual narrative feature across and within media products themselves, particularly news reporting and website features - “We Report, You Decide”, for example, is the principle operating rhetoric of Fox News.

This creates a webbed rhetoric of cross-referential accounts and narratives that informs all media output - from television ‘chat’ shows, news broadcasting, to radio phone-ins and commercial advertising (wherein we can ‘choose’ or ‘elect’ our preferred television commercial). It could also be an important driver in the high profile of rap music - proving on-going evidence of free speech rights to the younger generation. Writing, then, in the light of more recent court deliberations in the 1980s and 1990s McChesney (1999) underlines how, in the hands of the wealthy

“…the advertisers, and the corporate media, the new-fangled First Amendment takes on an almost Orwellian cast…these semi monopolistic corporations that brandish the Constitution as their personal property eschew any public service obligations and claim that public efforts to demand them violate their First Amendment rights… Indeed, the media giants use their First Amendment protection not to battle for open information but to battle to protect their corporate privileges and subsidies.” (Mc Chesney, 1999, p. 279).

It is a debate to which we will return in our last chapter, but one that drives our account of how a few corporations were able to secure the dominance over the American media landscape. For an understanding of how this dominance was established in the first instance, preliminary coverage will now focus on how the U.S. broadcast system initially developed at the turn of the 20^th century.

Part Two

Broadcast Beginnings: Wires, War and Washington, D.C.

Acting in his capacity of Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover’s request on 3^rd March 1922 for a supplemental appropriation for his Department’s ‘Bureau of Navigation’ provides a detailed and loaded insight into the burgeoning explosion of radio development across the United States at the time:

“ …within the past 60 days there has been a tremendous development in the radio field throughout the United States of the system known as “radio broadcasting” and the employment of radio telephones in connection with the distribution to the public of government reports, including weather forecasts, crop and market estimates, etc; and in addition to these, concerts, news, lectures on educational, health and other subjects of public interest, religious services and general broadcasting by amateurs. This service is extending with great rapidity to every part of the country and it is estimated that there are at least 600,000 listening in stations now in operation…this number is still increasing so rapidly that the manufacturers of instruments are unable to meet the demand.” (Bensman, 2000, p. 25)

From the partial evidence of this letter alone, it is clear that radio “amateurs” across America, still free of government regulation and corporate commercial interests, were already driving and determining the scope and content of the wireless superhighway of the 1920s. This sudden profusion of private and community use was the result of numerous but related social, scientific and political circumstances that had coloured the development of radio transmissions in the decade before and as staged by the three International Wireless and Telegraph Conferences (1903, 1906, 1912) that had set agreed protocols for standardised use of wireless bands on the coastal highways.

The Radio Act of 1912

The Radio Act of 1912 provided for the licensing of radio operators and station transmission, though, despite appearances, it did not, according to a ruling by the Attorney General, accord any effective regulatory power to the Department of Commerce which was the official government body overseeing the new media. Designating particular frequencies for particular uses applied the property metaphor of the wilderness to the airwaves, thereby creating, “…the beginnings of major territorial divisions in the spectrum that continue to this day.” (Streeter, 1994, p. 97).

In a way that foreshadowed future prejudices in frequency allocations, the Act gave the frequency spectrum to two significant bodies - the Marconi Corporation won virtual monopoly in the commercial designation leaving the remaining availability for the U.S. Navy. The criteria of judgment came down to technical competency and public safety, criteria established and determined by these same institutions. As Streeter (1994) neatly puts it,

“…beginning in 1912, therefore, the State action wrested control over a new communications medium from a mixed group of small entrepreneurs and hobbyists and turned it over to large corporations and the military…furthermore, private individuals - the amateurs - were forcibly ejected from their place in the spectrum without compensation, while others, notably the Marconi Company, were granted a place of privilege by what amounted to government bequest. Similar actions were taken in Europe; what was unique about the U.S. was that this seizure was undertaken in the name of ‘free enterprise’.” (Streeter, 1994, p. 97)

So, as with the prairies and mountains of the 19^th century, so with the opening wilderness of public airwaves of the 20^th century. In addition, in an act of acute prescience, the Senate Committee made clear, that,

“…the term “radio communication” instead of “Radio telegraphy” is used throughout the bill so that its provisions will cover the possibility of the commercial development of radio telephony.” (Bensman, 2000, p. 9).

The development towards a system that could actually carry the human voice instead of Morse code was something lawmakers were therefore already legislating for and that “possibility” was largely assured given the current stages of research. Reginald Fessenden at the University of Pittsburgh had already impressed sound onto a electromagnetic carrier wave in 1906 and, more importantly, Lee de Forest had invented the audion tube which would become a crucial component in transmitting and receiving equipment since it made it possible to amplify radio waves without distortion and, significantly, generate the high-frequency radio wave needed to carry speech - and music. Despite his more noble intentions for his invention, however, McChesney (1999) informs us that De Forest’s later hatred of radio advertising was such that in the 1930s he tried to perfect a scrambling device that would automatically mute the radio commercials and then return the volume to audible levels when the programme returned (McChesney, 1999, p. 237).

More notably for our focus, the American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) company and the General Electric company were both researching into the de Forest vacuum tube by 1913. In 1915, General Electric had perfected the Alexander alternator, capable of generating powerful high frequency currents and over the next few years would secure key patents crucial to the development of radio broadcasting. It would be on the basis of these patents and others that followed that General Electric would become America’s most dominant company.

By 1917, however, the patent logjam in the courts that had stifled technological research was ended. With America at war, the patent impasse was broken on 7^th April 1917 by a Presidential proclamation that all commercial stations serving maritime commerce came within the operational management of the Naval Department and that all others were effectively closed down. Amongst those stations taken over by the Navy was its own major competitor in the field - the Marconi Company. Now that the government assumed all liability for patent infringement, the three main competitors, namely Westinghouse, Western Electric, and General Electric, all served successfully as the principle benefactors of the war economy and became major providers in the Defense Department‘s drive for greater technology and equipment capabilities in radio transmission.

The demands of the new warfare generated rapid technological advances and, based on the vacuum tube capabilities, a range of breakthroughs were effected, namely, long distance telephony and ground to air speech communication - all developments driven by the exigencies of war. Such alignments would be repeated in 2003 as the invasion of Iraq helpfully generated a needed upswing in the wider use of broadband technologies.

From Defense Departments to Worthy Citizens

With the end of war in 1918 and the return to limited government deregulation, however, interested parties such as the Naval Department and the commercial companies naturally wanted to secure the benefits of their successes for both national and corporate security - and long-term profit initiatives.

Returning the (foreign) Marconi company to its rightful and prominent place within the competitive market, for example, was clearly detrimental to this aim. Director of Naval Communications Admiral Bullard (he came from Media, Pennsylvania) was instrumental in warding off this clear and tangible threat to national Homeland security. So, towards this singular aim,

“Unable to convince Congress to keep control within the government, but still concerned about the deployment of its radio system, the Navy urged General Electric, largest of the radio manufacturers, to buy out the British backed Marconi company… General Electric’s acceptance of the Navy’s suggestion resulted in the formation in October 1919 of the Radio Corporation of America. In this country, RCA became owner of practically all the commercial high-power wireless telegraph facilities.” (Bensman, 2000, p. 13-14).

A fruitful synergy of mutual interests, then, between a department of the government (Defense) and a private corporation (General Electric) led to the deliberate creation of a private monopoly, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) based on the significant transfer of that government body’s many important and lucrative patents. This, in Cook’s (1998, p. 52) understated terms, would be “initial government assistance”.

We can register, then, from this fact alone, how the corporate mergers and media synergies that were deemed a unique and sudden feature of the 1980s media landscape had their antecedents even in the 1920s and involved the same handful of usual and familiar corporate and government institutions”.

And Farnsworth?

END OF EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 3, “We,the media…”

And from the Internet Archives: TelevisionTomorrow, a classic from the late 1930s:

http://www.archive.org/details/tomorrow_television

END OF CHAPTER 2

2008 Update: On Broadway,The Farnworth Invention.

From NPR: “Aaron Sorkin is best known as a television writer and producer — most notably as the creator of the Emmy Award-winning series The West Wing. But he got his start on Broadway 19 years ago, with the play A Few Good Men. He’s back now with a new play, The Farnsworth Invention, which happens to be all about television. About the television, that is — as in the box itself. And why not? It’s hard to think of a more ubiquitous device. They’re in our living rooms, our dens, our bedrooms, even in our kitchens and baths sometimes. Some houses have more TVs than people. “I make my living in television, I love television, I’m a TV addict,” says actor Hank Azaria, who stars in The Farnsworth Invention. “I was raised on television — and I didn’t know about this story until I read this play.”

• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16859501&sc=emaf

 Where To Now?

• For historical continuities, why not try Chapter 5 on the 1980s: http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1920s-us-media-beginnings/1980s-wars-white-house-and-media-mergers/

Or maybe corporate film on corporate media from 1999?:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1970s-case-study-film/1999-case-study-film-the-insider/

• 

END

FROM CHAPTER 8.

FOX NEWS - Showing Clearly, Speaking Plainly

“And time on television is an extremely rare commodity. When you take up precious time to say banal things, to the extent that they cover up precious things, these banalities become very important.” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 18)

“Politics is not just about politicians and their constituents; it is also about communication of socially significant information that confers or denies power.” (Woodward, 1997, p. 15)

“While previous commentaries have been content with the representation of American television practices and the news broadcasting industry by mainstream Hollywood, there exists the timely opportunity to undertake an analysis of one corporate strand that so far has appeared only tangentially.

This chapter, then, will build on previous coverage of NewsCorps’ texts - namely Independence Day (1996) - and critically address the Fox News output which, as we have uncovered, was first positively platformed in that film. Our analysis centres on a single 15-minute news sequence as taped in the early months of 2002. It has been isolated as representative of the twelve hours of material that were taped over the previous four months since 11^th September 2001.

The textual analysis will be sandwiched between a Part One overview of the Fox agenda since its inception in the mid-1990s and, at its close, a Part Three with a wider account of the Fox corporate portfolio as it burgeoned across America in 2003. This will itself foreshadow our overview in Chapter Nine that will sample the range of media events that became so prominent during that year and in which the NewsCorp, as a representative of the global news media, had a deep financial interest. Those media events would prominently include FCC revisions of The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the U.K. Communications White Paper and the invasion of Iraq.

Part One - Contexts

NewsCorp and Washington, D.C. - the Hegemonic Agenda

In 1995 a relatively small circulation publication was founded called The Weekly Standard. The modest publication quickly established itself as a brash counter to the more orthodox tomes of The Nation, The New Republic and The National Review. Indeed, as edited by William Kristol, former chief of staff to Republican Vice-President Dan Quayle, it defined itself more fully as a leader of the neo-conservative agenda whose target readership did not go beyond the Washington, D.C. beltway but was focused on sharpening the Right-Wing agenda that would, within five years, dominate the three areas of government - the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. By 2003, observers were able to reflect back on the significance of the journal in defining the widening scope of the Republican programme that became more directly influential with the election of George W. Bush in 2000. In June 1997, for example, it was Kristol who formed the ‘Project for a New American Century’ which, as reported by David Carr (2003) in The International Herald Tribune of March 2003,

“…issued papers, supporting essentially unilateralist efforts to police the world. It was a call to arms that compelled neo-conservatives, who say that America is best protected by exporting its values…signers at the time included…Vice-President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld along with others…including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl who heads the Defense Policy Board which advises the Pentagon.” (Carr, The International Herald Tribune. 12.03.2003: 2)

More specifically, just one year later, and with President Clinton still in office,

“The Weekly Standard made the broad, seemingly preposterous assertion that America was entitled and even compelled to engineer regime change in Iraq. But under the current Administration, driven by Sept 11, that contention has become conventional wisdom.” (Carr, The International Herald Tribune. 12.03.2003: 2)

Carr (2003) was writing when 1998 assertion and 2001 wisdom were being transformed into brutal 2003 fact. In February of that year, 2003, President Bush was able to attend the annual dinner of the Annual Enterprise Institute to compliment Kristel’s father, Irving Kristel who, at 83, was regarded as the forbearer of the neo-conservative movement (Carr, 2003). On the question of influence, Kristel the younger, wryly answered:

“We have a funny relationship with the top tier of the administration. They very much keep us at arm’s length, but Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of the magazine every Monday.” (Carr, The International Herald Tribune. 12.03.2003: 2)

Kristel’s ironic mix of mock self-depreciation coupled with up-front marketing savvy is emblematic of an overall casual style that shows itself more clearly in the format of Fox News which also debuted in the mid-1990s. In fact the allusion is not coincidental. What is of some interest in this prelude to our study of Fox News is that The Weekly Standard was actually founded as an antidote to the New Republic by the NewsCorp organisation and which is easily able to sustain the publication’s annual deficit of one million dollars over a weekly readership of just 55,000.

The News Programme - Setting the Populist Agenda

The emergence of Fox News in October 1996 (following its teaser in Independence Day, 1996) was and remains the first real threat to the tripartite oligopoly of CBS, ABC and NBC that had characterised the American news network system. It also emerged at a time of that general public and academic discontent with U.S. news media organisation coverage (Chapter Six). As we will consider, though, Fox made much of its independent status to speak on behalf of such discontentment. In mythologizing its own history, for example, Fox premiered its weekly series Only on Fox (26.05.2001) with an explanation from the show’s host, Trace Gallagher, that,

“Five years ago, Fox News Channel was launched on the idea that something was wrong with news media - that somehow, somewhere bias found its way into reporting…and it’s not just the way you tell a story that can get in the way of the truth. It’s the stories you choose to tell… Fox News Channel is committed to being fair and balanced in the coverage of the stories everybody is reporting - and to reporting stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Stories you will see only on Fox.” (http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html /, 04.01.2003)

Its populist appeal to folks interpellated the assumed viewer explicitly against the established news networks that were - and remain - ‘revealed’ to be rhetorically positioned in their ‘Liberal’ agenda. In the light of actual ownership patterns and histories as discussed in earlier chapters, this is a criticism those ‘rival’ companies might actually (secretly) welcome. As will be discussed, this appropriation of genuine discontent with the prevailing media industry neatly veiled Fox’s own virulent Right-Wing populist agenda.

As this chapter will hope to show, the Fox agenda reflects and often galvanises popular frustration and disappointment with the network media and, by extension, the culture at large, by creating a public space that seems to enable greater social involvement and democratic participation in public affairs for its audience. As will be argued, the process confirms the most positive aspects of hegemonic practice - that which allows for knowing critical engagement by the individual - with its most negative aspects - the ability of the media elite to meet such critique via acknowledgement, appropriation and deflection. This rhetoric of involvement that equates democracy and free speech constantly prevails across virtually all forms of Fox News narratives both textually and subtextually, and is a stylistic feature which will figure in our account below. It would soon complement on a broader level the same ideological views as propounded in the more exclusive tomes of The Weekly Standard, but for a more varied popular audience.

The Global Reach of NewsCorp

The two U.S. products contribute to a roster of NewsCorp output of worldwide interests as detailed in Mc Chesney and included:

• 22 U.S. TV stations covering 40% of the population

• the U.S. Fox TV network, including Fox News and Fox Sport

• 50% stake in fx, fxM, Fox Sports Net, Foy Kids Worldwide, Family TV Channel

• 33% stake in Golf TV channel

• film studio 20^th Century Fox

• Twentieth Television, U.S. and International TV production/distribution

• over 130 daily newspapers including The Times and the New York Post

• 70% Australian newspaper market

• 23 magazines, including TV Guide

• 40% stake in the United Video Satellite Group

• 30% stake in Echostar, a US satellite division company

• ownership of Harper Collins book publishers

• the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team

• minority stakes in the New York Knickers and Rangers

• option to purchase 40% stake in Los Angeles Kings NHL hockey team

• option to purchase 10% Loss Angeles Lakers NBA basketball team

• controlling interest in British Sky Broadcasting

• 32.5% stake in British Interactive

• numerous Sky Television channels for the U.K. and Europe

• partial stake in music Choice Europe TV channels

• Latin American TV channel El Canal Fox and Fox Sport Noticias

• 30% stake in Latin Sky Broadcasting, venture with AT&T-TCI, Televisa and Globo

• 20% stake in Telecine, Brazilian pay TV service

• 66% stake in Munich TV station TM-3

• 50% stake in German Vox TV network

• Controlling interest in Italian pay - venture, Stream

• Fox TV - Netherlands

• 80% stake in New Zealand Natural History Unit

• European radio - 71% stake in Sky radio; 42% - Radio 538; 28% Sky radio Sweden

• Heritage Media - U.S. direct marketing company, revenues $500 million plus

• Stakes in Eastern European companies -PLD Telekom (30%) and PeterStar

• Asian Star TV satellite TV service

• ESPN and Star Sports

• Asian Channels - Channel V Music (four)

• Star World, Star Plus, Star Movies (nine Asian channels)

• 50% stake in Indian cable TV channels Zee TV, EL TV and Zee cinema

• partial stake in Indian cable TV company Siti cable

• partial stake in Indonesian pay TV venture Indovision and Film Indonesia

• 11% stake with Sony, Fuji TV and Softbank in Japan Sky PerfecTV

• Star Chinese Channel (Taiwan)

• 45% interest n Phoenix Chinese Channel, satellite tv for mainland China

• Australian channel FoxTel

• controlling interest in New Zealand’s Independent Newspapers Ltd

• 52% New Zealand newspaper market and 40% New Zealand Sky Television

• India Sky broadcasting, satellite TV service

• 50% stake Australian national rugby league

The list would be extended to include the takeover of DirecTV by the summer of 2003 (Chapter Nine).

The extent of NewsCorp own media empire was, by 1999, a very visible feature in world media. A year earlier, Murdoch claimed to have networks that reached 75% of the world’s population, with the future focused firmly on the rapidly expanding markets of China.

Washington, D.C. Lobbyist

Seth Ackermann (2001) of Fair & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR, www.fair.org) underscores the more Right-Wing Republican ethos operating at Fox News by detailing the intricate network of former relationships that associated its founding members to the Republican cause of the 1980s and 1990s. Daytime anchor David Asman, for example, worked formally for the conservative Manhattan Institute; the-then host of Fox News on Sunday, Tony Snow was former speech writer for the Bush administration; managing editor Brit Hume is former contributor to the conservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard magazines, while Bill O’Reilly was outed as a registered Republican by The Washington Post in 2002. Further, before taking up her front line post as a jobbing journalist, Catherine Crier had a career as an elected Republican judge. Last but not least, the founder and President of Fox, Roger Ailes, actually led the election media campaigns of first Nixon, then Reagan and followed by Bush Sr. in 1988. Prior to taking the lead at Fox he worked as producer for Rush Limbaugh’s ABC television show (Chapter Five) and The New York Post, which was successfully repurchased by NewsCorp in 1993 (http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html /, 30.01.2003). As further detailed by Oliver Burkeman, as a former adviser to Nixon,

“…Reagan and the current president’s father, Ailes is profoundly irritated by accusations of enduring sympathies for the Republicans, and once reportedly urged a newspaper interviewer not to dwell on his earlier career because it was “irrelevant”. He does not, for example, take kindly to implications of bias on Election Night 2000, when Fox hired John Ellis, who happens to be the president’s cousin to analyse the returns (Fox was the first channel to declare a Bush victory that night).” (Burkeman, The Guardian. 25.11.2002)

However, denying any bias allows Fox to maintain its claims for objectivity. As further outlined by FAIR with the ascendance of Fox News Channel,

”…we now have a national conservative TV network in addition to the established centrist outlets. But unlike the mainstream outlets, Fox refuses to admit its political point of view. The result is a skewed center-to-right media spectrum made worse by the refusal to acknowledge any tilt at all.” (Ackermann, 2001, http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html , 30.01.2003)

The account has so far focused principally on the beginnings of Fox News and the political affiliations of its more public news anchors. Attention will be paid more fully to actual content - first, a short commentary of the Fox website, and then a detailed account of a selected news sequence as taped in Frankfurt during January of 2002. This was one sequence culled from many hours of available material as taped since 11^th September 2001.

News Style, Content and the Co-modification of Citizen Identity

“Express your support for Fair & Balanced news It takes about 2 minutes.”
www.foxnews.com.

Despite Fox claims to the contrary, one need not go very far on the station’s website in detailing a distinct Right-Wing angle that passes for objective news reporting. Direct quotes, for example, from a web-search on 24.11.2002 8:31pm EST revealed an alarming account of naked agenda setting that colours and determines areas of social observation, book reviews and culture coverage in terms of ultra-conservative rhetoric….

Similar snappy overviews in this “war” can be found in the book review section where, amongst those texts most prominently headlined were, from 2001, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, by Bernard Goldberg. The dubious insider account positions the rival news network (owned by Viacom) as politically Left. By inference, this form of labeling attempts to align Fox News with the more reasonable or objective middle. The provocative Fox review of the book opens thus:

“Think the media are biased? Conservatives have been crying foul for years, but now a veteran CBS reporter has come forward to expose how liberal bias pervades the mainstream media. Even if you’ve suspected your nightly news is slanted to the left, it’s far worse than you think… If you ever suspected the network news was short-changing the truth, Goldberg will not only prove you right, he’ll give you a glimpse of just how it’s done, and how fairness, balance, and integrity have disappeared from network television.”.

The marketing tease comes with a special offer to purchase Slander by Ann H. Coulter at a $16.16 discount and those titles as recently purchased, it claims, by the same readers. These titles included,

• 1. • The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House, by Barbara Olson

     • Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson,by Kenneth R. Timmerman

     • The No-Spin Zone: Confrontations with the Powerful and Famous in America,by Bill O’ Reilly

     • The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil our Country and Civilization, by Patrick J. Buchanan

     • Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGovern

(www.foxnews.com, 24.11.2002: 8:31pm EST)

It is within this historical and operational context that each programme on the Fox News channel operates.

The aesthetic of Fox News distinguished it from the main broadcasters (at the time) in its resolute attempt to capture ever-popular viewing ratings. This was achieved by creating a form that seemed to appropriate the codes and conventions of the mainstream news format and merging these with a more casual unaffected style of mise-en-scene drawn largely from the cable news environment. Like its own anchors, the Fox brand has created a corporate persona that positions itself in the public arena that combines both a propositional role as traditional deliverer of news content and a performative role as media underdog asserting the best practices of raw investigative journalism (“we report, you decide…”)…

Despite the rhetoric of competition that compares ratings across the news broadcasters, the success of Fox has created a more aggressive commercial environment that allows the more established ‘players’ a helpful excuse in undertaking decisions of style and content that they might otherwise take, in time. Either way, the hegemonic structure remains in place by conforming to Glynn’s (2000) overall point that describes how,

“…at each point where dominating power confronts its “counterstroke”, its “underside”, its “limit”, the weak power on which it runs aground forms the “motivation” for new developments within its own networks of domination, which in turn provokes the emergence of new resistive strategies.” (Glynn, 2000, p. 232)

Hence, just as ABC in the 1950s drove the leading networks of NBC and CBS towards more competitive strategies to secure more comparative ratings in a smaller market (Chapter Three), so Fox in the 1990s forced resistive strategies in the same networks that nevertheless led to even greater comity with the tabloid style that Fox was establishing. In the case of the Fox News style, one can see the profitable combination of orthodox network codes and conventions resting on the “counterstroke” of early citizen cable networks of the 1980s - a mix of 1950s bubble gum colour-coding and folksy cable TV street vernacular in the latter set within mainstream genre structures of the former. Its patterned mode of address that in diction and turns of phrase deliberately echoes, as well, the equally mannered folksy drawls more often associated with members of the East Coast ruling political elite that presupposes an unaffected easy familiarity with its assumed audiences.

The negotiation of meanings with those audiences that Fox constructs begins and ends at the screen face with that process of identification commonly known to structuralists as interpellation, or audience/reader positioning. At this point, the account is indebted to Bagley (2001) who, quoting Smith (1994) provides a useful overview of how successful television reception relies on three stages of audience engagement.

The first relies on basic patterns of recognition “wherein characters and settings are perceived in a context of relative plausibility” (this, I would assume, comes under the general category of genre recognition, which in the case of television news includes techno studio set, medium-shot frames and, most importantly, apparent reciprocal eye contact ‘with’ the viewer by the anchor). Thereafter comes stages two and three involving:

“…a move to align ourselves with a given character’s point of view and the third, one’s adoption of allegiance whereby the viewer comes to rank the character’s relative morality. This last stage is the culmination of cognition.” (Bagley, 2001, p. 448)

This account optimistically posits the viewer in the role of objective referee able to weigh with equanimity the relative merits of the televisual codes; hence for Bagley (2001),

“Allegiance satisfies the view that television viewing is active rather than passive because it calls upon the individual to make cognitive and emotional decisions on the basis of character depiction…by viewing the narrative depiction, each individual exercises his or her consent once again to an ideology that is most consistent with, or attractive to, these implicit views.” (Bagley, 2001, p. 449)

However, without undermining the general thrust of Bagley (2001), we ought to consider how media messages - as sent by commercial broadcasters such as Fox - already assume this active possibility in the targeted viewer. As will be argued in the following analysis, the Fox style, that assiduously and continuously attempts to engineer ideological consent, is itself a measure of the truth of Bagley’s (2001) assertions which, after Gramsci (1971), localise the legitimisation process as a site of continuing struggle over meanings but which are continually staged and dramatised on the corporately-owned public stage.

The result is a virulent and unremitting appeal to the assumed viewer through codes and conventions of genre, narrative, and representation to make allegiance with the worldview of a major global news corporation that speaks to and for the ‘folks’. One crucial aspect of style that we will address is that which elicits the “ethos of participatory engagement” that pervades tabloid style (Glynn, 2000). This is of particular relevance in our study of Fox News style and address as it insinuates a democratic sense of participation and unbiased debate.

The sequence under scrutiny was amongst twelve hours of broadcasting taped between 11^th September 2001 and 28^th January 2002 and covers a single programme sequence from the telecast anchored by Shepard Smith then Neil Cavuto as transmitted to Europe. The sequence collaged studio interviews, outside broadcast unit deliveries, extensive pre-recorded interviews/statements and archive footage on ENG. This factor alone qualifies our understanding of what constitutes the ‘liveness’ of such broadcasting and its claims to ontological truth (Feuer, 1983).

Part Two - The Text

Case Study # 13: THE FOX NEWS SEQUENCE (24^th January 2002)

The News Narrative and the Organisation of Allegiance

The prime coverage anticipated two events due to take place over the last weekend of January 2002 - the World Economic Forum in New York and the World Super Bowl in New Orleans (and televised exclusively that weekend by Fox News). The sequence covers the last 15 minutes of the Shepard Smith Report that was transmitted between 3 pm - 4 pm EST on 24^th January 2002. The pattern of report coverage was as follows:

1. INT. STUDIO - a trailer from Neil Caputo detailing his coming programme
2. INT. STUDIO - back to Smith for a brief introduction to the OBU in New York.
3. EXT NEW YORK OBU Unit - Tod Connor’s coverage of how New York was preparing for the coming World Economic Forum, including a recorded exchange with the President of Friends of the Earth
4. INT STUDIO - Smith interview with John Timoney, Former Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police
5. COMMERCIAL BREAK
6. EXT NEW ORLEANS - from Brian Kilmeade
7. INT. STUDIO - insert on television commercials for the Super Bowl - close from Smith
8. INT: STUDIO - Neil Cavuto interview with Phillip Condit CEO Boeing

Across all programming sequences, a running banner featuring latest news reports and stock market listings are figured prominently at the bottom of the screen and an American flag proudly unfurls in an invisible digitalised wind at the top left of the screen corner.

INT. STUDIO, a trailer from Neil Caputo detailing his coming programme

The opening trailer from Neil Cavuto (Managing Business Editor) allows the anchor for the next programme to highlight the featured items for the coming hour. These are largely centred on coverage of the World Economic Forum and the series of rallies and demonstrations that have been organised around it. Both Smith and Cavuto confirm that this is a “heightened security alert” based around the Waldorf Hotel which, Cavuto mentions in passing, is “just a couple of blocks from us…”. With Fox News at the centre of the coming storm, Cavuto continues his round up with a gesture towards news balance but which ends in weighted angst:

Cavuto: …most of these guys are pretty peaceful demonstrators at that, but if so much as one person shows up in a mask,

Shep, then all hell could break loose… because…

PAUSE

…in New York you can be arrested (BEAT) for wearing a mask.

The earnest delivery to camera (second anchor/viewer) is accompanied here by a token open hand gesture that ‘to’ Smith interpellates or hails the viewer ‘as’ the second unseen anchor ‘as’ an implied contributor to the ‘exchange’. Having set the uncertain dramaturgy of the weekend in motion, Cavuto closes with a quick overview that looks beyond the-then present invasion of Afghanistan:

Cavuto: A couple of things we are also following - some of the attendees and what they are thinking there - obviously terrorism and the administration might want to expand that war to counties like Iran, and Iraq and North Korea – very much a concern to all the attendees including Phil Condit, Chairman of Boeing - he’s there and will be talking to us live…the Chairman of Merck, he’s going to be talking to us live…

Cavuto finishes with an upbeat overview of the economic situation - a “major league rally” that means “we are off to the races”, with the picture from Wall Street “up smartly over 9000 on the Dow…”.

INT. STUDIO - back to Smith for a brief introduction to the OBU in New York.

The final fifteen minutes of the Smith show that will lead to this coverage bears some extended analysis. It begins with the OBU unit live in New York and leads to the related Smith - Timoney interview. The OBU insert is introduced and framed by Smith thus:

Smith: In the meantime New York’s finest are keeping the streets peaceful…for as Neil mentioned…protestors who have threatened to disrupt the World Economic Forum are  descending…there we go…

…and the screen cuts swiftly to a forceful station insert frame “WAR ON TERROR” and then finds OBU reporter-on-the-scene Todd Connor ready to deliver his piece from the streets of New York:

EXT. NEW YORK OBU Unit

Connor: Well, Shepard, eh, no protestors really to speak of outside the Waldorf and the World Economic Forum. However, police still made some arrests. I’m going to tell you all about those in just a few minutes, but first we are going to show you just how quiet it’s been around here today…police literally everywhere…

We then cut to pre-recorded material taken at the scene - long-photo shots of uniformed police personnel in the winter rain at various positions - on horses, lingering bored at the entrance of a Gap shop, and even caught on top of a roof looking directly to the television camera through binoculars:

Connor: Even on the rooftops - they are looking for trouble but not finding any, and that’s because all the activists are in their own meetings or just didn’t show up to New York. Period. At least not yet. That of course is fine for the police many of whom think that’s because their strong show of force has something to do with it…

A screen banner appears: Police will be near stores like Gap.

Despite the fact that he has no news, his report does, however, include an exchange with Brent Blackwelder the President of the Friends of the Earth as recorded - and edited - a short time earlier from the same location:

Connor: I asked how his group will react if protestors turn violent…

The cut shows us a medium shot in a wet New York street peopled by passing pedestrians huddled against the rain. “We will try and leave the area…so that we are not associated with violence”, says Blackwelder. There is then a tight jump-cut intending to disguise the editing of the Blackwelder answer, that continues with,

Blackwelder: …the point is we have a serious message…we are trying to get that across…and so we will…violence gets in the way of our message we believe…

However, whatever important message Blackwelder perhaps made on behalf of Friends of the Earth which might have been shot by Fox News, remains unknown. Instead, we return live to Connor to close his piece by finally ‘answering’ his carefully plotted opening enigma - an explanation that will tell us “all about those arrests”:

Connor: So, eh, police aren’t getting too comfortable here, they know there will be massive rallies and protests on Saturday. Now to those arrests I promised to tell you all about. Five women were arrested for trespassing for climbing on top of a building and unfurling a banner. A twenty-three year-old California man was arrested for defacing a Starbucks door, some windows at a Gap clothing store were scratched - and a couple of other isolated incidents around the city that - more than likely - will be related to the World Economic Forum.

To remind us of the visual context of the reports (as determined by Fox), underneath the image of Connor we can read the rolling banner headlines:

Hizbollah guerrillas fire on Israeli jets over southern Lebanon…Nat’l Security advisor Condoleeza Rice: The U.S. has made clear that there is no such thing as a good terrorist and a bad terrorist: you cannot condemn Al Qaeda and hug Hamas…

The uncomfortable blending in these instances of direct quote, assertion and unattributed statement of ‘fact’ all emerging as from an electronic tele-printer is itself of concern in determining the status of such breaking-news format.

On screen above, Connor reaches to his final denouement - an affected aside - that helpfully foreshadows another possible confrontation to be reported later:

Connor: …and speaking of Gap, Shep, eh, in a little less than an hour there’s going to be a rally with - Jobs With Justice and the AFL and CIO outside a different Gap here in midtown, 54^th and 5^th Avenue. So we will have a report from there a little bit later on this evening. That’s all that’s happening here right now, back to you…

The whole report, therefore, constructs a visual and narrative motif that positions the comfy Gap store as emblematic soft victim of possible “massive” rallies over the weekend and union activity in the near future. In both instances, the stores are to be protected by the New York Police Department in its capacity as defender of civil rights. Closure in the final seconds, therefore, furthers the corporate agenda by deftly aligning The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations along an associational link that subliminally extends from a scratched door in downtown New York at one extreme to the global terrorist campaign against the United States on the other.

Masking Reality - Selecting the Agendas and Overcoding the Message

The presence of the reporter live at the scene suggests full coverage, but even light scrutiny of what is provided reveals telling gaps where more details might provide a deeper scope of debate and a wider understanding of events that were possible but denied - for example,

• what questions and answers emerge from the ‘activists’ meeting?

• what message is Brent Blackwelder trying so hard to get across?

• what few words were on the unfurled banner?

• why did it choose to stage its presence in New York anyway

• finally, what is the wage of a Gap worker ?(see Klein, 2001, p. 476)

The reader at this stage is of course invited to fill in the narrative gaps which the full transcription exposes and which would underscore the manufactured nature of the report that conveniently makes much ideological advances at the expense of very little actual news coverage:

INT. STUDIO - Smith interview with John Timoney, Former Commissioner of Philadelphia Police

However, as if the limited range of images from the Connor’s report was not enough, Smith ushers his viewers back to the studio with a supportive over- coded claim that assists the viewers in equating the live visual aesthetic with full knowledge:

Smith: As you can see…they aren’t taking any chances.

The “they” obliquely but very effectively allows for an active reading that nudges the viewer towards an imagined identification with the (assumed) police position but keeps the possibility of danger open. His interview then begins with a personal welcome, in the third person, and a general positioning of the expert primarily as:

Smith: …a high ranking New York city police officer - before he moved to head Philadelphia’s Police Department and now he runs…what is it…Beau Dietl & Associates…?

Timoney: That’s right, Shep

Smith: …a New York investigative and security sort of firm…

Smith quickly makes exaggerated locker-room reference to the Super Bowl - “sorry about your Eagles, by the way…can you get tickets….no way!” - and then, from a two-shot, he edges more seriously into the main discussion with the dour John Timoney who sits camera right with a large colour map of the Persian Gulf dominating his background. Smith’s opening question and Timoney’s reply extend from the previous Connor report:

Smith: They are working hard here by the way to keep this thing safe. You know the protestors are saying - “Oh, we’re gonna be safe and…”, but they have shown a propensity in the past…

Like a perfectly pitched football play, the loaded onomatopoeia is quickly picked up by the interviewee, though as we can see, there has been no actual question:

Timoney: …in the past…if the past is any guide and it usually is… expect some kind of trouble over the next two days, eh, Saturday is the planned big day, but I think tomorrow - because tomorrow is the last day of the week - lots of traffic, lots of opportunities, lots of opportunities to hit and run, hide in traffic, cause some chaos - so tomorrow… I know for a fact that there are a number of demonstrations planned throughout the city, not necessary by the way at the Waldorf…you just focused there on the Waldorf, but there maybe trouble elsewhere…

Their exchange is intercut with the identical material already seen from Connor’s OBU report (video recorded shots of police inactivity in a wet New York) and this is now sequenced into archive footage from the (wet) Seattle street protests. This interplay between live commentary and archive footage, for Feuer (1983), a “doubly temporal sequence”, is resonant with that form of narrative overlay which is a common feature of sports programming and where the word/logos is given interpretative priority over the visual offerings on the screen. Hence, there is an overlay of temporal shifts with the studio commentators commenting live on past events as shown within the live broadcast. As we will discuss below, consideration of such sequences helpfully question the live status of broadcast news and therefore its claims to objectivity (Feuer, 1983). Back to the studio we pick up a baffled Smith who now reads from his prepared script:

Smith: Some of this still wants me to scratch my head…this quote from David Graber, a Yale Anthropology Professor and a member of the anarchist group Anti Capitalist Convergence… a quote from him now: “We’re not going to break anyone’s heads…it’s up to the police if there is violence. If they attack us, they are the ones who are being violent…”

Smith places the paper down, a suggestive performative gesture that implies how the interview under way has not been rehearsed, has not been scripted, but comes ‘naturally’ and reasonably from the two men. With still no actual question asked but a point only suggested, the seasoned Timoney launches into his own explanatory soliloquy that oddly concludes with a strident defence of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:

Timoney: There’s no way…I know the people in charge, Ray Kelley, Al Hale, the, the Chief who is running this whole operation, he’s got thirty years of experience…

PAUSE

“They can take any kind of verbal abuse without, eh, eh, reacting. However, if the protestors lay their hands on police, if they break police lines, if they engage in asaultive behaviour…then the police are justified in using the necessary force to, eh, to place those protestors under arrest…but I can guarantee you that the freedom of speech will be guaranteed”.

To justify the sense of eminent danger, the discussion then makes extended reference to the previous World Economic Forum in Seattle and now includes a string of selected video images of street protesters and police forces in various stages of confrontation. Interestingly, one such image shows a young woman reading from a prepared statement while being forcefully evicted from a building. Her unheard statement to the crushed news crews is quickly ripped from her by an off-screen presence. Over these images we hear the on-going discussion between the anchor and his invited expert:

Smith: …people were saying, “…who are these people who are causing the problems…” and, and, some of them were categorizing them as people who are against the new world order…or whatever…but if you look at them as individuals…..

(SLOWER) …they seem like individuals who just like to stir up trouble.

The street images from Seattle close on the final word on this issue from Timoney,

Timoney: (OFF): Spoilt brats in some cases

The return cut to the studio provides us with a regular two-shot that brings anchor and guest into closer spatial agreement:

Smith: That’s a description that I heard repeatedly. And Mayor Bloomberg said we can’t let these people come in and run over our city, there are people’s hearts still bleeding.

Now in its rushed last stages Smith shifts the focus of the exchange to his guest and how he will contribute to the protection of New York citizens in the coming days. This is heralded by refashioning his angled social persona:

Smith: Now your company is promising some individual security…that’s pretty impressive.

At this point the banner at the bottom of the screen reads: Beau Dietl & Associates, and Timoney, with his new persona positively established, shifts to rehearsed marketing mode:

Timoney: That’s right, that’s right…there are a variety of venues away from the Waldorf where lunches, breakfasts and receptions at night are being held, so we are providing armed security, all our folks are retired NYPD, well trained, well disciplined, professional police officers providing armed protection for the individuals, for some of the parties, for some of the receptions, so we don’t expect any of these problems.

We cut from the medium shot on Timoney back to the two-shot that opened the sequence, with Shepard to the dominant right looking to Timoney left, thus signalling the end of the interview with Smith bringing some anchorage to the subject and an endearing fraternal touch to his final exchange with his guest:

Smith: And hopefully there won’t be…we have a team of people all over the city - this morning people who commute from the outer boros and from New Jersey and Connecticut are saying we spent an hour at the tunnel this morning - checking every car. (heavy) They have this place locked down.

PAUSE

(light) It’s good to see you, actually. It can be done in a new normal.

Timoney: (winking) There you go.

Smith: Good to see you

Timoney: Good to see you, Shep

Smith’s turn to front camera signals a change of subject and tone - from weighted earnestness to light and cheery - and as heightened by some further onomatopoeic indulgence:

Smith: All right. Coming up at the Sunday Super Bowl - the pitches will get nearly as much attention as the passes…we’ll show you some of the blockbuster advertising that they will show during the game - coming up…

INT. COMMERCIAL BREAK

Sheppard’s chirpy up-beat punched delivery to camera becomes a voice-over that matches selected outtakes from a range of fast, furious and fun television commercials - prominently Levis and Coke, that then bizarrely segues a short time later into the ‘real’ commercial break, which in Germany was blanketed by a station signal-card intended to ban advertising transmissions. However, the traditional line between advertisement and programming becomes indeterminate when news coverage positions $ multibillion corporate businesses as victims of minor street crime and which also includes, at the end, a news report that makes corporate advertising a newsworthy subject to report.

We are, of course, alert to the strengths of reception studies that underline and sometimes celebrate the riches available in the sliding signifier of the polysemic text for the active reader. However, reflecting back to Dow (1996), we are also alert to the underlying rhetorical strategies that determinedly work hard to make certain reading practices smoother than others, whether they be found in Hollywood films, television news broadcasts or even academic theses. Calling to the cognitive and the emotional is one instance where,

“As Barthes notes, the producer has a hand in what these paths of possible interpretation will be, and has an interest (as well as a set of strategies) in ‘overcoding’ a particular path of interpretation and ‘undercoding’ others.” (Jacobs, 1996, p. 374)

The news sequence from Fox described so far is obviously worthy of critical discussion in several areas where the term ‘overcoding’ is clearly an understatement.

Firstly, we can consider how the prominence given to the World Economic Forum from this particular narrative perspective conforms to how potential events are shaped as the likely source of news coverage (Jacobs, 1996). The potential conflict (in New York) becomes newsworthy once it is plotted as part of an ongoing story genre (act one Seattle, act two New York) with some narrative tension now maximised in terms of its likely development and possible outcome. It also presents ready-made cast of unseen villains complemented by visible studio heroes.

The positioning of opposing sides in this respect is not coincidental with the parallel story - the Super Bowl in New Orleans. The direct associations made by Smith (however ‘unscripted’) help generate the subliminal motif that projects into a near future two opposing sides coming together in conflict. The certain scheduled contest of the New Orleans Super Bowl, then, provides the inclusive frame of likelihood that makes possible or credible the anticipated confrontations in New York that are feared. Hence, the parallel editing across cities delivers a narrative tension worthy of any Hollywood screenplay that brings opposing forces into act three collision. In support of this meta-narrative, we can also include Timoney’s expert technicist language of “hit and run” that simultaneously neatly weaves tactical discourses of guerilla warfare and sport into one.

What should be of some surprise to a European readership is how the assumed television audience is so clearly interpellated to identify with the aims and objectives of the potential victims who are clustered as the police forces, corporate businesses and the people of New York who, following the attacks of 11^th September 2001 a few months earlier, are “still bleeding”.

This form of ideological shaping (fusing the interests of terrorists and activists against the status quo of business interests), is grounded on that form of audience hailing that is the prime task of the anchor. However, we have come a long way from the subtle intricate nuances of Tom Grutnick/William Hurt of Broadcast News (1987). The ideological project in 2002 is fully dramatised by Smith who helpfully overcodes the frame of his already over-coded text - affecting at times bafflement, surprise, some frustration, even amazement, in his exchange with the deadpan Timoney. While his delivery skirts a range of emotional registers, his script also provides a range of shifting personae. For example, he can be the neutral non-combatant by ascribing supporting opinions to unseen and unverifiable sources - “…people were saying”, or just another member of confused Joe Public looking for guidance and direction in his awe-shucks sense of apparent disbelief (“…some of this stuff wants me to scratch my head…”).

His wide acting repertoire is particularly in evidence in the reading of the letter where he appropriates the assumed voice of David Graber and adopts tones of belligerence and anger when reading quotes as if directed from Graber himself. His personification of Graber’s assumed presence is one of the several layered ironies that proliferate across the sequence since the letter as read makes Graber’s absence all the more telling in a news broadcast that purports to uphold certain freedoms of speech. By contrast, his more assertive role at the end - that firmly assures us with pointed finger to the desk that the city is “buttoned down” - places him securely in the adopted home of the embattled police force. This account that highlights the modes of anchor address is in keeping with Campbell’s (1991) own analysis of of the CBS showcase 60 Minutes, which helped clarify how reporters (Mike Wallace, Diane Sawyer) are scripted to adopt fictionalised character persona, from an available cache of personae that include the investigator/detective, analyst/therapist and even tourist/adventurer, and which are performative options that are adopted in accordance to the chosen genre mode of the report (Chapter Seven and Mad City, 1997).

Our critical analysis at this point is supported by a range of commentaries that have focused on the dramaturgy of the broadcast interview in general and the role(s) of the news anchors in particular. In this light, our specific account of Fox News is presented as a sample of marked tendencies in narrative and visual rhetorics said to be pervasive across the commercial U.S. broadcasting system (Croteau and Hoynes, 1994; Bourdieu, 1996 and Stein, 2001).

In the case of the late Pierre Bourdieu (1996), for example, “second level of activity” reminds us that,

“The set is there in front of viewers, and what they see hides what they don’t see - and what they don’t see is in this constructed image, are the social conditions of its construction.” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 34)

For our present analysis we are indebted to Roth (1998) whose own research based on dramaturgical principles of transactional exchange is particularly prescient. Roth (1998) begins with a consideration of Croteau and Hoynes (1994) and their detailed account of guest lists on U.S. mainstream news broadcast interviews on the basis of race, gender and institutional affiliation/status. From their research in actual casting, Croteau and Hoynes (1994) found that,

“…the range of guests helps to define the limits of legitimate debate and stakes out the limits of dissenting opinion.” (Croteau and Hoynes, 1994)

In other words, the initial casting of the social actors in the forum of debate often determined the outcome of what passes as a debate across supposed equal values, a feature already explored in the Chapter Six analysis of Mad City (1997).

Roth (1998) takes this a stage further by recognising how the interview itself is a dynamic forum of interchange wherein the actor (primarily the interviewee) is positioned and presented within the limits of a carefully shaped social persona (by the interviewer) in a manner that matches the overall agenda of the line of questioning - and the corporation’s bigger agenda. Roth’s (1998) focus, therefore, is in how, through introductory patter and selected and shaped biographical supportive accounts, the interviewer frames and presents the persona of the interviewee (soft start) and how this friction becomes the investigative content of the interview (hard middle). As Roth (1998) puts it,

“Through these selective descriptions, interviewers formulate the aspects of an interviewee’s persona that matter for this particular interview and warrant this particular question…it remains for the interviewer to establish the interviewee’s persona that are relevant to the developing news story.” (Roth, 1998, p. 87). Further, after the selective casting has been made (according to age, gender and status),

“In selecting what to describe and formulating how to describe it, interviewers make choices that shape the interactional relevance of the descriptions they produce.” (Roth, 1998, p. 87)

Roth (1998) looks to three different but standard uses of the form that provide useful reference points for our analysis of the selected sequence (and for that matter, for all news interviews and Fox News programming in general). They are:

• establishing expertise

• juxtaposing multiple perspectives; and, more provocatively

• challenging the familiar accepted personae

However, Roth (1998) proceeds to describe the orthodox assumed conventions that codify such exchanges. Our interest is in how closely the Fox version observes the genre conventions not just in form - but in spirit as well. This gap is fully exposed in comparing the minimal coverage of the President of the Friends of the Earth - who has a “serious message” to get across - with the extended conversational chat with the guest expert, John Timoney. While the cold and wet Blackwelder is both taped and tightly edited - and only in response to a loaded question about possible violence from protestors - Timoney is positioned comfortably in the secure studios of Fox News where he speaks authoritatively for the forces of law and order - and from where he obligingly guarantees the principle of the freedom of speech on their behalf. The contrast is supported in visual terms where Blackwelder is shot in a dramatically inferior position at an oblique angle looking down, while Timoney is framed at a respectful distance that does not intrude into his physical/psychic space. The lack of penetrating visual close-up assists in the unquestioning agenda of the interview.

Once Timoney’s reputable persona/status as former police commissioner has been established and called upon during most of the exchange, he can then speak on the public platform of national news as the head of a private company making good business in securing the protection of, note, “individuals” in this time of “heightened security alert”. So while the form of the studio exchange that develops seems to agree with codes and conventions of traditional studio interviews (soft launch, hard middle, soft landing), the actual minimal news information content and casual style of delivery betrays a highly skewed (and not very subtextual) ideological slant that is neatly smothered by the fraternal style of buddy discourse between anchor and interviewee. This unpremeditated surface effect works assiduously in deflecting any possible critical reading of the programme flow. Looking back to Roth (1998), we can quickly identify where the news item:

• establishes expertise (though it equates this with experience),

• makes some surface gesture to juxtapose multiple perspectives but

• makes no attempt in challenging the familiar accepted personae of its
  studio guest and the opinions he has.

On the contrary, it effectively undermines the standing of Yale Professor Graber - who is kept off-stage - and upholds the secondary persona of Timoney as a businessman. It is not an interview; it is not a discussion. It is a highly scripted exchange that, in the end, provides a (crude) commercial platform for a security firm manned by former civil guardians whose skills and know-how, once in the service of the public, are now employed to protect corporate executives, as “individuals”.

This profound imbalance of views, opinions and accounts which this single sequence exposes, also functions very knowingly within the terms of a wider more vital rhetoric that touches on the provision in the First Amendment that is designed to guarantee the right of free speech. Timoney’s direct reminder, uncontested by Smith, that, ”the freedom of speech will be guaranteed” is, in the light of our analysis, a rich, but uncomfortable assertion.

With the return from the commercial break, we are perhaps reminded from Comstock (1989) that,

“A persuasive theme of television entertainment is the satisfaction to be achieved from consumption…another theme is that the world is a mean and risky place.” (Comstock, 1989, p. 172)

EXT. NEW ORLEANS

from Brian Kilmeade

The return takes us first to Smith in the studio then live to the outside coverage from New Orleans, anchored by Brian Kilmeade. The lead-in from cheerleader Smith in New York is characteristically sprightly and is accompanied by a change to razzle-dazzle title and whooshy sound effects designed to imitate the rapid passing of a football across the screen:

Smith: This year more than ever, the Super Bowl, the symbol of life going on in America, and also, unfortunately a potential target (BEAT) for the evil ones.

PAUSE

Brian Kilmeade who is not evil has been checking out the security for the big game is with us now from the Big Easy.

What’s Up!!

This is followed by the formulaic buddy patter that across the anchors on Fox television establishes the homely environment that viewers should recognise as Fox Friends. In this instance it also bizarrely creates the persona of fellow anchor as featured national star attraction as well:

Kilmeade: Absolutely, Shep, we can’t wait for your arrival, there’s a buzz about Shepard Smith comin’ to the big city, but first…

And so Kilmeade, with open shirt and no tie, swoops into a breathless coverage of the security arrangements for the weekend contest that includes a recorded interview and then the more upbeat special items that will feature in the three-hour Fox broadcast. Viewers are privileged at this point in seeing “an exclusive preview of the Declaration of Independence being read by some NFL legends”. A few shots include recorded golden- hour coverage at the San Francisco bridge of prominent sports stars reverentially reciting the words of the Declaration of Independence. In closing, we have a final modest sales pitch from a breathless Kilmeade who assures how,

Kilmeade: It’s going to be as moving as anything you’ve ever seen.I’ve seen people who have put together the biggest shows on the planet say you’re not going to believe what we are going to present to America shortly on Sunday, and they expect all-time ratings…

INT STUDIO

- insert on television commercials for the Super Bowl

The last line back to the studio is picked up by Smith who reminds us that:

Smith: Super Bowl is home to the best ads of the year…

And this segues swiftly into the next and last news item of the show - a series of taped statements as part of assumed interviews with market expert Wayne Friedman and Anna Brockway, Levis Corporate Marketing Director. These headshots are accompanied by a zestful sequence of zappy edited highlights from those commercials that will be transmitted in full during the Sunday game. Profiled commercials in this news item include Pepsi (featuring Britney Spears), Seven Up, Budweiser beer, Blockbuster Video and Levi Jeans. In the latter case, there is a novel extension to the principle of representative democracy that allows potential consumers some voting power in the marketing decisions of corporate America. As explained by Brockway, viewers can “decide” and,

Brockway: …participate by logging on to Levi.co, and when they go there they can see all three commercials that are potential candidates to run in the Super Bowl…and we’ll pick the one that wins and run it in the game.

This is what Glynn (2000) would describe as the “ethos of participatory engagement”, adopted by the rhetoric of politicians, then broadcast television, and the sponsors themselves. From McAllister (2002) we learn that the coverage within Fox News of its own coverage of the Super Bowl is a form of ‘plugola’, a quasi-legal term created by the FCC and which is,

“…defined as “when a person responsible for including promotional material in a broadcast has a financial interest in the goods, or…the group being promoted…”.” (McAllister, 2002, p. 384, italics added)

McAllister (2002) helpfully points out the increase in such practices in a news environment that is losing its overall audience share and in a mediascape that allows single corporations such as NewsCorp to advertise its own programming services across its various divisions as news. The additional topping that then includes the actual advertising package as subject of a separate but related news item fuses the commercial interests of broadcaster with the advertisers who are provided free air time to speak of their promotional gimmick. Lest Fox News takes up too much of our own time, McAllister (2002) writes with specific reference to how NBC capitalised on the final showing of its major hit Seinfeld in 1997 when,

“…during its May 14^th evening news, only hours before the finale, NBC aired a news report about the commercials to be aired during that evening’s Seinfeld. This was the third longest segment of the broadcast, lasting 2:30. What, though, is the harm of this 21/2 minute promotional story? Viewing news as a democratic resource provides one answer.” (McAllister, 2002, p. 398)

In agreement with most media analysts, McAllister (2002) accounts for such corporate intertextual strategies that merge journalist endeavour and entertainment with reference to those deregulatory changes since the 1980s and specifically, the elimination of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules and the passing of The Communications Act of 1996 (Chapter Seven).

Returning to our sequence, the sparky plugola in the Shepard Smith Report, then, takes viewers pleasantly to the top of the hour and the start of the Neil Cavuto programme that purports to focus more resolutely on serious business and economic affairs. In contrast to Shepard’s classically proportioned bearing, Cavuto, also white, is appropriately cast as the chubby spectacled, hence more academically orientated anchor who is quick with the passing data flow of latest stock shares, Dow Jones indicators and graphic company forecasts. However, despite the changed anchor, tone and format, the ideological agenda that weaves and supports the interests of corporate entities and power elites that we have detailed so far remains virtually the same.

INT. STUDIO/OBU. Neil Cavuto Interview with Philip Condit, Boeing

In the case of the live reports and interviews from the World Economic Forum, for example, the link between the two, as mediated by the news broadcaster, becomes nakedly explicit.

The exchange from Neil Cavuto in the studio and the CEO of Boeing, Phillip Condit from the Waldorf hotel, is significantly revealing since it signals that Fox News has a news crew both outside the beleaguered hotel and inside at the same time. Whereas in the first instance we were positioned in the streets as fellow participant observers with the New York Police Department, “looking for trouble but not finding any”, we are invited to an exchange with one of the individual participants at the Forum under protection.

The five-minute interview is in the context of the significant rise in defence expenditure as planned by the Bush administration, and later passed by Congress, in its war against global terror. Rather than talk about the issue in terms of ethics, however, Cavuto frames the issue in terms of how the advance of taxpayer’s money will impact on the strategic production programme at Boeing as a problem to be shared:

Cavuto: “…let’s talk logistically, what you would have to do. Obviously this would ramp up production of a lot of key defense offerings – forty eight billion dollars that the administration wants to see. (BEAT) How much of that are you going to get?”

Condit: “It will come in lots of different pieces - it ranges everywhere from Smart bombs which we do up to the C 17s which are the primary logistics tool in this campaign to things like FA 18s which are one of the primary fighters in this thing.”

On cue, and as if to confirm the rehearsed nature of the live exchange, Condit (left) shares the split screen with a silent running sequence of video clips (right) showing aircraft carriers, fighter jets and, finally, military helicopters in action around the world. Below is a banner headline that, timed with a helicopter in flight, reads ‘High Flier’.

Condit: “So each one of those we will see. The last one is probably tankers.”

Giving the impression that his direct and provocative question has been directly answered, Cavuto now refigures the questions to consider the form of the meeting in the context of the “heightened state of alert” reported just a few minutes earlier from Todd Conner in the Shepard Smith Report. At this point, we are back with the single alternating shots from Cavuto to Condit:

Cavuto: “So far so good, do you think that will still be the case?”

Condit: “I sure hope so…um, everybody that is here is concerned about all of those issues, they are not ignored, they are really part of every discussion, and I hope the people (BEAT) that are interested in that realize that.”

Cavuto: “You know…there was some scepticism expressed by some of the attendees that maybe they shouldn’t attend, that they were concerned for their own safety…” TIGHT PAUSE: “Were you?”

In the light of those video sequences that have just shown the mighty force of Boeing weaponry, the shaping of the Condit persona as a possible beleaguered victim of activist attack, is jaw dropping:

Condit: “I think if we, if we take that attitude, we’re not gonna be in the right place, um, if you let it affect you, it will affect you, and my feeling was - I needed to be here.”

With his rise to heroic status established, Cavuto pushes the hardened investigative line:

Cavuto: “But you weren’t any stranger when it got hot and heavy in Seattle - your old haunt - and there were a lot of people concerned that it might happen here. If it DOES happen here, do you think that global type conference can go on without a hitch or is it just…”

Condit: “It think that it will be continuing to be important, global conferences are important, there will be those who want to disrupt them and there are those who want to join the conversation - the conversation is important, and we just got to try and do that.”

Cavuto: “Phil Condit, CEO of Boeing, good to see you, sir”

Condit: “Thanks, Neil”

This final personal appeal to activists to join in the “conversation” and the deferential sign of obligation to corporate business America from corporate media America brings to an end this sequence description and commentary from Fox News of 24^th January 2002. (Condit would later resign from Boeing in December 2003 following the firing of the company’s chief financial adviser, Michael Sears, and programme manager, Darleen Druyun.

Their earlier dismissal followed irregularities between Boeing and the Pentagon and, specifically, improper meetings that took place between Sears and Druyan when she was the chief procurement officer for the Pentagon prior to her appointment at Boeing in January 2003 under Phil Condit).

The Fox Metatext - Ideologies through Narratives

The obliging coda from the CEO of one of America’s biggest military suppliers to activists to “join the conversation” completes a subtextual refrain that has ghosted all the separate discourses - from sports through advertising to economics - that together make up the corporate meta-text that is Fox News. The selection of news items, their narrative framing and stylistic delivery converge in an ideological agreement that unifies the interests of commercial, military and entertainment entities across all reports.

It is a mendacious agreement that codes within the same frame of reference, for example, Gap stores, the New York Police Department, Britney Spears and Boeing “smart bombs” - a surreal gaga of visual motifs and aural impressions all compressed within a seventeen-minute blitz but all supporting a very focused and determined persuasive rhetoric that keeps certain social groups out of the ‘debate’ and certain corporate entities at its centre. The representative sequence - chosen from 12 hours of available material - is testimony to Glynn’s (2000) persuasive argument that,

“Tabloid media are not a discursive democracy wherein all the voices in society contest one another on equal grounds. The current high visibility of tabloid media demands to be understood not in terms of liberal pluralism but rather in terms of power and of the procedures whereby socially weak and strong voices and knowledges contest one another from dominant and subordinate positions.” (Glynn, 2000, p. 232)

The single sequence is clearly rich in supportive examples. For instance, while former New York police chiefs “guarantee” the freedom of speech, real access to “the conversation” is curtailed by a skewed news agenda that deliberately limits the range of voices made available while simultaneously celebrating ‘choices’ to be made in the selection of television commercials that will figure in another NewsCorp product. The degree of corporate purchase on the social and civil public sphere is most notably visible and audible in this last instance where the Levi Strauss marketing campaign so ruthlessly appropriates and assimilates the language of democratic political discourse - “participate”, “candidates”, “voting” - into its marketing strategy that invites viewers to its website where they must take time determining in true democratic fashion the relative values of three commercials for a ‘winner’ to be picked. These concerns about access are not unrelated to the increase since the 1980s of the ENG - electronic news gathering video systems - that made broadcasting from OBUs (outside broadcasting units) more economically viable. Cottle (1995), for example, makes an interesting point in suggesting that the arrival of the more “expansive” ENG format that was portable, lightweight and dependent only on reusable video seemed at first to,

“…afford some opportunity for outside voices and viewpoints to make their case and, depending on editorial juxtaposition, engage the viewpoints of others.” (Cottle, 1995, p. 278)

However, despite the technological opportunities that could mix and match a range of diverse opinions from various citizens across several geographic locations at once, the chosen ENG format, as we have seen,

“…is especially prone to the editorial process in which interviewee statements are severely edited, with clipped statements frequently juxtaposed in a mock contest of selected verbal bites all arranged in accordance with the overall story conceptualization of the news producers.” (Cottle, 1995, p. 285)

There still remains, then, that element of ideological canal digging that structures the programme flow - a feature we have underscored in Fox News and emphasised in our films under scrutiny, most significantly, Mad City (1997). In the case of the former, the audience may feel, because of the sheer speed of coverage, that they have been engaged with a ‘discussion’ that has directly involved interested parties - ranging from the Friends of the Earth, Boeing, to the New York Police Department and the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. However, as Cottle (1995) would observe,

“…such professional judgments have denied the public the possibility of witnessing and listening to engaged and elaborated positions of discursive and rhetorical struggle and as such they have been offered an impoverished resource for understanding and opinion formation.” (Cottle, 1995, p. 285)

It might be, though, that such editorial interventions by the corporate author are more clearly in evidence given the range of formats now available. Just as we can see the jumps, so we can see the gaps. Countering such critical reading places even greater dramaturgical emphasis on the role(s) of the anchor who must attempt to smoothly orchestrate the increased ramble of the programme flow.

While, therefore, the conventional form of the telecast supports orthodox expectations and so assumes authoritative ‘objective’ reporting (propositional), the overcoded (and undercoded) delivery style within the mise-en-scene exposes the performative dimension of the anchor that invites an active often positive response from the viewer. A classic case of deliberate but effective undercoding combined with framing for example, is the uncontested aside by Shepard that quickly and smoothly framed Professor Graber’s citizen group as “anarchist”. Stam (1983) has already underscored how in this respect,

“…television news, then, claims to speak for us…but just as often it deprives us of the right to speak by deluding us into thinking that its discourse is our own. Often it gives us the illusion of social harmony, the ersatz communication of a global village which is overwhelmingly white, male and corporate.” (Stam, 1983, p. 39)

With news programmes so vitally anchored to the role of the presenter, ever-greater attention is paid, therefore, to the delivery of performance - by both media academics and corporate shareholders. Hence, this is some justification for any extended analysis of an anchor’s dual-tone “speech act” (Hallin, 1994; Searle, 1969). As we have discussed in the Fox News examples above - the anchor role must contain both a propositional and a performative content - that is, make a statement about the world and simultaneously invoke or solicit a relationship between speaker and hearer/viewer that both opens ‘dialogue’ about the subject but then narrowly anchors limited ‘agreed’ meaning.

This beguiling transparent aspect of the anchor’s performance is additionally detected in the fraternal exchange between anchors ‘across and through’ the viewer, and in the balance achieved between respect and familiarity with complicit invited guests. In the case of the former our cognitive and emotional judgments and responses are nudged and guided by the carefully paced cross-cutting exchanges that help identify ‘us’ as active listeners who shot-by-shot adopt the assumed role of the listening second anchor being directly and politely addressed by the first. In this process we are literally interpellated as one of the anchors through direct reference to camera by the other. This is all the more evident in the transcription provided above which reveals a form of transparent discourse that - on paper - could not be distinguished from ‘natural’ conversation exchange outside the studio (albeit in the men’s locker-room). It is as if we are just listening in, yet active in anticipating the often engaging and comfortable give-and-take of the exchange.

Lastly, there is a further dramaturgical slant involved that subliminally compares news content (social contest and argument) with the more emotionally satisfying pattern of non-combative discourses that make up the Fox News environment. It is a form of mise-en-scene that, in its scripted affect towards “public reasonableness”, attempts to reproduce that form of spontaneous public discussion on which the democratic agenda is assumed to rest. It is a form that foregrounds mutual engagement, evenhandedness, turn-taking with the power of transmitting information and “clarifying the common world” (Schudson, 1997a).

The fraternal patter is not just to make the news comfortable for advertisers to locate their wares but codifies an ideological benchmark that equates the civil exchange of free ideas between engaged citizens as the basis of democracy. The working comparison is, by weighted implication, with those who choose other means of expressing their opinions by scratching Starbucks doors. The style of transparent exchange, Stam’s (1983) “ersatz communication”, within the Fox Friends simulacrum attempts, therefore, to secure viewerlistener alignment in the often explicit ethos of the programme, thus suggesting, is it not better to be with ‘us’, than with ‘them’? This active response that the studio discourse continually evinces from the audience would give legitimacy both to the broadcaster’s role (through the anchors) and by extension the ideological corporate worldview of the media system that they collectively represent. Thus the off-stage Anti-Capitalist Convergence becomes an anarchist group, by anchor definition. This would be one clear illustrative example - Wag the Dog (1997) provides another - of how, for Glynn (2000),

“Indeed, it can be said with increasing justification that in this electronically networked society, media processes are the primary site of struggle over the power of discourse to constitute meanings in ways that variously serve socio-political interests over and against others.” (Glynn, 2000, p. 232).

This discursive practice, rooted in dramaturgical gesture, creates identifications and empathies with figures from corporate news, entertainment and advertising that then blend fortuitously towards ideological alignment with institutions representing the given status quo. The form of public communication itself assimilates known discourses and practices from entertainment. As Altheide (2002) contests,

“The entertainment format contributes to social definitions and provides a common ground that the advertising industry essentially owns and operates…as audiences are exposed to more of these formats, the logic of advertising, entertainment, and popular culture becomes taken for granted as a “normal” form of communication.” (Altheide, 2002, p. 9).

Altheide is writing in the post-11^th September 2001 context of how mainstream communication patterns and organisations figure strongly in the creation of fear and how this generates and frames a social dramaturgical awareness that first manufactures contest and then fosters apparent security in the form of imagined social communities - one of which, for example, would be Fox Friends. In this important instance, the medium of convivial scripted exchange that weaves interview and conversation styles so invitingly is the actual message.

Considering the use of language, the continued hailing of the assumed audience into an imaginative dialogue with television anchors reading off unseen auto-cues is testimony of the real social and political contest referred to by Glynn (2000), and others, that is in play over these contested terms of description and labeling and how their meanings are anchored (Schiffrin, 1999; Hilliard, 2001; Schiller, 1996; Bourdieu, 1996).

We should also note how, the pattern of the conversational style that casually ascribes often loaded opinions to unidentified third parties (“you know, there was some scepticism expressed by some of the attendees”; “there were a lot of people concerned that it might happen here”; “this morning people who commute…are saying”; “That’s a description that I heard repeatedly.”) is one that also keeps NewsCorp out of the law courts.

Lastly, transposing one language discourse that frames civil rights for citizens into another that openly and pleasantly hails them as consumers is symptomatic of the general trend that deftly equates the fading ideals of the former with the crude commercial imperatives of the latter.

So while the sequence as a whole focuses on the trusted elements of visible drama - contest and battle between opposing forces whether in New York or New Orleans - there is another more virulent and unseen vital contest underpinning the programming agenda. This agenda that frames news events only in terms of contest, and evident in the chosen language of broadcast and internet websites, is all the more intriguing as corporations are personalised in terms of victims of minor or possible attack: how, in the two instances above, for example, Starbucks street doors are damaged and how corporate leaders, in this case CEO Condit of Boeing, are voluntarily and heroically putting themselves “in harms way”.

The ghostly struggle, just off screen but always within earshot - is over certain key definitions on which the Republic turns - ‘individual’, ‘freedom of speech’, and ‘democracy’ - and how those definitions are being anchored and then framed through a rhetoric of structured and rehearsed exchanges to suit the specific purposes of corporate America (Boeing) which confidently assumes, in our example, that, through complicit corporate television, it is already at the “conversation” and hoping others will “join”.

One critical insight, for example at this juncture, would wonder if the five women reported by Connor unfurling a banner on top of a New York building on a wet January afternoon would prefer instead to voice their opinions as citizens to the millions watching Fox News - if they were invited. Instead, condemned to broadcast silence, their unseen arrest provides even more justification for the “strong” police presence as celebrated by Shepard Smith. It also provides a news information hook for a frustrated reporter with no news to tell. It is interesting how the absence of event is positively ascribed to the strong presence of the New York Police Department. Yet within minutes, the same broadcaster allows extended airtime to the chairmen of corporate industry who are “concerned about all of those issues” while inside the security of the Waldorf hotel made ‘safe’ by public tax funds (for an overview of how well Boeing was to profit from the budget windfall to military contractors see Barnes, 2003). The sequence as a whole is worthy of Bourdieu’s (1996) fiery observation that,

“So much emphasis on headlines and so much filling up of precious time with empty air - with nothing or almost nothing - shunts aside relevant news, that is, the information that all citizens ought to have in order to exercise their democratic rights.” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 18)

Hence, the active determining role of the news broadcaster in decidedly shaping the social reality/contest on which it reports, is neatly camouflaged as it rhetorically ‘follows’ the news events ‘live!’. At this point we can defer respectfully to the late Neil Postman (1987) and his general contention that,

“…television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called “disinformation”… Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information, misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing… In saying this I do not mean to imply that television deliberately aims to deprive Americans of coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.” (Postman, 1987, p.109)

It is the main contention of this book to argue, however, that what for Postman (1987) might have been an unconscious element in television programming in the 1980s - an unfortunate outcome of historical and technological forces or the unconscious ideology at work - is now, more than ever, a consciously determined strategy/rhetoric that subscribes to a serious political and ideological agenda. It is an agenda driven, of course, by the invisible market, that landscape of ‘natural’, neutral and unfettered freedoms as permitted, though, only for the corporate few.

It is also an agenda, however, that actively creates the scope and powerfully arbitrates to anchor meanings that make up that social reality of on-going contest. In this context, citizens who may have no other alternative public avenue of direct expression outside the television studio that stage-manages the leading social discourses might very well emerge on rooftops unfurling a simple banner. That social reality is one of fractured social groups, real but manufactured conflicts, orchestrated fear and increasing frantic debate that passes for earnest discussion, or, in its most extreme form, ‘anarchism’ that must then be met with the full force of the law (Mad City, 1998).

So the sometimes easy and elitist tendency to frame ‘shallow’ tabloid form within the discourse of entertainment runs a serous risk of missing its determined rhetorical function that has a much wider and socially significant purpose than just providing infotainment as distraction from serious issues. The careful commercial appropriation of politically coded language - “we report, you decide”, “conversation”, “participate”, “discussion”, even “forum” itself, is of vital loaded importance in the context of a political culture founded on the associate link connecting voice, individual and power - and as condensed in the provisions in the First Amendment which Fox News thinks is so important. The most troubling aspect of this process is how the news organisations themselves - as corporate institutions - claim individual rights in line with free speech allowance, yet crucially deny their very active role as social actors in the real events as reported so objectively and, it appears, transparently.

The Interview - Implications of the Loss of Fairness

The concern over limited access for the diversity of voices has become a particularly significant aspect of debates that question the scope and depth of American news journalism in general (Sparrow, 1999). These debates have acutely sharpened in the wake of the 1987 FCC decision to suspend, it seems permanently, the Fairness Doctrine (Chapter Five). We are reminded that President Reagan’s veto that upheld the FCC decision was in direct opposition to the wishes of the people’s representatives in both the House and the Senate. In keeping with criticisms at the time, it has created the form of skewed news delivery of the kind we have sampled and analysed above. For example, in agreement with Croteau and Hoynes (2000),

“Since the abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC no longer requires stations to seriously address issues of public interest. If stations do address public issues, they can now create entire program schedules that communicate a single viewpoint without ever seriously considering alternative opinions. One possible result is the further retrenchment of political division.” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000, p. 100)

Our limited but telling example from Fox News is evidence of how such a single corporate viewpoint or ideological narrative angle can operate subtextually across a range of apparently different genre discourses in a way that has direct influence on the structure and content of public events that then become the profitable subject of news coverage. In this respect the analysis above concurs with similar recent findings (Stein, 2001).

To counter such positions, Fox News continually foregrounds the competitive ethos of public debate - but only in relation to the contest for market share between broadcasters. Within this determined discourse that positions Fox as the people’s underdog, Fox often claims a centrist objective position by continually presenting the commercial press (even including CNN) as biased. Yet,

“Contrary to what Ailes and other right-wing media critics say, the agenda at CNN and its fellow mainstream outlets is not liberal or conservative, but staunchly centrist. The perspective they value most are those of the bi-partisan establishment middle, the same views that make up the mainstream corporate consensus that media publishers and executive are a part of.” (Ackermann, 2001, http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html , 30.01.2003)

Behind the dramaturgy of news competition, however, there remains the main ideological project which, in times of permanent states of high alert in America, keeps the political agenda firmly to the Right.

This selected but detailed account of rudimentary Fox News reports underscores certain key theoretical assumptions that underpin this thesis as a whole. In essence it has been assumed that, after Gramsci (1971), the corporate mass media are part of an ongoing struggle over meanings that constitute social reality. Through continual consensual approval, they are able to determine, to their own economic and ideological advantage and those social elites that own them, the ongoing uneven distribution of power and influence within that reality.

Since the social reality - and its control - is largely determined by the ownership and distribution of mass media artefacts, securing such consent is, by nature, an ongoing struggle over the meaning of such signs - whether they be live reports covering the World Economic Forum, the Super Bowl or, with reference to another manufactured contest, the search for weapons of mass destruction.

It is in respect of this last example that we conclude the chapter with an account of News Corp’s healthy financial performance for 2002, which the executives of Fox News, with the complicit assistance of the White House, enjoyed

Part Three

USA 2002 - NewsCorp Finances, the White House and War

Since the attacks on Washington, D.C. and New York of 11^th September 2001, Fox has been a spectacular success with audiences, surpassing its main rival CNN in the ratings for the first time in January 2003 - apparently a beneficiary of the changing national mood post-11^th September 2001, and the invasion of Iraq that seemed to follow. Financial reports clearly indicated the major reliance on the American market across all media and how, television - that included Fox News - remained the most profitable sector. In addition, and in comparison with its market rivals, the NewsCorp portfolio also indicated a highly stable financial situation during this time of major insecurity that witnessed a substantial downturn in advertising expenditure across the industry.

As an insight of the continued pressures in advertising, a May 2002 U.S. News & World Report entitled Make-or-break TV reported a record 13% drop in upfront advertising revenues in 2001 that then increased the 2002 competitive edge where,

“…things could be worse…although a down economy means many advertisers can’t afford to buy TV time, it also means many others can’t afford not to. Despite in roads made by cable channels, broadcast TV still delivers the biggest and best quality audiences.” (Streisand, 2002, p. 38)

While market share prices varied wildly, particularly at Warners/AOL and Viacom, NewsCorp maintained a healthy balance between revenues and company valuations at the end of the year 2002.

The most dramatic and visible reason ascribed to the general economic downturn by the mainstream media was, of course, the air attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11^th September 2001.

Back to War

One year after the events of 11^th September 2001, Bob Woodward, acclaimed icon of journalist integrity who, with Carl Bernstein, investigated the Watergate scandal, published Bush At War (Woodward, 2002) which purported to detail the operations of the Bush White House in the days and months following the attacks. Among the revelations was how one particular news director - Fox’s Richard Ailes - made specific communication to the U.S. President that attempted to guide or at least suggest best foreign policy initiatives while the World Trade Center still smouldered in ruins.

One particular story element in the book became, therefore, the focus of much media interest immediately on its publication in November 2002. The account in question revealed how, during the weeks in question, Ailes,

“…a media coach for Bush’s father and now chairman of the Fox News Channel, sent a confidential communications to the White House in the weeks after the terrorist attacks. Rove took the Ailes communication to the President. His back-channel message…“the American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible…Support would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly”.” (Kellner, 2003, p. 66)

Ailes’ defence was grounded, as we have come to expect, on free speech principles which from his point of view did not include anything untoward: “I wrote a personal note to a White House staff member as a concerned American citizen expressing my outrage about the attacks on our country.”, he said in a terse statement. “I did not give up my American citizenship to take this job.” He was acting only “as a human being and as a citizen”, he later explained (Deans, The Guardian, 22.11.2002). The media attention that followed soon coincided with a 21^st November 2002 NewsCorp shareholder’s meeting in New York which itself soon turned into a news event where Rupert Murdoch was happy to field critical questions from the media. As reported, again, in the rival U.K. Guardian newspaper, Murdoch was indeed quick to support his Fox News Executive Producer by insisting that,

“It was “absolutely proper for the head of a news organisation to offer advice to politicians, as long as it was not done in a partisan spirit”. He would have written it to a Democrat, too, he added. “It was just a patriotic letter and not partisan in any way”.” (Deans, The Guardian. 22.11.2002)

What seems to have escaped notice in the print press is that Woodward’s emerged only from the extended investigative pursuits of a star reporter and in the form of a highly marketed book which only emerged one full year after the event in question.

Directing the Global Reality

The staged managing of social contest in New York and New Orleans that was a narrative feature in the Fox News transmission extends beyond the shores of the United States. This direct patriotic intrusion by a media giant into the shaping of global events since 11^th September 2001 broadens the scope of our initial coverage of Fox News reports to include the invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq - with further on-going contests constructed in the case of Iran and North Korea. We are reminded, too, of the corporate ties that bind Fox News and The Weekly Standard through NewsCorp that began our coverage and which from the late 1990s set the agenda for such foreign policies of intervention.

In all cases - the local, national and international - we can readily detect how the social reality on which the news broadcasters report is itself subject to their direct manipulative designs that more often than not do not get reported. The communications as reported from Ailes to his former political bosses in the Bush administration that directly advised urgent and dramatic action to appease an “impatient” American public confirms, if confirmation was needed, the on-going mutual interests that have sustained the political status quo and the media elite in the United States since the end of the World War One. It is a direct collusion of working practices and shared ideologies that has been well documented both here and in a range of persuasive supporting texts - from Hallin (1986), to Mazzocco (1994) to Bernhard (1999).

The fact that this secret intrusion is justified by Murdoch in terms of citizen duty only confirms the strength of contemporary concerns about how the corporate voice can frame itself as an individual entity in the free democratic field of public discourse that, in this rarefied instance, provided direct access to the U.S. President (Schiller, 1996; Boggs, 2000).

‘Murdoch’ as a Useful Narrative Function

Our analysis of mainstream news narratives in Chapter Six, revealed a tendency to personalize events of social significance by creating public personae - whether they be tarnished corporate leaders or foreign evil despots - from whom the story seems to magically emerge, and then conveniently disappear when they are either jailed or brought back for the Day of Judgment, dead or alive. In the interests of the status-quo, the dominant paradigm leads to a (false) narrative closure that neatly elides the real social and economic forces that generate the ‘problem’ in the first instance but which remain off the table and untouched by the latest scandal.

One such tendency seems to figure large in the representation of media power as it is focused on NewsCorp and bears down on the figure of Rupert Murdoch in particular. A token example can be pulled from Marc Gunther’s (2003) analysis in The Business, where we learn how since the 1980s,

“Murdoch has used both his personal charm and his media clout to cultivate powerful politicians. ”He hungered for the kind of influence in the United States that he had in England and Australia,” a Former News Corps executive says. “Part of our political strategy here was the New York Post and the creation of Fox News”.” (Gunther, The Business. 09-10.02.2003: 12)

In considering the U.S. media itself, then, we should be alert to how the academic and industry focus on Fox News - and personalised in the figure of Murdoch in particular - can itself imitate this mainstream narrative tendency and so serve even the interests of corporate rivals (Harding, 2003). It is a dramaturgy which makes for easy copy for journalists, politicians and academics alike and comes with the danger that the largely negative narrative function that figures NewsCorp and Murdoch as villains is actually compatible with the commercial imperatives and requirements of the rival news broadcasters as a whole.

Though the particular negative representation is in many respects warranted (NewsCorp is by-and-large a family based business, so some kind of direct agency between ownership and ideological worldview can be conveniently assumed), critics might do well to avoid the personal lest the more important target of critique - the business and moral universe that all corporate media share - escapes the more earnest critical scrutiny which they deserve. In this respect the figure of Murdoch as a renegade foreigner - and the continued elitist framing of Fox News as tabloid - serves the interest of those other corporate entities in the United States who - often in their own press - appear more standard and acceptable by knowing manufactured comparison.

The Live Aesthetic - Closing Comments

It has always been the case that television’s power to deliver a direct live presence, now, as it happens, is its greatest attribute. This is particularly so in news broadcasting. However, the dramaturgical effect of a live report - the earnest eye of the personable reporter delivering on the spot (scripted) updates - is a notable rhetorical tool that supports the unspoken agreement between viewer and news broadcaster that news is what we have found - NOW. Moreover, this study has highlighted how the aesthetic of the live transmission has at certain times been of particular market importance - from early radio reports in the 1930s (Chapter Two) to the live theatre of the 1950s Golden Age (Chapter Three), to the (taped) CBS documentaries of the 1960s (Chapter Four), the contemporary interview showdowns on 60 Minutes (Chapter Seven) and, more resonantly, the “War on Terror” as it powered across the Iraqi desert in early 2003 (Chapter Nine).

The powerful rhetoric of co-presence and immediacy as ‘shared’ with the viewer is, of course, a beguiling illusion. Our own account above confirms how the programme flow is a patchwork of film, video and live commentary all woven within a blend of tenses (Marriott, 1996; Feuer, 1983). While all participants - viewers and news makers - are literate in the art and technique of news manufacture - the camera teams, scripts, broadcast vans and the vagaries of weather - there remains nevertheless a rooted assumption, a truth known to all, that however much news follows the regular calendar of framed events, the report as transmitted is news to the broadcasters as well.

This affected pose draws on the resources of the reporter’s most recently learned dramaturgical skills. Updates, for example, are sometimes sprinkled with the rise of surprised amazement in the reporter’s voice, some questioning assumptions about possible future developments or the earnest exchange of critical thinking that enlivens the link back to the starship studio. The constant delivery of live news - whether it be television or internet or telephone - inculcates a continuous assumption that the news gathering and distribution is just a routine processing of raw material/data that is then transformed into useable information all undertaken by an institutional system (NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN) that simply observes, records and delivers. The innocent reporter’s mixed pose of engagement and affected amazement is in keeping with the overall institutional pose that the news broadcasters themselves are, as it were, still in the viewing gallery of the House of Representatives looking down on the passing events as from an objective distance - viewers but not actors in the unfolding drama of social reality.

To support this pose of objectivity we can notice how news sequences neatly mesh reports of natural phenomena - usually environmental disasters - with human stories (crime, politics, economics) in such a manner that both realms seem to inhabit an anarchic universe beyond the safety zone of studio/home and which is brought somehow to order through the framing and narrative of the news report and in formulaic terms that neatly outline the simplistic moral universe through the steady reassuring presence of the news anchors. That moral universe is cast accordingly in terms of contests between the identifiable ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters, all woven within a narrative of on-going conflict. The greater the market squeeze for profits, it seems, the darker the evil, the whiter the good.

Postman’s (1987) entertainment should be refigured as an element in a structured dramaturgy that has increased social conflict as its narrative centre. In a post-capitalist environment of severe economic downturn, the ratings push for such entertainment exists to answer the needs of concerned business managers and strengthen the position of worried advertising executives eager to recoup on their budget investments in commercial broadcasters’ schedules that are all geared to meet the assumed impatient consumer needs of the American public. These combined elements generate then into a vertigo of frenzied television and media narratives that include a news coverage that is at once both sharply divisive in its framing of events and yet negligible in actual information content of those events.

The sombre scenario echoes all too well the prognostications of Network (1976). The denial of relevant and comprehensive news coverage to the American people that would allow greater access and thus bring together multiple voices leads by inevitable osmosis to citizen arrests on New York rooftops at one extreme and even to the shock and awe of 11^th September 2001 on the other. Instead, the live aesthetic has become further extended beyond the television studio and more fully personalised, a marketing hook to sell telephones that enable consumers (pitched primarily as teenagers) to transmit their own live image.

Our study concludes with an overview of media ownership debates as they continued into 2003, touching on the FCC review of The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the White Paper deliberations in the U.K. The chapter serves also as an impressionist account of how those debates, not coincidentally, were embedded in other rhetorics that assisted the U.S. extension of foreign policy into the Middle East during that year.”

CODA

Outfoxed, 2005

END

2003-2004: Wagging the People in the USA & U.K.

“We hope you depend on us for the truth, because we’re going to report the situation in Iraq without an agenda or any ideological prejudice.” (The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News, 17.01.2003)

“This chapter serves as an epilogue and summary that accounts for the concurrent events of 2003/4 that embrace both regulatory media changes in the U.S. and the U.K. - and, not coincidentally, desert invasions in the Middle East by the same two western democracies. The account will cross-cut between these developments as they emerged, divided and then coalesced as the year proceeded.

These separate, parallel, but associated events provide rich if provocative insights that reverberate across our discussion. It has been a discussion that at its core has emphasised how the operations of the mass media in America have functioned to voice and dramatise an unrepresentative account of key American principles of democracy in the interests of elite governance and cultural hegemony.

Our opening analysis is sharpened with reference to two noteworthy events that coincidentally occurred during the same wintry week in mid-January 2003 while the Bush administration was preparing the United States for war.

USA, 2003 - Free Speech and the Corporate Environment

The first event was the two-day national strike by more than 17,000 union employees at General Electric on 14^th and 15^th January. This was the first national strike at General Electric since 1969 and affected 48 plants in 23 states.

The second event was more circumscribed but just as significant for our purposes. This was the 16^th January conference at The Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School, New York. Here, senior representatives from network television (Fox Entertainment, Viacom, CBS), industry unions from theatre, film, journalism and academia were joined with community activist groups such as the Children’s Press Line, the Harlem Consumer Education Committee and the Third World News Reel. Amongst the academics to speak was Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy (1999). More noteworthy, Commissioners from the Federal Communications Commission, including Chairman Powell, were also present.

While General Electric strikers across America were protesting in the cold against the increasing costs of their health care plans - union officials claimed that these would cost the average worker an extra $300 to $400 a year - the debate in New York focused on the proposed reconsideration of media ownership rules that, if adopted by the FCC, would have a major impact on the American - and global - mass media landscape in the coming century. FCC Chairman Michael Powell put the proposal for a revision of The Telecommunications Act of 1996 forward in 2002 and those proposals were now open to public airing. The forum debate was part of this democratic process that would end with a final decision, it was supposed, later in September 2003 (the decision was brought forward to 2^nd June 2003).

These two events, then, would on the surface seem destined for different and unrelated news categories unless we are alert to the corporate ties that bind General Electric to NBC. Scanning through the MSNBC news website during the General Electric strike of 14^th and 15^th January would reveal a bizarre paradox wherein a national news broadcaster (NBC) reported on a public event (a protest strike) which was directed against a major corporate owner (General Electric) which also happened to fully own the broadcaster and which it operated, under trusted license, from the FCC.

The dramaturgical society is hence truly in play when all parties perform the recognisable rites of participatory democracy - from street protest, banners, and speeches on the one hand and “serving the public interest” through objective news reporting on the other. However, the performance in this case was woven within a public discourse strictly determined and outlined by America’s leading corporate broadcaster whose interests were clearly not limited to delivering objective news coverage for informed public debate.

Now in the 21^st century we witness more fully than ever the problematic conditions of public news broadcasting when it is embedded into the corporate structure of (a very few) commercial entities such as General Electric.

Looking to such events and coverage we can readily recognise why the issue of media ownership is so crucial in any consideration about media news content and how it informs current concerns both in Europe and primarily in the U.S. that focus on citizen rights within the ever-narrowing scope of public debate.

 

We, the media - Homeland Expansion 2003 – 2004

 

The 16^th January 2003 media conference in New York, then, takes on an immediate and useful relevance when we recognise how national broadcasters owned by industrial giants report local news, or not. At the time it was widely believed that FCC Chairman Michael Powell and the two other Republicans on the five-member commission were intent on loosening present regulations (Powell is son of Colin Powell, the Secretary of State and was appointed by President George W. Bush in January 2001).

The FCC was studying whether decades-old ownership restrictions were appropriate in a market changed by the Internet, satellite broadcasts and cable television (but, as we argue, unchanged by the overriding commercial needs of the broadcasters). In summary, those public interest protections under threat/consideration included:

• The Newspaper/Broadcast Cross-Ownership Rule that prevented the owners of broadcast station from owning daily newspapers in the same market, and vice versa.

• The National Broadcast Ownership Cap - that was meant to prevent one company from owning broadcast stations that reached more than 35 percent of U.S. households.

• The Local Radio Ownership Rule - that limited the number of radio stations a company could own in a single listening area to eight or less, depending on the area’s size.

• The Duopoly Rule - that limited a company to owning two broadcast TV stations in any given market.

• The Dual Network Rule - that barred the major TV networks - ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC - from merging with each other (interestingly, Viacom and News Corp. had already secured from the regulators key waivers on television stations they owned that exceeded the 35% cap on the percent of U.S. households any single owner of television stations could reach

Not surprisingly, the deregulation agenda was encouraged by the major broadcasters (Kirkpatrick, 2003; Dreazen, 2003). The joint submission from NBC, News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group, and Viacom (CBS), was submitted on 2^nd January 2003 and was countered by opposing comments on the same day from the Communications Workers of America, Jonathan Rintels (The Center for the Creative Community), and Charles Slocum of the Writers Guild of America, amongst others.

These submissions against the proposed rulings were further supported by a full critique of the FCC’s own research studies on media ownership as published in December 2002 by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (ALF/CIO) (“Democracy Unhinged”).

The FCC, the Citizen and the Consumer - Again

Our Chapter Two overview of media developments since the 1920s outlined the calculated rhetorical twists that tried to equate ‘citizen’ with ‘consumer’. This contest of meanings has always marked a subtle subtextual political divide in U.S. political discourse.

In his written statement, for example, to the U.S. Senate two days before the media conference at Columbia University Chairman Powell (2003) delivered a 16-page report which, in keeping with FCC leanings since 1934, spoke much of “universal service, competition and diversity” as a broad and noble aim. However, Powell listed five key strategies one of which was to “empower consumers, by moving towards greater personalization of communications - when, where, what and how they want it”. In terms that uncannily recall earlier debates about Radio licensing in the 1920s, technological advances in broadband and a ‘free’ de-regulatory environment would allow, said Powell, the,“…marketplace to adapt and stabilize and industry participants can vigorously compete, invest and innovate - all to the benefit of the American telecommunications consumer.” (Powell, 2003, http://www.wga.org 30.01.2004)

While the word ‘consumer’ appears eighteen times, however, it is noticeable that never once does Chairman Powell mention the vital word ‘citizen’.

 

Dissenting Opinions

Advocates for an alternative strategy - one that appeals for a more publicly accountable broadcast system remain, as they were in the 1930s, vigorous, alert, but always pushing up the political hegemonic hill. Since December 2002, for example, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting posted an “Action Alert” - aimed to focus dissenting opinions towards Washington, D.C. For the writers of FAIR, for example,

“This country’s airwaves belong to the American people, and the FCC is supposed to manage them in the public interest. Unfortunately, the current FCC leadership seems hostile to this very concept. Asked to explain his understanding of the public interest, Chairman Powell once replied that he had “no idea” what it meant.” (http://www.fair.org, 04.01.2003)

A unique alignment of disparate political groupings emerged in concert against the ruling that included Members of the National Rifle Association, The National Organization for Women, Christian fundamentalists and even the Conservative Communications Center. As recorded by FAIR,

“As the country reels from some of the biggest business scandals in U.S. history, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is getting ready to give big media a big gift-the rollback of some of the last regulatory checks on media consolidation…People across the country, from grassroots activists to members of Congress, are raising their voices to stop the FCC’s rush to open the floodgates to another wave of media mergers.” (http://www.fair.org, 04.01.2003)

One of the most vocal groups in opposition to the proposed changes was the combined union between Hollywood writers and producers. In their filing to the FCC (“Protect Competition and Diversity in the Broadcast and Cable Entertainment Marketplace”, 1^st February 2003), the Writers Guild of America (WGA) made arguments that looked sceptically at the new future of greater technological choices made possible through advances in cable and broadband systems:

“Americans should not be fooled into thinking more broadcast and cable channels means greater choice. When the overwhelming majority of channels and programming are owned and produced by only five companies, we have fewer choices not more.”

As evidence, the Guild provided revealing data that indicated how, since the deregulation of the financial syndication rules in 1992, greater proportions of broadcast content was being produced by the networks themselves, leaving less scope for more creative and challenging work from the independent sector.

These changes indicated for the Guild the degree to which the broadcasters were opting for greater security in tried and tested genre formulas that lacked narrative and imaginative challenge. The WGA argued, further, that,

“Of 230 cable program services cited by the FCC as an example of diversity, only 91 reach 16 million homes and can be considered “major” networks. Of those, 80% (73) are owned or co-owned by six companies; five of those six are the same companies that control the broadcast networks.” (WGA (West) filings to FCC, 12.02.2004)

In total, and looking at the impoverished quality of broadcast drama on American television, the Guild from Hollywood insisted that,

“…none of the studies prepared by the commission addressed the impact consolidation has had on competition and diversity in the television production marketplace.” (WGA (West) filings to FCC, 12.02.2004).

Rather than rules supporting the present corporate interests, the Guild called instead for a greater focus on the needs of citizens, “…for the adoption of a rule to protect the interests of the American people by requiring diversity and open competition in the television production marketplace.”

It is of some uncomfortable coincidence that such concerns about democracy and free speech from FAIR and the need for wider variability in television dramas from the Hollywood Writers Guild should emerge at a time within the United States when the administration of that country had already undertaken one invasion of an Arab Middle East country - Afghanistan - and was preparing its detailed but questionable arguments for another - Iraq - with the expressed intention of bringing to that part of the world the kind of freedoms that such advocates for diversity in news and drama now found lacking in the Homeland.

Advancing the argument for war, for example, was the main priority of NewsCorp’s 175 newspapers around the world. In an account in mid-February 2003 that detailed editorial commentaries in Australia’s five leading cities, Roy Greenslade (2003) highlighted how,“…a series of gung-ho front pages have been backed up by vehemently pro-Bush articles inside. A typical example, by a retired US army intelligence officer, Ralph Peters, heaped praise on a “flawless” Colin Powell for doing a “superb job” (Feb 5th, 2003) in revealing “hard evidence” which justified war on Iraq… These papers show their colours by giving unswerving support to the rabidly pro-American Prime Minister John Howard… One Australian media watcher said that all the paper’s right-leaning columnists have been given license to bang the war drums while belittling opponents.” (Greenslade, The Guardian Media. 17.02.2003: 7)

The efforts of Australian editors to match the leading claims of Fox News were themselves in line with NewsCorp’s U.K publications. Both tabloid (The Sun) and broadsheets (The Times) worked hard to engineer the growing anti-war objections (often pejoratively described as “sentiments”) away from anti-Americanism and, to meet another NewsCorp agenda that generated familiar suspicions of Europe. As Greenslade (2003) documents it, “The Sunday Times also laid into the French and Germans, claiming that to adopt their attitudes “would be, to adapt the three wise monkeys, neither seeing, hearing nor acting on a brutal regime that defies the U.N.” An earlier Sunday Times leader revealed the truth about the world-wide struggle of the Murdoch press to secure the hearts and minds of its millions of readers. “Winning the public relations battle is almost as vital as military victory,” said the Sunday Times.” (Greenslade, The Guardian Media. 17.02.2003: 7)

AntiWar Protest, Feb 15th 2003, London UK

While major American forces were already being prepared for desert battle, another vital public relations battle - and which NewsCorp was equally instrumental in staging - continued inside Washington, D.C.’s beltway. The FCC review that was under way came under intense scrutiny, from a range of community, professional and civic bodies. However, it is perhaps timely to question what prompted the FCC to pursue this de-regulatory agenda in the first instance and at this particular time. The answer lies buried in the more arcane details of The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and reveals the nuanced close relationship between key Washington, D.C. legal bodies - the D.C. Circuit of Appeals, the FCC and certain news organisations. The following short account is submitted if only to confirm how even judicial processes that might otherwise seem natural or ideologically neutral are themselves vulnerable to the knowing prompts of interested parties.

Real Insiders - How and Why a Review Takes Place

The details of Clause 202 (h) of The Telecommunications Act of 1996 instructed the FCC to review every two years its rules limiting media ownership - and to “repeal or modify” any rule that “it determines to be no longer in the public interest”. The judges on the D.C. Circuit of Appeals had an opportunity to examine this clause when several media companies attempted to sue the FCC to overturn limits on their expansion, merger, and cross-ownership plans. One of the cases at issue was Fox Television Stations vs FCC. In two influential rulings that followed in 2002, the Court ruled for the companies and against the FCC.

The ruling came with a significant expectation for the FCC to observe. As instructed now by the Court, the five members of the FCC were impelled to prove the need to maintain its regulations and specifically those limits on cross-ownership that NewsCorp had now challenged. Failure to justify the rulings meant that the FCC had to change or remove the 1996 controls immediately. How that ruling from the Court was interpreted depended on the political judgment of the newly appointed Chair of the FCC, Michael Powell. Powell was in the best position in this regard since in 1993 he had become a clerk for Harry Edwards, the-then chief judge of the same D.C. Circuit. Powell’s interpretation of the ruling accommodated the known ideological reputation of the Court as a forum of appeals against Federal institutions and as a traditional source of conservative intellectual energy - Neo-conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas both came to the Supreme Court from the D.C. Circuit, Robert Bork was on this circuit when Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court and Douglas Ginsburg, now the D.C. Circuit’s chief judge, had been nominated by President Reagan for the Supreme Court as well.

Given the range of options available, Powell determined from his accurate working knowledge of the Court that it expected not just an explanation of FCC decisions, but a full review of The Telecommunications Act itself (Fallows, 2003). It was therefore the combined moves of media giants, a sympathetic Conservative court and an ideologically aligned government agency, which created this major review to broaden key provisions of The Telecommunications Act of 1996.

A similar alignment of corporate, administration and family interests also combined in staging at the same time another defence of democratic values - this time beyond Washington, D.C.

 

Opening Market Territories in Iraq, the USA and the U.K.

“We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others. And we will prevail.” President George W. Bush announcing on American live TV the beginning of military action in Iraq, March 2003

Within days of the opening curtain display of “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, provided his own impromptu account of the media coverage then blanketing the news networks, cable and the ‘worldwide’ Internet. In an observation (Stanley, 2003a) noted for its apparent postmodern spin, Richard Nixon’s lawyer during Watergate emphasised to the watching millions that,

“What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq. What we’re seeing are slices of the war in Iraq. We’re seeing that particularized perspective that that reporter or that commentator or that television camera happens to be able to see at that moment. And it is not what’s taking place.” (Stanley, The New York Times. 23.03.2003: A.1)

To distance himself from any accusation of epistemological relativism, however, Rumsfeld quickly confirmed within the same breadth that, indeed,

“What you see is taking place, to be sure, but it is one slice, and it is the totality of that that is what this war is about and being made up of…” (Stanley, The New York Times. 23.03.2003: A.1)

However, Rumsfeld’s own form of media education quickly returned to more secure ideological ground in a final declaration more in keeping with traditional accounts that neatly bracketed the work of the Fourth Estate within the Pentagon agenda, “I doubt”, he ended,“…that in a conflict of this type there’s ever been the degree of free press coverage as you are witnessing in this instance.” (Stanley, The New York Times. 23.03.2003: A.1).

 

Corporate War Reporting -Up, Close and Deadly

 

That press coverage (which Rumsfeld celebrated in a live press conference) had first shown live footage from CNN of B-52 bombers departing the U.K, and attack aircraft launched from U.S. aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean. The “shock and awe” night-time coverage of the ‘precision’ bombing of central Baghdad proved, for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the humanitarian care with which the war had been so thoughtfully planned. As the first Gulf War (1991) became the marketing platform for news cable TV and primarily CNN, so its sequel became the first multi-media Internet war that would help generate greater demands for broadband access.

Rumsfeld’s glowing endorsement of the media coverage, however, also ricocheted across media debates in Washington, D.C. and gave supportive justification to those mogul arguments for deregulation in the light of the fuller information freedoms now clearly enjoyed by the American people through their wider access to a more varied range of media outlets. In this respect, the Defense Secretary’s impromptu remarks chimed very nicely with the stated position of the-then Chair of the FCC, Michael Powell, who would vote for the changes on 2^nd June 2003. To repeat a refrain from my introductory remarks, the theatre of war seemed designed not just to display the humanitarian might of the American armed forces, but the capacity of the news ‘divisions’ in tow to report the event so fully, comprehensively and obligingly. However, in their own report Todd Purdum and Jim Rutenberg (2003) would report how the “riveting” coverage from the invasion was a carefully devised plan by the Pentagon specifically designed to counter the years of complaints by news organisations about restrictions on combat coverage (Carpenter, 1995).

Those complaints had been building since the 1980s when the-then Reagan administration adopted the pool system for journalists which effectively ‘helped’ but curtailed coverage of subsequent ‘wars’ (Chapter Five). For Purdum and Rutenberg:

“…the new policy of “embedding” more than 500 reporters with invading troops has produced riveting images of fighter jets on carriers and tanks plowing across the Iraqi desert, accompanied by household faces like Ted Koppel of ABC’s “Nightline”, and of surrendering Iraqi soldiers with their hands held high.” (Pudrum and Rutenberg, The New York Times. 23.03.2003: B.3).

Close collusion between the broadcast media and the military over the next two weeks of war would allow, “…extraordinary access on secret briefings, watching computerized maps of the battlefield with the latest satellite photos, in the middle of the Kuwait desert, for example.” (Pudrum and Rutenberg, The New York Times. 23.03.2003: B.3)

Indeed, as more Iraqi territory succumbed to the invasion forces, Alessandra Stanley (2003b) reported how the famed,

“…NBC correspondent David Bloom, in helmet, bulletproof vest and sunglasses, delivered reports live on the move from a specially designed armored vehicle. Others hollered updates from the flight decks of aircraft carriers, and even through gas masks… A few seemed so caught up in the adrenaline of battle and the thrill of access that they sounded like sports reporters on the sidelines of the Superbowl. “How do you feel about your performance tonight?” Frank Buckley of CNN, assigned to the aircraft carrier Constellation, asked a pilot who had just returned from a bombing mission over Baghdad.” (Stanley, The New York Times. 30.03.2003: B.15)

Meanwhile, in the same article, Stanley also reported on the Fox studios that went live to Kuwait, and how,

“Two days after the first missile attacks on Baghdad, the network’s morning show, “Fox & Friends” displayed a still photograph of Mr. Bush talking with aides in the Oval Office, his glasses on and his jacket off. ”The administration is really going out of its way to show the truth”, the co-host, Brian Kilmeade exclaimed to his guest, William Kristol, the conservative columnist.” (Stanley, The New York Times. 30.03.2003: B.15)

We should recognise that Brian Kilmeade was carefully embedded into both Fox News magazine programmes where he comments authoritatively on political and social subjects and leads elsewhere on the schedule as main sports anchor/enthusiast. We may also recognise William Kristol as the editor of NewsCorp’s own Weekly Standard who had founded the influential ‘Project for the New American Century’ that had as its rallying cry the kind of U.S. interventionist foreign policy over which he was now, indeed, an ‘expert’ commentator (Chapter Eight). Still at Fox, further authoritative observations emerged from Kilmeade’s even more assertive colleague, anchor ‘Bill’ O’Reilly, who became characteristically vocal in outlining his more comprehensive overview of the war so far. As reported and recorded in full by Peter Hart (2003) at FAIR,

“The politically incorrect strategy O’Reilly called for was the complete destruction of Baghdad, a city of 4.5 million residents (3/26/03): “There is a school of thought that says we should have given the citizens of Baghdad 48 hours to get out of Dodge by dropping leaflets and going with the AM radios and all that. Forty-eight hours, you’ve got to get out of there, and flatten the place. Then the war would be over. We could have done that in two days…You flatten Baghdad, you flatten all the troops, we know where they go, there’s nowhere to hide in the desert. We know where everybody’s moving. And you know as well as I do, this war could have been over in two days. It’s just frustrating for everybody to know that we have been fighting this war with one hand behind our back. And let there be no doubt about where the real responsibility for the safety of the Iraqi people lies: Now after we know that the final battle is going to come to Baghdad, that the people who remain in Baghdad, the civilians, bear some kind of responsibility for their own safety. Am I wrong?” O’Reilly’s guests that night were in agreement.” (Hart, 2003).

Despite the Strangelove rhetoric, U.S. troops strolled into the Iraqi capital in a far less dramatic fashion. By the time news reporters were embedded in the city’s major hotels, results from another battle were being quickly assessed: Fox News had beaten its main rival CNN in the all-important ratings war in an economic leverage that would significantly contribute to the NewsCorp finances as reflected in the healthy quarterly financial statement that followed a few weeks later. The “harshest measures” requested by Fox News Chief executive Richard Ailes to the U.S. President after the 11^th September 2001 air attacks (Woodward, 2002) were now profiting both administration and cable news broadcaster alike.

 

Weapons of Mass Distraction

With a failure to show actual battles (if they existed) and a reluctance to disturb advertisers with images of war casualties, a sanitised Reality War was constructed and delivered by excited embedded reporters, fuelled by packaged video sequences obligingly provided by the Pentagon.

As revealed by Frank Rich (2003a), these were cast according to a specific marketing mise-en-scene concocted by former media representative Victoria Clarke at the Pentagon. In his own article “Iraq around the clock” (The New York Times. 30.03.2003) Rich wryly reminded the reader that,

“The master of the Pentagon media operation, including the program embedding more than 500 journalists among our troops, is Victoria Clarke, whose resumé features a stint directing public affairs for the National Cable Television Association. In that job, according to The Wall Street Journal, she helped persuade the public that cable’s “terrible reputation for customer service” was unjustified. In other words, she’s a p.r. genius.” (Rich, The New York Times. 30.03.2003: 2.1).

In an uncanny echo of Wag the Dog (1997), Rich helpfully also traced the origin of the stage design that served as the ghoulish Pentagon battlefront press conference backdrop:

“Not for nothing was a designer who has worked for Disney, MGM, “Good Morning America” and the illusionist David Blaine hired to build Gen. Tommy Franks a $250,000 set for the briefings in Qatar.” (Rich, The New York Times. 30.03. 2003: 2.1).

The set in question was a mosaic of significantly coloured oily black-and-blue world maps that dominated the press conferences as provided by the U.S. military (pic, April 3rd, 2003).

Very quickly, therefore, the Liberal print press were in a position to question the mainstream broadcast delivery of the invasion. Over at The New York Times, Lucien K. Truscott (2003) was to observe how, despite the video footage supplied from aircraft carriers and tank commanders, such imagery served a wider more questionable strategic purpose, since,

“…not since the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan has an administration been so adept at managing information and manipulating images. In Iraq, the Bush administration has beaten the press at its own game. It has turned the media into a weapon of war, using the information it provides to harass and intimidate the Iraqi military leadership.” (Truscott, The New York Times. 25.03.2003: A.17)

 

Howevermuch we can agree with Truscott’s overall position, it would be within the frame of this overview to strongly suggest that the broadcast media in question were far less naive and far more knowing - and ideologically supportive - of the Bush administration’s military adventure and provided such footage in the full knowledge of its propaganda potential (Rich, 2003b).

In the absence of genuine war footage, what images did emerge were quickly contextualised into narratives of battle culled from either Hollywood films or previous wars. In an article strap lined “‘shock and awe’: a reality-TV war”, Michiko Kakutani (2003) would observe how,

“…the opening salvos of the war had taken place during prime-time entertainment, and television stations did their best to serve up gaudily produced coverage: the war in Iraq as the ultimate in reality television, as the apotheosis of every favorite Hollywood genre.” (Katutani, The International Herald Tribune. 26.03.2003: 20)

Hence, black-and-white close-up images of harassed marines crossing bridges (Remagen?) or the Stars and Stripes hoisted by Marines over the central Baghdad statute of Saddam Hussein (Iwo Jima?). In the absence of securing Hussein himself, victory seemed only assured with repeated destruction of his ubiquitous poster images. Further, in the days following the first cruise missile assault, “…television anchors took to promising viewers that there was more “shock and awe” to come and military analysts talked about how the new technology had made the Pentagon “more imaginative than its been in the past” and “more creative”. It all might have been a trailer for the disaster movie “the Core”…but it may be recalled that many television networks, including ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox are owned by multimedia corporations well practiced in the manufacture of entertainment.” (Kakutani, The International Herald Tribune. 26.03.2003: 20)

While the deserts of Iraq provided timely and much needed revenues for U.S. television broadcasters at a time of severe economic downturn, the FCC regulators back in Washington, D.C. were debating more fully the future prognosis for the industry for the generations of Americans to come.

Chairman Charles Powell revealed that the five-member commission had tentatively scheduled a meeting on 2^nd June 2003 to adopt new rules on media ownership, thus bringing forward the real possibility of an open free market eagerly advanced by the corporate giants and as Dreazen (2003) reported earlier in the year,

“Three of the U.S.’s biggest media companies asked federal regulators to scrap all of the government’s media-ownership rules, a move that would make it for easier for television, radio and newspaper companies to combine with or acquire one another… The joint request by News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group; VIACOM Inc., which owns CBS and UPN networks; and General Electric Co.’s NBC unit may receive a warm reception at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.” (Dreazen, The Wall Street Journal. 06.01.2003: A.6).

While the news divisions faithfully reported around the clock live from the deserts of Iraq, FCC regulators were working to untie their last remaining restrictions on media ownership and control.

So, in keeping the overall account of this book, the vital interests of mass media corporations and the U.S. Defense Department became just as close in meeting each others’ ideological and commercial needs and requirements in the early part of the 21^st century as they had been a century before when RCA was formed by the Signal Corps from the Marconi Company. In contrast to conditions prevailing in 1996 when The Telecommunications Act was first framed, a new but very similar climate of synergies had formed. “…What’s different this time”, observed Dreazen (2003),“… is that a changed legal and regulatory climate means the companies’ requests could become reality. FCC Chairman Michael Powell often has hinted that he would be willing to drop or substantially modify many of the rules which have also come under fire from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.” (Dreazen, The Wall Street Journal. 06.01.2003: A.6)

That “changed legal and regulatory climate” is code for a change to a Republican administration that, harking back to the Reagan administration of the 1980s, enjoyed a determinedly pro-industry Right-Wing de-regulatory agenda as shared by the commercial broadcasters and their industry owners.

 

Homeland Questions on a Free Press

In the light of the minimal amount of public hearings organised by the FCC (a single formal public hearing was arranged on 27^th February 2003 in Virginia) some activists and independent media analysts made studies during this period on how much the general public were aware - or not - of such impending radical changes to their media. It was a shared irony that though media companies filed extensive comments with the FCC in support of the proposed changes, “It’s what they haven’t done that is more troubling: None of the big three networks have found the story worth reporting in depth. Since the FCC issued its notice on the ownership rules last September, a search of the Nexis news database turns up one network story: a short summary of the FCC’s announcement on ABC’s World News This Morning (9/9/02), which according to the transcript aired at 4:30 AM.” (www.fair.org, 29.01.2003)

The findings would support a February 2003 telephone poll conducted by the Project For Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which decided to probe Americans on the subject of the proposed FCC changes. The Project is a research institute on the press affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism while the Center is an independent polling institute that specialises in matters of public awareness of press issues. Both groups are funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew Research Center survey of February 2003).

Two reasons were routinely forwarded by corporate voices that justified such minimal media coverage - firstly, that it was a (convenient) technical regulatory agency matter of often great complexity or that, secondly, but more suspiciously, that there was an inherent moral conflict of interest for the news media in covering their own industry.

However, the figures gave credence to those media advocate arguments that the news organisations were clearly failing in their duty in reporting a major public issue that, on this occasion, centred importantly on their own industry and, by extension, on the workings of democracy itself. It was argued by activists that such limited coverage only supported the long-term interests of those media corporations who were likely to benefit from the FCC changes.

One corporation, even under the cloud of war, was already flexing its capital muscle as a sign of things to come.

Capturing Baghdad andThe U.S Airwaves: 10^th

April 2003

On Friday, 11^th April 2003, when the world’s media were focused on the previous day’s dramatic events in “liberated” Baghdad, it was also reported (though not so brazenly) that Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp had markedly extended its U.S. cable reach by buying DirecTV for $6.6 billion that very same day. Negotiations had been on-going for three years between NewsCorp, General Motors and the owners of Hughes Electronics. The purchase was to confirm how the outright ownership of DirecTV would be central feature of NewsCorps’ more powerful leverage over the whole U.S. industry. That power and market influence would be grounded on DirecTV’s then estimated 11.3 million subscriber base, making it the single biggest distributor of programming in the United States. Already there was a concern that the deal would be agreed by the FCC regulators and would allow NewsCorp thereafter to squeeze smaller cable competitors out of the market by raising the price of content as generated by its own massive Fox Entertainment Group.

Such market advances made by the major media operators in the United States, and the profits gleaned from the Iraqi war, did not go unnoticed by certain other institutions, notably in the U.K.

 

Embedded Reporting - Critical Views from the BBC and Oxford

In a 24^th April 2003 speech at Goldsmith’s College in London, Greg Dyke, then Head of the BBC, was to openly question standards in U.S. network war reporting (Wells, 2003a). He quickly singled out both radio broadcaster Clear Channel and Fox News, the most watched U.S. cable news network during the conflict. Of the former he said, ““We are genuinely shocked when we discover that the largest radio group in the United States was using its airwaves to organize pro-war rallies… We are even more shocked to discover the same group wants to become a big radio player in the U.K.”.” (in Wells, The Guardian. 25.04.2003: 5)

Dyke’s stinging rebukes towards Fox extended to include the commercial paradigm itself, ““Commercial pressures may tempt others to follow the Fox News formulae of gung-ho patriotism, but for the BBC this would be a terrible mistake…many of the large television news organizations in the states are no longer profitable or confident of their future. The effect of this fragmentation is to make government - the White House and the Pentagon - all-powerful, with no news operation strong enough of brave enough to stand up against it…this is particularly so since September 11 when many U.S. networks wrapped themselves in the American flag and swapped impartiality for patriotism”.” (in Wells, The Guardian. 25.04.2003: 5)

In support, (and, again, in the NewsCorp rival Guardian newspaper), Andrew Graham (Master of Balliol College, Oxford and non-executive director of Channel Four) would highlight to some dismay the NewsCorp pro-war agenda which, across all global news outlets “displayed a unanimity of view greater even than the Pentagon”. Moreover, and considering the U.S. news provision in general, Graham (2003) ruminated in The Guardian how,

“When a large proportion of Americans are reputed to believe that Saddam Hussein was implicated in Al-Quaida terrorism, a belief for which there is not a shred of credible evidence, one wonders if the world’s largest democracy is being so well served by its media.” (Graham, The Guardian. 01.09.2003: 12)

As if to confirm the worst case scenarios no doubt contemplated at the BBC and Oxford, White House communications staff were busily preparing at the same time for what would perhaps be one of the defining media moments of the summer, a production that would segue the skills of Pentagon officials, White House staff and former broadcast professionals into one marketing whole.

 

The White House - Lights, Camera and the Rhetoric of Power

The 1^st May 2003 declaration of war’s end by George W. Bush was a form of dramaturgical chutzpah that surreally wove discourses of politics, military and entertainment together. As such it was the kind of manufactured golden-hour scenario ideally suited to prime-time live television that would immediately touch the valued criteria of media event and so somehow stem the leaking fortunes of the broadcasters that Dyke referred to. For Elisabeth Bumiller (2003a), the,

“…“Top Gun” landing on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln will be remembered as one of the most audacious moments of presidential theater in U.S. history. But it was only the latest example of how the Bush administration, going far beyond the stagecraft set by Ronald Reagan’s White House, is using the powers of television and technology to promote a presidency like never before.” (Bumiller, The International Herald Tribune. 17-18.05.2003: 3)

As an example, Bumiller’s extensive account outlined how in a Presidential speech in the summer of 2002, conveniently set at Mount Rushmore, White House personnel positioned television camera crews to Bush’s side so as to catch the profile of the 43^rd President in alignment with the carved outlines of his eminent predecessors. Another national stage was appropriated, this time at night, when on the first anniversary of the 11^th September 2001 attacks three large barges were tied to the Statue of Liberty and provided a giant lighting backdrop to Bush’s speech.

The mise-en-scenes that Bumiller (2003) describes were carefully co-ordinated by three key personnel formally employed by U.S. news broadcasters but who were by now fully signed up to the White House marketing operations. Former ABC news producer, Scott Sforza operated through the offices of White House communications director Dan Bartlett and was directly responsible co-ordinating the $250,000 design for the U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Quatar. Sforza was teamed with Robert de Servi, former NBC cameraman who was responsible for shipping the British lighting system that covered the U.S. President’s speech in Bucharest in November 2002.

The third component that helped shape and define the Presidential image was Greg Jenkins, a former Fox News television producer who acted as director of the advance party and who co-ordinated all aspects of the planned mise-en-scenes. As explained and then justified by Bartlett,

”We pay particular attention to not only what the president says, but what the American people see. Americans are leading busy lives, and sometimes they don’t have the opportunity to read a story or listen to an entire broadcast. But if they can have an instant understanding of what the president is talking about by seeing 60 seconds of television, you accomplish your goals, as communicators. So we take it seriously.” (in Bumiller, The International Herald Tribune. 17-18.05.2003: 3)

The fact that George W. Bush had never wandered further than a curtailed one-year stint with the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam war would of course be a significant downside factor in taking and then marketing his role as Commander in Chief very seriously. By associating himself so manfully to such visible displays of hulking military might as an aircraft carrier could, for some, be regarded as a classic case of awkward over-compensation in the younger Bush. Despite the best intentions of the communications professionals, however, the venture of the California coast, exposed the degree to which tightened market forces in the broadcast industry demand ever-greater gestures towards theatre, where even the President of the United States must grandiosely perform and have his words heard above the commercial babble.

 

The U.K. Communications Bill

The extended concerns from Oxford and the BBC about the breadth and depth of U.S. news journalism during the invasion of Iraq took place at a time when the British media landscape was itself subject to extended political debate that had begun a year earlier when Tony Blair’s government introduced the UK Communications Bill White Paper. Amongst the Bill’s proposed was,

“…widest possible access to a choice of diverse communications services of the highest quality. All of us can benefit from new services - as citizens, as parents, as workers, as students, and as consumers. We want to include every section of our society in the benefits of these services, and use to the full the opportunities now available for enhancing their diversity and quality.” (08.06.2003)

The noble commitment to citizens, however, was neatly and delicately balanced with later reference to a commitment, as well, to reform the rules,

“…which protect media plurality, in the light of the new converging market conditions. We seek to combine a lighter touch in many aspects with tough protection of the genuine public interest”.

It was only by the summer of 2003, when the Bill was in the last stages of its final reading through the House of Commons and then the House of Lords, that the full implications of its impact on its ‘lighter’ ownership rules came into view. In terms already familiar to readers of media regulation changes in the United States, two key clauses became the quick focus of intense debate: the first abolished the requirement for owners of television companies to be British or E.U. citizens, and the second clause removed existing laws that prohibited anyone who owned 20% or more of newspaper readership from buying into television. These two inclusions signalled a debate that made NewsCorp, again, the subject for much speculation and increased concern about Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. media ambitions that had originally surfaced a year previously (Shah, 2002).

Overshadowing and perhaps driving the debates through May and June 2003 were ratings figures released in April 2003 that showed how for the first time ever, in the week ending Sunday, 20^th April 2003, multichannel (non terrestrial) TV accounted for 26.1% of all viewing compared with a 23.9% share for terrestrials BBC1 and 23.8% for the independent television network (ITV). Their figures overtook the main terrestrial channels even though fewer than half of all U.K. households had access to digital channels through cable, satellite or Freeview, where Sky had no less than four channels (Gibson, The Guardian, 24.05.2003). Leading the ratings was the soccer Championship title game between Arsenal and Manchester United (on Sky Sports) and the much-publicised 300^th episode of The Simpsons (on Sky One), both NewsCorp’s productions and the latter produced by James L. Brooks, director and writer of Broadcast News (1987). While the top ten shows on multichannel TV showed digital services, they still relied heavily on sport, movies and American imports while just one home-grown drama secured a place in the list of top ten programmes.

The true significance of the figures - a “psychological milestone” - was properly seen in the context of government designs to convert the entire U.K. population from analogue to digital by 2010 and the fact that the only terrestrial threat to NewsCorp’s digital development was ITV Digital which, by 2003, no longer existed. With no legal prohibition anymore on owning the terrestrial Channel 5, Rupert Murdoch would own the ideal platform for building Sky’s pay-TV operations. For many critics of the Communications Bill, there was only one villain. Polly Toynbee (2003) in an article entitled: The threat to our TV from this corrupter of politicians, commented with onomatopoeic vitriol how,

“With both Labour and Conservative leaders in humiliating thrall to the menacing might of Rupert Murdoch, this is the legitimate time for the unelected Lords to rebel against the elected Commons and stop Murdoch seizing yet another slab of the British media.” (Toynbee, The Guardian. 30.05.2003). At the time of Toynbee’s (2003) concern, NewsCorp already controlled 35% of BSkyB, and owned News International, publisher of The Sun, The News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times, and Sky remained on course to meet its target of 7 million subscribers by the end of the year.

For Toynbee (2003) and more involved activists in Parliament - including former film producer Lord (David) Putman - the clauses would allow Murdoch (or some other non-British, non-EU multibillionaire news broadcaster) to purchase U.K.’s fifth terrestrial channel, Channel Five (Wells, 2003b, The Guardian 03.07.2003. 14). This would then allow NewsCorp to buy more valued sports rights for both terrestrial and satellite television. More significantly, the Bill would finally free the new purchaser of Channel Five from the expensive public service obligations and so emerge as a viable threat to the alternative ITV system and become, in time, the only major alternative to the BBC.

 

Final Moves Towards Media Consolidation - USA & U.K.

In the few weeks that followed, parallel events in both London and Washington, D.C. focused on the final stages of regulatory media changes that signalled a wider scope for the commercial broadcasters in both countries.

It is not without irony, though, that one of the most prominent voices at this time against the deregulation moves both in the U.K and the U.S. was Barry Diller (2003) who, amongst his various illustrious roles as media mogul in Hollywood and in cable TV, actually launched Murdoch’s Fox Network in the 1980s. Speaking on 7^th April 2003 at a U.S. Conference of the National Association of Broadcasters, Diller was convinced that the U.K.’s attitude to media was fundamentally flawed. There were, “…real dangers in complete concentration. The conventional wisdom is wrong - we need more regulation, not less… Conglomerates buy eyeballs. That’s it. They leverage their producing power to drive content, their distribution power to drive new services and their promotional power to literally obliterate competitors.” (Diller, 2003).

However, back in Washington, D.C., in keeping with his remit for ‘change’, Charles Powell convened the brief 2^nd June 2003 FCC meeting that - by a divisive three to two vote - supported the proposed changes to The Communications Act of 1996 (Shales, 2003). Speaking after the vote, he claimed in reverential tomes that,

“I have had to make peace with myself, to know with every fiber of my being and intellect and faith with the law that this is the right answer - at least in the short term.” (Ahrens, The Washington Post. 02.06.2003: A.06)

In the U.K. events moved quickly enough in favour of NewsCorp with the Lords vote of 8^th July 2003 that scuppered Lord McNally’s amendment to undermine the key clauses concerning ownership status. With a specific aim to thwart NewsCorp, the Liberal Democrat peer had tabled his amendment to retain the ban on newspaper owners with more than 20% of the market from buying Channel Five.

The lurking threat of industry gutting became quickly manifest by September 2003 when, just a few months following the passing of the U.K. Communications Bill, moves were already being taken - not by NewsCorps - but by Hallmark, maker of feely-good greeting cards, to take over the ITV network - not to establish a better public service for the British television public, but to quickly strip the company of its extensive programme library and production assets. The revelation came amid speculation that U.S. broadcasters, including VIACOM and Time Warner, were interested in Carlton and Granada, co-owners of the whole ITV franchise. However, as a measure of the speeding process of merger activity, both U.K. companies sought and gained regulatory approval to combine by October 2003 (Timmons, The Guardian. 08.10.2003. 11).

While in the U.K. events ran smoothly for the commercial broadcasters, Washington, D.C lawmakers in the House of Representatives and Senate moved quickly to block the FCC ruling of 2^nd June 2003. The House voted 400 to 21 for a bill restoring the 35% limit and in the Senate, a bipartisan group pushed legislation to erase all of the FCC’s media ownership rule changes. The votes followed criticism from lawmakers that Powell had given little regard to public opinion before the FCC approved the media rules. As a result, by 3^rd September 2003 the agency stopped accepting new merger applications and froze all pending deal reviews after the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit barred it from implementing the media ownership rules until after the three-judge panel considered if the regulations were legal. At the time of writing, therefore, there exists an awkward unprecedented standoff in the United States between the FCC and the lawmakers who listened and acted in favour of the hundreds of thousands of citizen objections to the 2^nd June 2003 ruling (Sevastopulo, 2003).

However, we are reminded again of past victories of a similar kind. As was the case in 1987 and the tussle over the Fairness Doctrine, the mechanics of democratic accountability compel the good members of the House and Senate to at least gesture in some apparent agreement with the populist temper of the many. Speaking critically, however, the tortured process seems only to support a dramaturgy that encourages some on-going faith in the overall process of representative government (the people have been heard), while postponing the final decision and deflecting it ultimately to the D.C. Circuit Court judges. It is a common expectation amongst most parties that, as with the case of the Fairness Doctrine, the issue could be finally settled either by the judges or by a Presidential veto and that, whichever, will invariably come down in favour of the corporate few.

In way of contrast, the early autumn merger between ITV giants Granada and Carlton had created a U.K. media company with a combined estimate worth of 3.5 billion GB pounds and control of 52% of the British television advertising market (The International Herald Tribune. 08.10.2003. 11). More ominously, the merger already confirmed earlier suspicions that, as permitted by the Communications Bill, the new company would be an attractive proposition to a foreign buyer looking to extend operations into the British broadcasting market. The future shape of that market was already projected as a likely tussle for viewers between the BBC and a possible American media giant, hence for Wells (2003c),

“…the prospect of a US-owned ITV has caused unease amongst British broadcasters, who fear wholesale cost-cutting and the imposition of bland global TV formats…high in entertainment and drama and low on news, documentaries and off-beat shows.” (Wells, The Guardian. 06.10.2003: 6)

 

We return to Andrew Graham whose 1^st September 2003 article was written after the passing of the Communication Bill that summer. Graham’s central concern - that the U.K. broadcast system was now vulnerable to commercial takeovers, particularly from abroad - was grounded on those principles of democratic accountability and citizen rights familiar to media reform lobbyists since the 1930s. For Graham (2003), “Citizens are entitled to core information about their society, much of which now comes from broadcasting. Citizens are also entitled to participate fully in society; and democratic discussion, much of which takes place via television and radio, is an essential part of such participation. The delivery of these rights is not the purpose of the market… In much the same way that we do not expect our schools or universities to be run by McDonalds or Nike, we should not expect those parts of broadcasting that exist to inform, educate and possibly even entertain to be run in the interest of maximising profits and the returns to shareholders…the score line in 2006 may read: BBC: minus 1, citizens: minus 2, Mr Murdoch: 4. This would be a dreadful mistake.” (Graham, The Guardian. 01.09.2003: 12)

Placing Graham (2003) within a well-established historical tradition of media reformers that extends back to the early days of U.S. (and Canadian) broadcasting is not intended to qualify or curtly undermine his arguments for a more responsive and representative media. On the contrary, as McChesney (1999) helpfully points out, this tradition provides a continuum of historical importance that reminds the media historian (and citizen) that the development of the present commercial broadcast system was not free of sophisticated critique and extensive social protest, even at the beginning. For McChesney (1999), it is,

“…a critique which in certain respects is every bit as valid today as it was then. It is a political critique which places the fight for public service broadcasting necessarily in the broader context of the fight for a more social democratic, even democratic socialist, society.” (McChesney, 1999, p. 339)

Similarly, to provide further useful context in our coverage of present and future media debates, McChesney (1999) highlights how the work of those earlier media reformers of the 1930s - the “first generation of media activists” - established the key principle,“…that control over broadcasting (and communication) must always be the duty of the citizenry in a democratic society; it should never, ever, be entrusted to the tender mercies of corporate and commercial interests.” (McChesney, 1999, p. 240)

However, as if to anticipate Graham’s (2003) misgivings, and as a measure of how quickly corporations can activate the agenda, BSkyB announced in mid-October 2003 a new programming initiative that would invest more fully in both world cinema and the highbrow arts. In a move deemed by commentators to enhance its public service credentials, BSkyB executives confirmed that a rota of established classics and contemporary international titles would be showcased and premiered on regular Saturday and Wednesday evenings on its Sky Cinema One channel. This was the first real commitment to non-commercial filmmaking outside the safer orbit of its major studio distribution deals that had characterised its programming thus far. The gesture to cineastes was coupled with an earlier 50% stake in the digital channel Artsworld which, valued at 3 million GB pounds, allowed the broadcaster to sponsor the English National Opera over the next three years.

These moves towards quality programming traditionally secured within the remit of the BBC were immediately seen in the context of the charter renewal debate that was already building as the BBC headed to renew its parliamentary remit in 2006. One vital argument that legitimises the BBC continued presence is the provision of special-interest services (coded as ‘quality’) - of the kind being enthusiastically adopted by BSkyB. By broadening its programming provision beyond the attractions of immediate commercial profit BSkyB would position the NewsCorp organisation for a likely take over of the terrestrial Channel Five system that had only been possible just a few months earlier. The BSkyB October 2003 announcements (conveniently staged at the prestigious Ivy restaurant in central London) confirmed Diller’s (2003) ground rules about mogul clout that can quickly combine production, distribution and promotional power towards favourable repositioning in the public and political sphere.

Further developments at the end of November 2003 confirmed earlier unease and fears when plans for a 57 million GB pound cost-cutting measure were announced at Granada-Carlton that lead to reductions in production and administrative staff and the sale of buildings. In a seven-point business strategy that has been duplicated since the 1950s chief designate Charles Allen committed to a bigger commercial impact where,

““Advertisers will say we need more housewives and children watching in day time, and we will drive our investment to deliver what they want”.” (Milmo, The Guardian. 27.11.2003:14)

 

2003 Outcomes - Territories Secured

The close of the year also witnessed the appointment in the U.K. of Rupert Murdoch’s younger son, James, 30, as the Chief Executive of BSkyB (Beard, 2003b) and, in the U.S., the FCC approval of the NewsCorp controlling purchase of DirecTV. The deal, compelling DirecTV to offer local channels in 130 markets by the end of 2004, was approved by a 3 to 2 vote in the closing weeks of December 2003.

At the same time results of an independent research project were published that focused on the coverage of the Iraqi war by the main U.K. news broadcasters that included NewsCorps’ Sky News. The research project was undertaken by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies led by Professor Justin Lewis and was commissioned by the BBC. The findings confirmed how,

• embedded reporters avoided images they knew would be too graphic or violent

• that such reporters, despite their own wishes, were forced under constraints to produce the kind of coverage that made the war appear more acceptable

• that both reporters and viewers strongly supported independent reporting and wanted a multiplicity of voices to be heard that provided a wider coverage

As summarised by Wells (2003d), nine reports out of ten concerning the existence of weapons of mass destruction assumed that such weapons existed, that broadcasters were twice as likely to show Iraqi enthusiasm for the invading allied forces, and attribution to official sources often got lost through journalist short-hand as it got shuttled forwards by the competitive demands of 24-hour delivery. According to research leader Professor Justin Lewis (2003) of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, “Following the death of many independent reporters - a number killed by US forces - there are some fears among journalists that US military strategy will make embedding the only safe option. This is a fear that interviews with the Pentagon - which makes it clear that the battlefield is no place for unauthorized reporters - suggest is justified.” (Lewis, The Guardian. 06.11.2003: 15).

This deliberate organisation of news coverage by the U.S. military - characterised by explicit restraint on movement and subsequent coverage and an obliging allowance of source video footage - seemed as a surprise to many contemporary observers. It should, however, be no surprise if we consider from Chapter Five how such policies of pooling, support and limitation have been a conscious design since the 1980s with the specific aim to fashion news towards that level of objectivity most acceptable to the Pentagon (Carpenter, 1995).

In support of such earlier contentions, and writing specifically about the policy of embedding reporters, Lewis (2003) made clear that the Pentagon, “…was happy to have them there, because they would show US-led forces winning the war. If this kind of “action footage” dominates the coverage, it forces wider issues off the margins, reducing the war to a simple narrative of “us” vs “them”.” (Lewis, The Guardian. 06.11.2003: 15).

A convergence of technological factors, institutional restraint, deliberate military policy and market pressure thus established that narrative perspective that webbed uncertain chaos into packaged narrative forms. That scenario would ultimately adhere to Altheide’s (2002) “problem frame” that confirms threat, identifies clear sources of such threat and works towards fixing a problem through easily measured outcomes. It is a frame, however, that emerges as if naturally to uphold certain specific ideological imperatives that support the underlying dominant hegemony.

(Charles Powell, addressing SUPERCOMM, June 20th-24th, 2004 & father Colin Powell on the publication of a new terrorist report from the Department ofState, 22, June, 2004).

Creating Spaces and Filling Voids

It is a hegemony that scrupulously oversees the news management of its own narrative practices, foreshadowing some elements, while assiduously burying others. While Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would at the beginning of the war in February 2003 celebrate the “free press coverage” that his forces were permitting and which, by inference, signalled the democratic principles for which the war was being fought, no such freedoms were activated by the end of the year in the United States itself when increasing numbers of American soldiers were returning from Iraq to be laid to rest.

For example, following a strict March 2003 directive from the Pentagon, media coverage of military services was already sharply curtailed. More specifically, coverage of the arrival of the war dead at the country’s only military mortuary in Dover, Delaware, would be banned outright. As reported by Gary Younge (2003),

“…for the first time since war in the television era, the sight of flag-covered caskets arriving to the salute of military colleagues and the tears of mourning relatives are no longer part of the national narrative.” (Younge, The Guardian G2. 07.11.2003: 3)

Other narrative erasures on the Homeland front were reported in the The International Herald Tribune in early November 2003 by the late Charles Levendosky (2003) who assembled a number of recent instances of peaceful public protest that highlighted the sudden creation of Free Speech Zones - by the Secret Service. As outlined by Levondosky,

“President George W. Bush has never been an advocate of the First Amendment. Even when he was governor of Texas, he prohibited demonstrations on the walkways in front of the governor’s mansion, an area which had traditionally been used for peaceful protests… As president Bush he has widened his restrictions on demonstrations against his policies. Anti-Bush protestors are now relegated to what are euphemistically called Free Speech Zones. These are areas cordoned off as far as a mile away from the president…are only for those who disagree with the administration’s current policies (and)…local law enforcement officers under orders of the Secret Service demand that protestors move into a free speech area.” (Levondosky, The International Herald Tribune. 06.11.2003: 9)

The same policies of news control and access that seemed so successful in the prosecution of the war in Iraq were applied more fully in the Free Speech Zone which many had supposed to be America itself. Indeed, no better tangible example could be envisioned in 2003 to so fully evidence the constrained conditions that characterised the sharply limited range of allowable social discourses and as were outlined in Chapter One.

Lastly, by the end of November 2003 Congress made changes to the FCC ruling of June 2003 that concerned the percentage of American viewers who could be reached by stations owned by a single owner. Rather than roll back the national television cap from the proposed 45% to the pre-June level of 35%, Congress settled for a 39% limit. The figure was hardly arbitrary since Viacom and NewsCorp were already operating stations with a reach of 38.8% (VIACOM) and 37.8% (NewsCorp). If the 35% limit were imposed, these corporations would have been compelled to sell the offending stations. The 39% increase effectively sanctioned their rule-breaking and gave rivals NBC and ABC the allowance to substantially expand their own holdings. Bizarrely, one loophole in the ruling permitted any company to violate the ruling for two years without any penalty.

The Naked and The Dead

This chapter has underscored the prevailing assimilation of such entertainment values into the practices of mainstream commercial news media as they were manifest across events in 2003. This overview is brought to a fitting close with reference to how the American media and governing administration attended to the uncomfortable aftermath of the Iraqi invasion in the Homeland.

While the American dead were arriving back to the USA out of media range, preparations were being made that, across the areas of book publishing, film and network news, secured in the public imagination a more unifying media event of suitably uplifting national symbolic importance.

The event in question was the publication of “I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story” that focused on the capture and ‘rescue’ of the-then nineteen-year-old clerk from Palestine, West Virginia, in the southern Iraqi city of Nasriyah in March 2003 (Teather, 2003). Lynch joined the army, it was said, because she could not secure a part-time job at Wal-Mart. The book had been written by journalist Rick Bragg who had earlier in the year created his own media storm when he resigned from The New York Times following his suspension for faking a by-line. He and Lynch were dividing the $1 million advance from publishers Knopf. As well as exposure to CBS PrimeTime, Lynch would also be prominently featured shortly thereafter as a cover story in Time magazine and in an inside article in Vanity Fair.

Adding to the media mix was the Sunday television showing of NBC’s film version of Lynch’s experiences, imaginatively entitled Saving Jessica Lynch. With no assistance from Lynch, NBC pieced together a version of events based on the account of Iraqi lawyer Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief who informed the U.S. military of Lynch’s location (his own book “Because Each Life Is Precious” was itself published by Harper Collins (NewsCorp)). To widen viewer choice, CBS transmitted at the same time their own specially made TV film - “The Elizabeth Smart Story” - which was based on the real-life abduction of the fourteen-year-old blonde girl from her home in Salt Lake City in 2002 and, who, like Lynch, was eventually returned to safety. Both film and interview were coincidentally transmitted during the highly competitive “sweeps month” when advertisers had the window of opportunity to access the relative strengths of the broadcasters and commit their dollars to prime spots for the year ahead. The narrow scope of provision that night from the main broadcasters is testimony to concerns from the Writers Guild as earlier recorded in Chapter Nine and which highlighted the increasing homogenisation of America’s broadcast airwaves.

To repeat accounts that readers are perhaps familiar with, the Lynch ‘story’ was first galvanised by the U.S. military when it released an edited five-minute video recording her ‘rescue’ as accompanied by claims that she had stab and bullet wounds. Intriguingly, the video was prompted by a ‘stray’ question from CNN’s Tom Mintier the day before that itself was lightly nudged by Pentagon officials. However, hospital doctor Anwar Uday would in May 2003 recall how, “…it was like a Hollywood film. They cried ‘go, go, go’, with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show - an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors…we were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital.” (Kampfner, The Guardian G2. 15.05.2003: 2-3)

In such an instance, the high-density micro mobile camera attached to the soldiers’ helmet could render the grim practice of pseudo-war into a dramaturgical appropriation of Reality TV which, wedded to the theatrics of Hollywood, provided a tightly edited and packaged (outsourced) news event that provided some opportune positive narrative spin at a time when advances across Iraq were said to be stymied - four Marines had earlier died in a helicopter crash and U.S. troops had killed a van full of Iraqi women and children (Eviatar, 2003). The whole scenario confirmed how the enterprising investigative journalist of former times who might have wrenched the story from the teeth of danger (Up, Close and Personal, 1996), had been deftly replaced by Navy Seals and Army Rangers who now undertook in more dramatic but staged terms their own version of the investigative ‘ambush’.

The example only serves to prove a general point made earlier that Pentagon commanders were themselves, as news workers/rhetors, primed to shape, enact and report events according to immediate dramaturgical and political exigencies. In this case it may have been to deflect negative attention away from the initial attack that led to Lynch’s capture and where eleven members of her 507 Maintenance Company were killed after, it was said, they took a wrong turning. Considering how rumours became ‘reports’ that turned quickly into convenient ‘news’,

“On NBC, Forrest Sawyer reported that, “Lynch continued firing at Iraqi troops, even after she was wounded,” while Robin Roberts on ABC’s Good Morning America announced that Lynch “fought fiercely”, “shooting several Iraqis” and “emptying her weapon before being stabbed and finally taken prisoner”. Although they all credited the Post, none of the networks made any reference to the fact that the Post itself acknowledged it was citing “rumors”.” (Eviatar, The Nation. 07.07.2003: 19)

The representation of the invading American forces as innocents who take ‘wrong turnings’ and are then unfairly overwhelmed by massive enemy numbers echoes other mythic scenarios and inverted narratives that have helped support and provide moral justification for other invasions of ‘underdeveloped nations’ - familiar scenarios of stranded and ‘outnumbered’ pioneers of the ‘wild’ west come easily to mind. The later appropriation of the ambush event by broadcasters NBC and CBS confirms Altheid’s (2001) acute point that underlined how,

“…the way in which news coverage foreshadows future TV movies. In this way, TV news becomes a kind of preview or advertisement for coming attractions. News as a form of knowledge is transformed through news as entertainment into news as advertising.” (Altheide, 2002, p. 47)

It is a perspective that wisely reframes any claim by television producers that their dramas can ever be based on a real-life story since, under market pressure, news stories must already conform to mainstream story paradigms as largely determined by Hollywood to have broadcast prominence in the first instance (Jacobs, 1996).

By way of uncomfortable ironic contrast to the media blitz that became the Jessica Lynch distraction, we end this chapter on the proceedings in 2003 on a note of suitable surrealty as pulled from Gary Younge’s article on how the U.S. Department of Defense laid to rest some of its dead by the end of the year. Conforming to the understood codes and conventions, for example, the burial of Artimus Brassfeld proceeded in accordance with tradition - he had been a tank driver during the war, killed instantly in a mortar attack while playing basketball at a military base in Samiri, Iraq, and his funeral was the fifth to date in Flint, Michigan. In a subdued scene too surreal for even Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997), Younge reported how,

“Brassfeld was buried with full military honours, the purple heart and bronze star presented to his wife Andrea. In the distance, the bugle played. It was not clear whether it was just a man puffing his cheeks or really playing. Since last month the military has been using ”ceremonial buglers” at some military funerals - a tape that can be inserted into the bugle and sounds like the real thing. “We’ve got 1,800 veterans dying each day, and only 500 buglers”, said Lt Col Cynthia Colin, a defence department spokeswoman, “We needed to do something to fill the void”.” (Younge, The Guardian G2. 07.11.2003: 3)

 

Post-script, 2004-2005: The BBC Humbled

 

As a post-script to our 2003 coverage, Andrew Graham’s wary prognostications about the fate of commercial-free broadcasting were to resurface with the final release of the Lord Hutton Report in January 2004 that was intended to clarify the circumstances behind the suicide of arms inspector Dr. David Kelly and bring judgment upon BBC accounts of how the U.K. government justified its case for war.

As we know, the comprehensive severity of the report’s findings against the BBC resulted in the resignations of Gavyn Davies (Chairman) and Greg Dyke himself. In line with Graham’s (2003) fears voiced four months earlier, only one rival corporation could benefit from the bitter contest between the Blair office and the BBC, since “…it is obvious on straightforward commercial grounds that Sky would love to see the BBC much smaller. Anything - such as Hutton - that weakens the BBC is in the interests of News Corporation.” (Graham, The Guardian. 01.09.2003: 12)”.

Where to Now?

Why Not back to the Movies with this 2007 Update: http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/2007-lions-for-lambs/

END, for now…

 

From Chapter Seven: Case Study Analysis: The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999)

“We come to The Insider (1999) with a reverential respect due to Michael Mann and his established position as one of America’s foremost auteur directors (and fellow graduate of the London Film School). In addition, the film boasts the combined efforts of Al Pacino - as 60 Minutes CBS ‘Ace’ Producer Lowell Bergman and Russell Crowe - as Jeffrey Wigand, successful research scientist now turning corporate tobacco industry whistleblower. All three artists - established Hollywood ‘A’ List names - are brought together to tell a cutting-edge drama of real contemporary social significance - the kind, it was assumed, that Hollywood never made anymore.

The film is based on the Vanity Fair article The Man Who Knew Too Much by Marie Brenner which itself was based on the true life account of the events surrounding Jeffrey Wigand’s torturous experiences with the giant tobacco firm Brown & Williamson in which he worked as a “research scientist” and from which he was fired - as the film notes with due irony - for “poor communication skills”. In fact he had openly disagreed with their policy of spiking their cigarette products with highly concentrated nicotine to enhance addiction, a practice shared with other tobacco companies.

Twinned Destinies

The story begins by juxtaposing the dramatic contrast between the commitment of the crusading producer/journalist Bergman in Lebanon and the fatherly concerns of Jeffrey Wigand, corporate executive. While Bergman successfully secures a story exclusive on the Hezbollah in the dangerously armed Middle East (filmed in Israel), Wigand works effectively to save his daughter from another dangerous asthma attack. Furthermore, as Bergman and his ace interviewer Mike Wallace/Christopher Plummer tangle with the Sheikh/Clifford Curtis and his pushy gunmen, Wigand eventually admits to his distraught wife that he has indeed been fired from Brown & Williamson for disagreeing with his bosses, thus putting the family livelihood - health insurance and education - in jeopardy.

Thereafter, Wigand becomes proudly angered by the corporation’s move to extend the established confidentiality agreement that he has signed and, despite earlier misunderstandings of Bergman’s intent, the narrative arc thereafter brings the suspicious Wigand within range of Bergman’s interest in reporting the story that, at its centre, would crucially incorporate a recorded interview on 60 Minutes with celebrated anchor-investigator Mike Wallace (Chapters Three and Five).

On the way to what would result in America’s real-life biggest court settlement, Bergman and Wigand undertake their own form of self-scrutiny. In one of their preliminary meetings in a Japanese restaurant, Wigand reverses their allotted roles by questioning and undermining Lowell’s status and journalist ethic - he was, he points out, a student of Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s and has carried the critical Left-Wing agenda since then:

WIGAND

I’m just a commodity to you, aren’t I? I could be anything. Right? Anything worth putting on between commercials.

LOWELL

To a network, probably, we’re all commodities. To me? You are not a commodity. What you are is important. You go public and thirty million people hear what you got to say, nothing, I mean nothing, will ever be the same again.

The duel of words that ensues serves to bring both men towards a greater understanding about personal commitment:

LOWELL

You believe that?

WIGAND

No.

The confrontation - a tough exchange of accusation, counter attack and justification - foregrounds contemporary skepticism of the news broadcasting system of journalism and provides Lowell his opportunity in riposte to justify his personal commitment and belief in his chosen profession,

LOWELL

You should. Because when you’re done, a judgment is going to go down in the court of public opinion, my friend. And that’s the power you have.

WIGAND

You believe that?

LOWELL

I believe that? Yes, I believe that.

WIGAND

You believe that because you get information out to people…something happens?

LOWELL

Yes.

WIGAND

Maybe that’s just what you’ve been telling yourself all these years to justify having a good job? Having status? And maybe for the audience, it’s just voyeurism? Something to do on a Sunday night. And maybe it won’t change a fucking thing. And people like myself and my family are left hung out to dry. Used up! Broke, alone!

LOWELL

Are you talking to me or did somebody else just walk in here?! I never abandoned a source!

In familiar screenwriting terms, the course of the narrative proceeds to ‘throw stones at the hero’. As Lowell persuades Wigand to break his confidentiality agreement - ominous threats to Lowell’s family welfare paradoxically lead to the growing determination on Wigand’s part to undertake the interview that once aired would make the executives of the tobacco companies publicly accountable to those millions who have suffered and died as a result of the induced levels of nicotine in the cigarettes. With the story set-up determined, and the moral stakes at risk, act two covers the media frenzy that makes victims of both men - Wigand’s wife leaves him and Bergman’s principles must come to terms with the harsh corporate reality that determines news business.

So while the first half of the narrative, then, belongs to Wigand, where he exposes in court and on television the inside politics and dubious methods of ‘research’ within Brown & Williamson and which led to his dismissal, the second part turns with sweet irony towards the inside dealings of CBS itself wherein we engage with Lowell’s similar struggles against CBS corporate to get the full interview aired once it has been gainfully filmed.

With apparent success in his hand, Lowell - with Wallace and their executive producer Don Hewitt/Philip Baker Hall - is forced to face the reality of the new corporate news ethic in the cool and polished intervention of lawyer Helen Caperelli/Gina Gershon, CBS General Counsel (real name Ellen Kaden). Considering their scoop, she explains how:

HELEN CAPERELLI

If two people have an agreement, like a confidentiality agreement, and one of them breaks it because they are induced to do so by a 3rd party, the 3rd party can be sued for damages for interfering, hence, “tortious interference”.

The three professionals, confident in the secure handling of their profession, then politely rebut her:

DON HEWITT

Interfering? That’s what we do.

LOWELL

I think what we’re trying to tell you is that it happens all the time. This is a news organization. People are always telling us things they shouldn’t. We have to verify if it’s true and in the public interest. And if it is, we air it.

But Caperelli remains resolute, leading to a deepening of the intrigue, and a sense that the outcomes of events at CBS are no longer determined by front-row news people:

HELEN CAPERELLI

And “60 Minutes’” verification is exact. And precise.

And I don’t think it would hurt to make sure you’re right…on this one.

At which point the angle of attack comes explicitly towards Lowell and his programme that question the viability of his source - Wigand:

HELEN CAPERELLI

I’m told there are questions as to our star witness’s veracity.

LOWELL

His veracity was good enough for the State of Mississippi.

HELEN CAPERELLI

Our standards have to be higher than anyone else’s, because we are the standard…for everyone else.

LOWELL

Well, as a standard I’ll hang with “is the guy telling the truth?”

HELEN CAPERELLI

Well, with tortious interference, I’m afraid, the greater the truth, the greater the damage.

LOWELL

Come again?

HELEN CAPERELLI

They own the information he’s disclosing. The truer it is, the greater the damage to them. If he lied, he didn’t disclose their information. And the damages are smaller.

LOWELL

Is this Alice in Wonderland?

After some prodding from Wallace, Caperelli plays her final and more devastating card:

HELEN CAPERELLI

Well, at the end of the day…because of your segment…the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company…could own CBS.

Insider News at CBS

It’s at this plot juncture that Lowell’s investigative skills are put to the test. An elegant ironic plot turn requires that he must investigate the inside operations of his own corporation CBS - only to reveal how editorial decisions that determine news content turn ultimately not on the public right to know but on the veiled interests of controlling corporations whose market positions depend on the shadowed maneuverings of their stocks and shares.

As events appear to speed by him, he makes his grandstand counterstroke against the film’s new enemy, Eric Kluster/Stephen Tobolowsky, President of CBS News (real name, Eric Ober). It is Kluster who, in support of Caperelli, now shifts against Lowell by heavily suggesting after much “soul searching” that Hewitt’s team should quickly cut an alternative version of their show, but without the crucial Wigand interview. The rising conflict now centres on the right of the programme producer to author his version of his programme:

ERIC KLUSTER

We’re doing this with or without you, Lowell. If you like, I can assign another producer to edit your show.

It is at this point - with the corporate position explicit and with Hewitt moving against him - that Bergman makes his grandstand play against Kluster and exposes the backroom corporate dealings that are truly driving the news agenda at CBS.

To begin the attack, Mann holds on a close-up of Bergman readying his thoughts, then turning to face the departing Kluster:

LOWELL

Before you go…I discovered this SEC filing. For the sale of the CBS Corporation to Westinghouse Corporation.

MIKE WALLACE

What?

DON HEWITT

Yeah, I heard rumors.

LOWELL

It’s not a rumor. It’s a sale. If Tisch can unload CBS for $81 a share to Westinghouse and then is suddenly threatened with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from Brown & Williamson, that could screw up the sale, could it not?

ERIC KLUSTER

And what are you implying?

LOWELL

I’m not implying. I’m quoting. More vested interests…“Persons Who Will Profit From This Merger…Ms. Helen Caperelli, General Counsel of CBS News, 3.9 million. Mr. Eric Kluster, President of CBS News, 1.4 million”

DON HEWITT

Are you suggesting that she and Eric are influenced by money?

LOWELL

Oh, no, of course they’re not influenced by money.

They work for free. And you are a Volunteer Executive Producer.

DON HEWITT

CBS does not do that. And, you’re questioning our journalistic integrity?!

Whereupon the script requires that Bergman makes explicit the awkward facts:

LOWELL

No, I’m questioning your hearing! You hear “reasonable” and “tortious interference”. I hear, “Potential Brown & Williamson lawsuit jeopardizing the sale of CBS to Westinghouse”. I hear, “Shut the segment down. Cut Wigand loose. Obey orders. And fuck off…!” That’s what I hear.

DON HEWITT

You’re exaggerating!

Bergman rises against Hewitt’s offended manager’s pride by helpfully contextualising the broader scope of the film narrative:

LOWELL

I am? You pay me to go get guys like Wigand, to draw him out. To get him to trust us, to get him to go on television. I do. I deliver him. He sits. He talks. He violates his own fucking confidentiality agreement. And he’s only the key witness in the biggest public health reform issue, maybe the biggest, most-expensive corporate-malfeasance case in U.S. history. And Jeffrey Wigand, who’s out on a limb, does he go on television and tell the truth? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we gonna air it? Of course not. Why? Because he’s not telling the truth? No. Because he is telling the truth. That’s why we’re not going to air it. And the more truth he tells, the worse it gets!

DON HEWITT

You are a fanatic. An anarchist. You know that? If we can’t have a whole show, then I want half a show rather than no show. But oh, no, not you. You won’t be satisfied unless you’re putting the company at risk!

In keeping with genre conventions, the central issue becomes explicit - on which side of the ‘wall’ between journalism and commercialism should they stand. For Bergman, at the vanguard of broadly Liberal politics since his student days under Herbert Marcuse, the issue is clear:

LOWELL

“Put the corporation at risk?” Give me a fucking break!

MIKE WALLACE

Lowell.

LOWELL

These people are putting our whole reason for doing what we do…on the line!

MIKE WALLACE

Lowell!

LOWELL

What?

MIKE WALLACE

I’m with Don on this.

Bergman stands stunned by the sudden turn in his career colleague and without such backing from the lead anchor Wallace he departs the office in silent disgust, his appeals to journalist freedom and the public good now rendered void.

Not since Network (1976) has a Hollywood film come so close to damning the contemporary American broadcast system - and the impact of its corporate ownership on its working methods - so explicitly.

Staging Reality - The News Producer as Social Constructivist

Thereafter, while Wigand struggles with both his divorce and new job as a chemistry teacher (where he seems at first awkward in speaking so freely to the students), Bergman stays firm to his principles as producer of 60 minutes, and works more determinedly to secure the interview airing on two main fronts.

Firstly, he must establish the positive social persona of Jeffrey Wigand who, it transpires has a more awkward past history of minor fabrications that could be exposed and thus discredit him before the interview could be aired. Bergman therefore works to counter a smear campaign that is building against Wigand through the Wall Street Journal. Secondly, Bergman must secure the news space for the evening programme by arranging with the FBI to delay their impending capture of the Unobomber in Montana. Both aims draw explicit attention to the constuctedness of news organisation - in casting necessary and acceptable social personae of interviewees and in stage-managing social events that then become, as if by coincidence, media events.

This particular aspect of the news producer’s power and influence on the real events that are objectively reported now bear greater critical consideration. The force of Hollywood star power allows Pacino’s character to orchestrate and align such events - including the Kentucky deposition in the first instance - without critical comment by the film. In addition, the real event, in this instance the FBI capture of a backwoods Homeland terrorist, is orchestrated and timed to conform to Bergman’s broader agenda - to secure an exclusive story of his prime-time show. The uncomfortable collusion here between television producer, police forces and internal security is one feature of contemporary news journalism that the film seems to take for granted. It exposes, by default, how the reality that is recorded - the capture of a terrorist - is itself a staged incident timed and performed for the benefit of prime-time scheduling needs which make a local story in the western backwoods into a shared nationwide media event in which the broadcasters - and all parties that includes the police and FBI, have a vested interest in airing (see also Mad City, 1997, Chapter Six).

Indeed, as an uncomfortable extension, we could argue that the Unabomber terrorist threat is itself a manifestation of network news delivery since its genre strapline makes local news a natural national concern that garners wider viewer numbers. In this respect, the ‘terrorist’ threat takes on a more sinister dramaturgical significance that can weave a relatively minor discrete criminal item into the recognisable terrorist genre formulae of immediate wider national security relevance.

At the last resort, Lowell hires private investigators to undermine the Wall Street smear campaign that attempts to portray Wigand as an unworthy witness and, with time running out, approaches fellow journalists at The New York Times who are prepared to run a story on the inward dealings at CBS News. At this point he himself becomes the prime whistleblower. What started as a story about the internal operations of the tobacco industry turns inward and becomes an investigation into the corporate dealings of the industry paragon, CBS itself, with both men holding out against corporate America from their respective isolated hotel rooms.

With CBS itself headline news, Wallace confronts Lowell in his hotel room and the two friends and colleagues trade uncomfortable accusations and high principles that cut to the bone of contemporary issues of journalistic integrity and professionalism as it struggles to be heard in the corporate universe. For Bergman, the issue is clear:

LOWELL

No, you give me a break! I never left a source hung out to dry, ever. Abandoned. Not ’til right fucking now! When I came on this job, I came with my word intact. I’m gonna leave with my word intact.

For respected CBS anchor Wallace, the issue takes greater historical weight since:

MIKE WALLACE

I’m not talking celebrity, vanity, CBS. I’m talking about when you’re nearer the end of your life than the beginning. No. What you think is: how will I be regarded in the end? After I’m gone.

His account reminds the audience of the network’s influential role in weaving the nation’s recent history:

MIKE WALLACE

Now, along the way I suppose I made some minor impact. Did Iran-Gate and the Ayatollah, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Saddam, Sadat, etcetera, etcetera. I showed them thieves in suits. I’ve spent a lifetime building all that. But history only remembers most what you did last. And should that be fronting a segment that allowed a tobacco giant to crash this network? Does it give someone at my time of life pause? Yeah.

And in the scene’s culmination, he towers over the sitting Bergman and gives him that morning’s copy of The New York Times:

MIKE WALLACE

In it is the whole sordid story of what went on inside our shop. And in the editorial it accuses us…PAUSE….of betraying the legacy of Edward E. Murrow.

His final resigned turning from Bergman, in a shabby nondescript hotel, signals the deep loss of reputation that he and by extension CBS must suffer in the public forum.

However, with Wallace’s final support against Hewitt secured, Lowell ensures that the full interview is finally aired, though only after their internal dispute has been covered extensively in the press and the smear campaign against Wigand has been successfully confounded.

Facing Realities

The final showdown between the three men turns the tables on Hewitt as Bergman helpfully summarises last-minute plot points and Wallace nods and agrees in final support:

DON HEWITT

The news division has been vilified in The New York Times, in print, on television, for caving to corporate interests! The New York Times ran a blow by blow of what we talked about behind closed doors!. You fucked us!

LOWELL

No, you fucked you! Don’t invert stuff! Big tobacco tried to smear Wigand; you bought it. The Wall Street Journal, here, not exactly a bastion of anti-capitalist sentiment, refutes big tobacco’s smear campaign as the lowest form of character assassination! And now, even now, when every word of what Wigand has said on our show is printed the entire deposition of his testimony in a court of law in the State of Mississippi, the cat totally out of the bag, you’re still standing here debating! Don, what the hell else do you need?

DON HEWITT

Mike, you tell him…

MIKE WALLACE

You fucked up, Don.

DON HEWITT

Hey, it’s old news! Stick with me. Like always, we’ll be okay. These things have a half-life of fifteen minutes.

MIKE WALLACE

No, that’s fame. Fame has a fifteen-minute half-life. Infamy…lasts a little longer We caved. It’s foolish. It’s simply dead wrong. Now, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going over to Black Rock…

The final airing, though, works to justify Lowell’s earlier claims to Wigand in the restaurant that such testimonies on public record make a difference. In support, as the end credits of the film confirm,

• SUBSEQUENT TO THE EVENTS DRAMATIZED HERE, THE TOBACCO

• INDUSTRY IN 1998 SETTLED THE LAWSUITS FILED AGAINST IT BY

• MISSISSIPPI AND 49 OTHER STATES FOR $246 BILLION.

Despite the upbeat ending, however, there is a qualified coda. At the point of his greatest success - Lowell soon gets the plaudits for the exclusive coverage of the Unobomber’s arrest - he decides to cease his employment with CBS. The final exchange with Wallace underscores his realistic appraisal of the new corporate order that determines news broadcasting and a reluctant admittance of his own limited scope within that order:

LOWELL

I quit, Mike.

MIKE WALLACE

Bullshit. Come on, it all worked out. You came out okay in the end.

LOWELL

I did? What do I tell a source on the next tough story? Hang in with us. You’ll be fine…maybe? What got broken here doesn’t go back together again.

Lowell’s silent departure through revolving glass doors of CBS neatly mirrors Wigand’s own walk into the unknown from the Brown & Williamson building at the beginning of the film, both men turning away from corporate America and towards, as it turned out, the noble venture of education. Bergman went to Berkeley to a position on the Faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism, and Wigand succeeded in tertiary education - securing the honour of 1996 Kentucky teacher of the year. On 31^st March 2003, Dr. Wigand attended the 13^th Annual Kenneth Owler Smith Symposium at the University of Southern California that discussed the FCC regulatory changes then in deliberation (Chapter Nine). The title of the symposium was “Media, Marketing and Morality”.

The Film Text as Corporate Weapon

We now turn a more critical eye on the film’s stated representation of broadcast working conditions, and particularly, its uncertain status as investigative prober of real-life events. This is particularly of significance in a film that goes to great stylistic lengths in terms of pacing and chosen aesthetic palette to invest the drama with powerful psychological truths.

For example, despite its ghostly moves against CBS as suggested above, the film nevertheless represents as worthy and legitimate the form of news interview which Wallace and Hewitt’s 60 Minutes has come to typify for all broadcasters. It is a form of “evocative interview” (Altheide, 1976, p. 115) that engineers and then maximises emotional resonances by foregrounding both star reporter and interviewer within an intense para-social exchange of powerful internal drama that stages character over social context, limited truth over understanding. The real-life interview sequence is reproduced to support the film’s own intended dramatic scenario, with Crowe as Wigand in exchange with the inquiring Wallace/Plummer. The film audience is interpellated at these points as the original television audience and is expected to accept the working practices and delivery techniques that the original 60 Minutes sets as the Gold Standard in investigative reporting. As Stein’s (2001) qualifier to the 60 Minutes reputation points out, it is a news magazine format that,

“…the other news magazines adopted in virtually every detail. They utilized the same visual rhetoric of tight camera framing of subjects and the medium shot of the correspondents, and again also gave more screen time to the reporters than the subjects. The only differentiation they made from each other and 60 Minutes was in choosing ever more highly sensationalistic, tabloid-style stories.” (Stein, 2001, p. 256)

Oddly enough, Stein’s (2001) description chimes uncannily with Mann’s own chosen film aesthetic and its patina of prying close-ups of the shifting Crowe/Wigand character that, under pressure, reveals more ambiguous character traits and background histories as the film proceeds. Hence, the viewer is invited to scrutinise the Wigand persona as presented by Russell Crowe in just the same way that a 60 Minutes television viewer would be interpellated to probe the characters brought to bear by Mike Wallace. In addition, the highly fabricated nature of the scripted and rehearsed 60 Minute interview format, whereby the reporter is variously portrayed as ‘Investigator’, ‘Analyst’ or even ‘Tourist’, seems to go unnoticed by the filmmakers (Campbell, 1987).

In support, the film’s production notes provide elaborate details that confirm the extensive efforts made by Mann and his team to duplicate the circumstances of the real-life case. Filming took place, for example, at the suburban neighbourhoods of Hurstbourne and Seneca Park where Wigand lived while at Brown & Williamson and in the Du Pont Manual High School where he first taught after leaving that company. Similarly, cameras were also set up in Berkeley California at a location not far from Lowell’s home and in the south of the country where cast and crew assembled to recreate Wigand’s decision to testify. This took place at the real location of coastal home of Richard Scruggs who, as a member of Attorney General Michael Moore’s legal team, got his name on the cast list as an assistant to the actor who played him. Indeed, the film featured Moore himself as himself (named the Most Outstanding Attorney General in America in 1997) and even The New York Times reporter Pete Hamill secured a part, as a reporter. With these points in mind that platform the film’s claims on its own authenticity, we refocus attention on the most potent dramatic turn in the film which occurs with Pacino’s grandstand counterstroke flourish in which he details to his Managing News Editor the impending takeover of CBS by Westinghouse - a company which, as noted in earlier chapters, had an instrumental role in the development of the U.S. national radio and television networks in the early 1920s.

Touchstone Enquiries

Taking this as a lead, one key contextual element in our consideration of the film’s claims to accuracy will include an account of those series of mergers and acquisitions during the 1980s and 1990s that, it will be argued, have a direct bearing on the film’s dubious narrative agenda. Like The Truman Show (1998), it too has emerged as a corporate text from Touchstone Pictures, a division of Disney, owner of ABC news.

More notably we will consider not what the film narrative includes about the political intrigues behind the operations of CBS news, but, more significantly, what it chooses to deftly exclude about the more questionable recent history at ABC itself, prior to the Disney takeover. In other words, what has been edited from a film account/docu-drama that supposedly exposes such ambivalent practices in news broadcasting - and why. For this, we can probe briefly into Dennis Mazzocco’s history of ABC, Networks of Power (1994), and refer again to Foerstel (2001).

The ABC Corporate Backstory - from Cap Cities to Disney

The $3.5 billion purchase of ABC in 1985 by Cap Cities, was a takeover paved by the deregulation drive of the Reagan era (Chapter Five). While networks could previously own only seven stations, under Reagan that number was raised to 12 thus allowing Cap Cities to combine the ABC affiliates it owned with ABC’s owned-and-operated stations. In a scenario already familiar to viewers of Network (1976), ABC, now under Cap Cities, came under heavy pressure to cut costs and make its news operations profitable, like NBC and CBS which also changed corporate hands in the 1980s. By 1987, the same year as Broadcast News (1987), about 300 news staffers (one-fifth of all employees) had lost their jobs (Auletta, 1991). In such straightened commercial circumstances, the issue turned once again on how television news networks were and remain constrained in their news coverage as a direct result of operating in the more exposed commercialised environment of the 1980s and 1990s. The Insider (1999), clearly foregrounds such invasive nature of corporate interests on television news content, for sure. And in this respect, its outspoken censure via Pacino would earn it some credit from those who see the film as a powerful Hollywood indictment of corporate America. Further, this open exposure would be in keeping with contemporary academic accounts elsewhere. For example, Sparrow (1999) confirms how in the 1970s advertisers withheld commitment from what they saw as undesirable programming. For instance,

“…when NBC ran a news special on the conditions of migrant workers who picked citrus crops for Minute Maid, Coca Cola (the parent company) pulled its mulit-million dollar account. For at least eight years thereafter, NBC did not produce a documentary on a controversial domestic issue involving an important advertiser.”

(Sparrow, 1999, p. 79)

Similarly, Woodward (1997) details a number of corporate coercions that had determined 1970s network news and drama output. In one open secret, for example,

“General Foods Vice President Kent Mitchell indicated that in the 1970s his corporation was regularly withdrawing its advertising from roughly 100 television programmes a year because the content did not match the views the company held. General Foods is the second largest purchaser of television advertising in the United States. In one instance the company withdrew their sponsorship of an episode of a TV drama with a plot built around a poorly run nursing home. “It wasn’t as balanced as we would have wished”, he noted.” (Woodward, 1997, p. 37)

Within this constellation, and echoing Semali’s (2000) contention in Chapter One, the networks first audience is the ‘silent’ third-party advertiser whose on-going $ multibillion accounts with the networks effectively fund the public system.

More significantly, however, for our present account of Disney’s interests, Sparrow (1999) also makes detailed reference to the similar and more pronounced intrigues between the news networks and the tobacco industry during the 1990s (see also Woodward, 1997, p. 61-64). Investigating these sources reveals an interesting blind spot in the film’s narrative that exposes its rhetorical function as a corporate text.

Amongst the most notable instances of explicit an unabashed corporate censorship, for example, took place in early 1995 when Capital Cities/ABC itself took a major risk in airing a prime-time documentary on the secretive operations of the tobacco industry. That documentary went so far as to accuse market-leader Phillip Morris of injecting additives into its own cigarettes. As with the case in Brown & Williamson, this was to encourage addiction and therefore increase greater sales profits, all at the knowing risk of causing cancer (Philip Morris is also owner of Kraft Foods and so is a major television advertiser/benefactor to the commercial broadcasters).

However, in anticipation of the broadcast, the Philip Morris corporation responded immediately with a $10 billion libel suit that then precipitated a very public retraction from the humbled network broadcaster and - further - a formal on-air apology (during the popular Monday Night Football telecast) in August 1995. The background corporate intrigues that prompted such public contrition have been wryly observed by Foerstel (2001):

“Attorneys who followed the suit said the overriding factor in ABC’s capitulation was the immediacy of the takeover of ABC by Disney. Just three weeks before the settlement of the lawsuit, Capital Cities/ABC Inc and Disney announced their $19 billion merger.” (Foerstel, 2001, p. 27)

A vital public issue was therefore prevented from being aired by the controlling power of the corporate sector wielding significant power in the form of a major advertising budget.

The earlier scenario at ABC mirrors almost too exactly the events as depicted in The Insider (1999) - but only as they had a bearing on the tortured history at the rival CBS corporation. The uncomfortable and direct parallel with Cap Cities/ABC is not mentioned in any available references to the film, certainly not on the extensive Touchstone Production Notes that go to great lengths in detailing the real-life accuracies of the film’s chosen locations and those minor characters who appear “as themselves” in the drama. Indeed, this telling gap that draws attention to the corporate author is oddly absent from all other criticisms and commentaries of the film that emphasise its claims to documented truths. This is peculiarly significant in the case of a film which, over its 160 minutes length, draws clear critical attention of its own to the pervasive influence of corporate bodies on public discourse in the first instance.

Adding to this grand narrative elision that carefully buries the ABC/Philip Morris history, are the range of reviews which attended to the accuracy of the film’s narrative - but only in terms of its veracity to the chosen limited perspective - how, for example, it was a fair account of the Vanity Fair article in the first instance, or how close was the film to the real life beyond, but only as far as its representation of the threats on Jeffrey Wigan’s own experience were concerned or how it bruised the egos of Wallace and Hewitt. Indeed, the film itself helps shape this limited agenda at its close, where,

ALTHOUGH BASED ON A TRUE STORY, CERTAIN EVENTS IN THIS MOTION PICTURE HAVE BEEN FICTIONALIZED FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT. THE SOURCE OF THE DEATH THREATS AGAINST THE WIGANDS NEVER WAS IDENTIFIED AND NO ONE WAS EVER CHARGED OF PROSECUTED.

In the light of other corporate truths not covered in the film, this would stand as a neat rhetorical deflection. Veracity to truth in this instance only includes elements of narrative that deftly eschews reference to ABC’s own questionable history with the tobacco giants just a few years before. Instead of such wider exposure, the narrative thrust of the Disney/ABC film focuses neatly and squarely on the alternative and equally troubled and dubious history of its network competitor, CBS, for the entire world to see. To put the issue in some historical context, the 60 Minutes programme was, at the time of the film’s release, in its 30^th year of transmission, having been created in 1968 by Don Hewitt who had been with CBS since the late 1940s (Chapter Three). During that time when he took charge in the late 1960s it had become the most popular magazine news show in television history, setting a record of twenty-two consecutive seasons in the top ten Nielsen ratings, and the only broadcast programme to finish the season in three different decades as number one. In terms of its news agenda, 60 Minutes set itself standards of journalist integrity and objective reporting as a champion of the individual against bureaucratic and corporate interests that judiciously appropriated the legacy of Edward E. Murrow. At the time of its 25^th anniversary, it led the standard over rivals Dateline NBC, 20/20 at ABC and Front Page at Fox. In the season 1998-9, the show averaged nineteen million viewers, indeed,

“…watching the show has taken on an aura of a cultural tradition through which television is valorized as a medium of depth.” (Stein, 2001, p. 252)

In this light, the second-half critique in The Insider (1999) by a corporate rival is all the more telling. It is the reputable CBS which suffers the humiliation of breaking the commitment to air issues of public importance, it is CBS which concedes to the demands of the commercial imperative, and it is the status of the CBS news network - in the form of Mike Wallace, ace anchor, which is ultimately humbled. Wallace’s own critiques of how he had been represented as an individual should not at this point go without comment. In an interview with The New York Times journalist Applebaum, Wallace was reported as questioning the intentions of Michael Mann:

“…why does he use my name and have words come out of my mouth that I never would have said.? There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind at all one where I stood on this. And to be portrayed as having lost my moral compass and caved in. To whom? For what?” (Stein, 2001, p. 250)

Wallace’s singular concerns about his representation and how it seemed framed by the director’s narrative shaping neatly deflects away from the main issues raised by the film and stands typically, for Stein (2001), as,

“…a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that exactly mirrors the journalistic and narrative practices of 60 minutes itself.” (Stein, 2001, p. 251)

An element missing in all accounts of the film, however, is the crucial factor of corporate authoring which we have raised. In “betraying the legacy of Edward E. Murrow”, CBS is well and truly bowed and broken in a film produced by a main corporate competitor, Disney, owner of news rival ABC. In this respect, the film itself is one further extension of negative advertising that serves to undermine the reputation of CBS and, by inference, raise the standing of its rivals at ABC.

In this context, and in consideration of the film’s overall chosen style, it would appear that the intense close narrative emphasis on Wigand and Lowell as driven by Mann’s accompanying celebrated interior visual strategy that expands primarily on the personal inner conflicts of the lead characters, brilliantly deflects any potential and valid criticism that may touch on the awkward ABC/Philip Morris saga that lurks menacingly on the story perimeter. As argued here, and considering issues of political economy as they have a bearing on the news industries, such an associative link would provide ample reason why Disney/ABC would find this exposure of its main competitor in news delivery so appealing to produce in the first instance. As will be further explored below, it is a chosen narrative that in its standard mainstream focus on personal histories uncannily recounts Stein’s (2001) separate critique of the 60 Minutes formula that by the 1980s had developed “the convention of the impartial,

“…professional journalist employing a scientific, objective methodology to uncover issues of public interest…now joined to narrative reconstructions of experience featuring dramatic characters.” (Stein, 2001, p. 254)

The Insider (1999), then, functions to both open and reveal certain (known) public truths while working assiduously to conceal or at least deflect certain corporate truths, while presenting as valid a news broadcast show that was founded on the very principles of Hollywood dramatic construction in the first place (Campbell, 1987).

The film is an explicit auteurial presence that speaks more directly than most of contemporary political and media concerns but in a way that resists full condemnation by meeting mainstream criteria that tip the balance from social critique to psychological concern for the main male protagonists as victims. This ambiguity was perhaps mirrored in the round of award conventions that year where it earned distinct moral approval in the form of seven Golden Globe nominations and no less than eight Oscar nominations but left both events with none.

Lastly, we close this chapter with a return to wider social contextual issues that consider the role of corporate news broadcasting in America and its determining impact on the scope and content of public discourse, a key theme that will lead our focus in the closing two chapters.

The Insider (1999) as Corporate Free Speech

As we have established, the theme of discourse and free speech is central to the film since, at its dramaturgical core, it draws critical attention to the powers of corporate America and its powerful ability to curtail open disclosure of vital social importance by private individuals. In this respect it speaks for prevailing contemporary concerns, (Boggs, 2000). However, its uncritical portrayal of Bergman’s own manipulation of events remains dangerously suspect since it is only through these corporate moves on behalf of CBS that such public spaces - in law courts and on the public airwaves - can seem to exist in the first instance. The vital casting of underdog Pacino as Liberal Bergman assists in covering this ideological dodge. His actions throughout the film are wholly devoted to constructing spaces where Wigand can exercise his right to speech free of corporate litigation. The success that is celebrated in the airing of the damning interview is, therefore, a suspect one. Equally open to critical concern is his noble retreat into the commercial-free zone of academia which, we are led to believe, exists beyond the corporate hold. It is an uncomfortable ironic coda indeed that a film that ostensibly engineers public concern about the diminishing scope for free speech in America should itself emerge from that same dominant corporate stage which it seems so eager to subversively censure.The final retreat into academia by both Bergman and Wigand provides a less-than satisfactory coda that suggests that, given their proven academic credentials anyway, this is perhaps the natural environment in which they can more fruitfully explore and share their skills, and where, by suggestive subtext, they should have perhaps remained in the first instance.

It is a final argument that the fictive reconstructing of events that Disney has created attempts to refigure and put to rest the historical account and close the gaps thereby that other possibly alternative accounts of the kind provided above might open. In this respect we return to the fiction film’s more enabling status as an influential rhetorical text in contest with other texts circulating in the public domain.

It is a public domain dominated by corporate institutions such as Disney/ABC. Through the appropriation of closely linked discourses such as film and broadcast news a dominant hegemony is legitimised through the narratives they weave and the entertaining myths that they share about themselves. Together, they work assiduously, like Bergman/Pacino, to leave their own words “intact”.”

CODA

2007 Update

Jeffrey Wigand’s orignial testimony against Brown and Williamson is here:-

Where to Now?

How About Berlin, the Summer 2007 Course on US Film & Media:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/the-jfk-berlin-programme/

 

END

 

CHAPTER SIX.

Case Study Analysis: Up, Close & Personal (1996):Redford’s Compromised Return

“Our opening observations concern the function of the film as a corporate text and assume, thence, that it performs as an advocate of certain corporate ideologies. In order to succeed, however, it needs to act as a rhetor in constructing a positon (through the story) that, from Cheney (1991),

“…must foster some type of identification or association between his or her interests and those of the audience addressed. Any organization that seeks to speak to one or more publics must observe these complementary principles. That means that in organizational settings an entity or an individual must find ways to adapt to other’s views while maintaining the distinctiveness claimed by the rhetor.” (Cheney, 1991, p. 170).

With these important provisos in mind, we shall begin our analysis with a unique insight into the documented operations of the corporate author, in this case, the Disney Corporation.

When screenwriters the late John Gregory Dunne and his wife Joan Didion attended an initial script conference at Disney’s Burbank headquarters in 1989, for example, they had little confidence that the proposed project under discussion would engage the family-orientated corporate executives of Touchstone Pictures. The proposed script - provisionally entitled Golden Girl - was to be based on the true-life of Jessica Savitch who emerged from small-town beginnings to become a nationally recognised and renowned television journalist but who died at the age of 35 in a ugly freak car accident. Her career arc was in dramatic contrast to that of former Nixon press aide Diane Sawyer who, as the script was being discussed, was establishing herself as correspondent on Don Hewitt’s 60 Minutes.

By the time the film was nearing actual production, Sawyer would be making fast ground as co-anchor on the CBS PrimeTime Live. The success of this programme would secure her $7 million contract of 1994, about the time when the film was in production.

Disney’s Problem with Reality

Back in 1989, however, Jeffrey Katzenberg, then Head of Motion Picture Production at Disney, was confronted with entirely different real-life story material. He was prepared to make an offer “if somewhere in Savitch’s messy life we could find an angle that would fit within the studio’s story parameters” (Dunne, 1997, p.17). The crucial point at the start of the meeting was the issue of veracity, of how close, or how far, the writers were prepared to veer from the established facts of her short vainglory life.

As recounted by Dunne (Monster, 1997), Katzenberg immediately contravened the proven record of history on which the film would be based by asking simply, “Did she have to die in the end?”. For Dunne (1997) and his wife, it was a,

“…question we had anticipated. If the character was not called Jessica Savitch, we answered carefully, then it was not necessary that she die. Disney, with its family reputation was also uncomfortable with Savitch’s addiction to cocaine. The transformation had begun… Savitch had once had an affair with CBS newscaster Ed Bradley, and we surmised that the interracial nature of that relationship might be another source of discomfort for Disney’s core audience. Her abortions could also pose a problem, as could her two marriages, especially the second to a gay gynecologist who, less than a year after they married, hanged himself from a cross-beam in the basement of her Philadelphia home.” (Dunne, 1997, p. 19-20)

As if this was not enough, Dunne (1997) concludes that it was,

“…clear that an uplifting story that would make an audience feel good about itself was not going to encompass any allusion either to Savitch’s suicide attempts or to the lesbian episodes in her life.” (Dunne, 1997, p. 19-20)

Dunne and Didion recognised quickly the emerging studio “story parameters” that demanded a scenario “that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves…” (Dunne, 1997, p.17). In time,

“Jessica Savitch, a middle-class Jewish girl from Kennet Square, Pennsylvania, was fast becoming Sallyanne Atwater, trailer trash from Stateline, Nevada.” (Dunne, 1997, p. 25)

Dunne and Didion proceeded, through numerous on-going contracts and several executive changes, to deliver an acceptable script to the main “elements”. Looking to the character of Warren Justice, for example, early drafts by Dunne and Didion attempted to draw some parallels with his real-life counterpart, Ron Kershaw,

“He would drink too much, smoke rock cocaine, be a full-time philanderer, the kind of self-destructive “dark star…that explodes and sucks in everything else around him”.” (Dunne, 1997, p. 30)

In early 1990, however, the Disney story executives submitted extensive response notes to first draft work, which Dunne (1997) summarises as follows. From Disney’s point of view,

““We agreed to make Tally a more sympathetic character. We feel it essential to show that Tally has other aspects to her personality besides her ambition. If we are to root for her, we must see she has doubts and insecurities, compassion and love. We’d like to help balance her character by showing…instances of kindness towards co-workers. We discussed making Warren a more accessible character by making him more likeable”.” (in Dunne, 1997, p. 32-33)

The notes emerged from a meeting between the writers and Touchstone’s President David Hoberman and an assortment of creative executives,

“…many of whom are second-generation Hollywood, often innocent of history, politics, art and Western civilization.” (Dunne, 1997, p. 32)

After twenty seven script drafts, Golden Girl would emerge seven years later as Up, Close and Personal (1996), staring Robert Redford and with Michelle Pfeiffer in the central role of Tally Atwater. By September of that year, it would gross over $100 million in U.S. box-office rentals alone. At the head of the film titles is the putative name of the production company ‘Cinergy Films’.

This short account juxtaposing the contrast between the true story of Jessica Savitch and Ron Kershaw (as described by Dunne, 1997) and the screen images (as consciously constructed/nudged by Disney’s Touchstone) reveals much about how corporate ideologies directly impact upon screen storytelling within Hollywood. The irony is all the greater in the case of a film that appropriates a deconstructuralist agenda by exploring the social nature of identity and exposing the operations of (‘tabloid’) news. It also vividly crystallises the importance of representation as an avenue of critical analysis within Media Education since,

“…uncovering the many levels of construction…in media messages is helpful to see that what is “constructed” by just a few people then becomes the way it is (or worldview) for the rest of us who buy into the message as news, textbook story, or TV sitcom.” (Semali, 2000, p. 94)

So, a story representing the life of a woman devoted to the verities of news presentation in the 1980s would emerge within the secure “story parameters” of the Disney corporation in the 1990s in order to make mainstream audiences “feel good about themselves”.

Corporate Narrative Strategies

The story is framed at the beginning by Atwater’s own account of her rise to success. With some gesture towards deconstructive irony, this takes the form of a back-stage studio interview where she answers off-camera (male) questions in conventional Hollywood terms as the star. We the film audience are privileged in witnessing the televisualised construction of the emerging set-up that brings together lights, background-feed, and off- camera question cues. We witness in Pfeiffer’s nuanced performance Atwater’s own skill in successfully merging both the private and public personae who is personable, beautiful and suited. This level of mature, seasoned and polished professionalism is neatly contrasted with video clips showing her past amateur attempts at news journalism in the 1980s as she, pioneer-like, constructed her own cv video portfolio despite shaky camera set-ups and in the face of intemperate weather conditions.

However, despite the film’s opening posture that appears to contrast truth and visual construction, there exists no real critical incision that undermines or questions television or film’s claim on veracity. Indeed, Scott Rudin, an early producer on the film, would insist to the harassed screenwriters, “I keep telling you, this is a picture about two movie stars…” (Dunne, 1997, p. 127)

With the happy ending neatly established at the start, the initial narrative arc takes us from Atwater’s poor mid-west beginnings in Nevada (surrogate mother to her baby sister) to a small-scale Miami affiliate station where she is employed first as tight-skirted and clumsy secretary, then novice weather ‘girl’ and finally challenging ace reporter. The second stage, or act two, takes her further towards network heaven - to Philadelphia - where she builds on the ground work in Miami. Here she proves herself as hardened street journalist while trapped in a highly dangerous (black) prison riot. The successful network pick-up of her work from the prison promotes her to the prestigious Independent Broadcast System (IBS) at the end of act three. This positive narrative charge is quickly followed by the death of her husband, Warren Justice/Robert Redford, while researching a foreign war news report. The film concludes with a return to the opening narrative frame and her acceptance speech at the annual network conference where she receives an award as journalist of the year.

Her advance through the (white) male dominated media industry, however, is guided by the sure and seasoned hand of Warren Justice, former Washington, D.C. crusading reporter of the 1970s, and current station producer of WMIA News, Channel 9 in Miami. In typical Pygmalion fashion, Justice takes the novice Atwater through a hardened course of news journalism, sharpening her clothes style, her hair, her language and even her name (now ‘Tally’), towards the honourable profession of “getting the story” by at first identifying with the plight of victims of natural and social tragedy and then delivering a professional account with sufficient relevant informed context to the television audience.

Justice takes Atwater through a steep learning curve on-the-job - undertaking politically charged interviews, overseeing his deft finger work on the editing consoles where crude footage is turned to “gold” and, crucially, writing and then delivering stories on screen in a way that magically combines her personal/social commitment to politically charged issues with a performance that is soon recognised by the film audience as a hard-won professional screen presence to be admired. As an added layer of irony, the process mirrors the conventional assu