Introduction to “We, the media…”, the Book and the Website

 

““Rhetoric”, then, is the arbiter of “congregation” and “segregation”, it makes possible the moves from “I” to “we” and “we” to “I”.” (Cheney, 1991, p. 20)

2003 - 2005: Rhetoric of War and Freedom

“We introduce our analysis of U.S. media rhetorics with an improvised 2003 lesson in Media Education from none other than the-then Defense Secretary of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld. His remarks, that came at the end of a March 2003 press conference, refer to the blanket news coverage of the invasion of Iraq that had begun just a few days earlier (Stanley, 2003a). Positioned live to perhaps billions of viewers, he opined with some amazed and almost genuine shocked awe, that,

“I think we’re probably watching something that is somewhat historic. We’re having a conflict at a time in our history when we have 24-hour-a-day television, radio, media, Internet, and more people in the world have access to what is taking place. You couple that with the hundreds - literally hundreds of people in the free press - the international press, the press of the United States, from every aspect of the media who have been offered and accepted an opportunity to join and be connected directly with practically every aspect of this campaign.” (in Stanley, The New York Times. 23.03.2003: A1).

It seemed as though “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was already serving to both bring democracy to a beleaguered middle-Eastern people and visibly prove that such democracy - in the form of a nominal free press - existed in the actual reporting of the war itself. The two themes from Rumsfeld’s short but telling overview seemed woven of the same rhetorical thread, and thus subtly implicating the operations of the press - and the media user - in the just cause for which the war was said to be fought. Having ‘access’ to such a wide scope of technologies, the rhetoric suggested, confirmed the existence of an equally wide scope of information content. In this intriguing instance hip 1960s media theory was brought to bear in supporting real war contingencies of the new century - the media operation was the message, after all.

Rumsfeld’s live celebration of free speech values - as obligingly recorded, edited, framed, and transmitted by the said press itself - serves to marshal a number of key themes touching on the function, role and performance of the free press in the United States and how, specifically, this is rhetorically forwarded as a touchstone for social freedoms assumed to be enjoyed by all citizens. How these ideologically loaded terms are therefore defined is of crucial social and political importance. Dramaturgically and ethically speaking, it is of special importance when corporate media align with leading representatives of the U.S. Defense Department in securing such definitions, especially as they are co-opted in justifying illegal wars.

What follows, then, was written in the context of rapidly changing global conditions wherein during the months between January 2002 and June 2003 the United States - along with “the coalition of the willing” - invaded the Arab countries of Afghanistan and Iraq and deposed the governments of both these countries. This action was undertaken in the name of national defence and extending to other countries the freedoms and associated rights to prosperity as supposedly enjoyed in the West.

One consistent measure of such freedom has always been the freedom of expression and the rights of free speech as determined by the First Amendment of the American Constitution. Invariably, the rhetoric then extends to the actual operations of the free press and how, in the United States, such notions of ‘speech’, ‘expression’ and ‘publication’ become equated with vital principles of ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’ (Lichtenberg, 1995). This is of particular significance in the case of a corporate media which rhetorically positions itself as an individual ‘entitiy’ with free speech rights (Chapter Five) and which is also in a leading position to anchor definitions of such terms.

It is one principle aim of this book to outline the real extent of such freedoms as they are supposed to exist in the United States itself by charting the development of mass media from the early part of the 20^th century to the Washington, D.C. ‘battles’ over regulatory control one hundred years later (Chapter Two). How those media institutions and journalist practices have been represented by mainstream Hollywood cinema is the core focus of this investigation (Chapters Four to Seven).

It is an investigation which, from the outset, recognises how culutral texts - whether they be film, congressional speeches, television commercials, corporate websites, or improvised lectures in media education from the U.S. Defense Department - all function rhetorically to legitimise themselves and their author/rhetors. They are regarded in this vein as “speech acts” (Austin and Searle, 1976) or “symbolic tools” (Burke, 1966) or, from a sociological perspective, as “the counterpart of ideology” and means, therefore, of maintaining the established social order (Simons, 1989).

The approach profits from a recent groundswell of developments in Rhetoric that, since the 1970s, have advanced critical accounts of how knowledge in the “anti-foundational” public sphere is inherently dialogical (Roberts and Good, 1993), that meaning is socially constructed (Rorty, 1979) and communicated by socially determined and constructed selves (Brown, 1987). In this regard, “…reality becomes fundamentally symbolic, action is seen as embodied language, and language becomes therefore the primary unit of empirical knowledge.” (Brown, 1987, p. 85)

Hence, the social reality on which claims to truth are based is objectified by the use of persuasive languages or rhetorics. Countering Aristotle’s division that created ‘poetry’ from ‘science’, the more recent “recovery of Rhetoric”, therefore, recognises that all language is inherently metaphorical (Simons, 1990). Indeed, from his charged ruminations, Burke (1966) forwards the possibility that, “Since language derives its materials from the co-operative acts of men in sociopolitical orders, which are themselves held together by a vast network of verbally perfected meanings, might it not follow that man must perceive nature through the fog of symbol-ridden social structures that he has erected atop nature? Material things would thus be like outward manifestations of the forms which are imposed upon the intuiting of nature by language, and by the socio-political orders that are interwoven with language… If this were possible, then nature, as perceived by the word-using animal, would be not just the less-than-verbal thing that we usually take it to be. Rather, as so conceived and perceived, it would be infused with the spirit of words, and of the social orders that are implicit in any given complex verbal structure… In this sense, things would be the signs of words.” (Burke 1966, p. 378, italics added)

Burke (1966) is here remarkably adroit in reversing the behaviourist’s formulaic hold on how words are assumed naturally to be signifiers of given things ‘in’ nature and counters, instead, with a form of linguistic realism that recognises how both words and things are signs constructed, a perspective that would be easily shared by any corporate alliance focused on constructing social spaces such as ‘public’ shopping ‘villages’ or, indeed, U.S. Presidents concocting liberating ‘wars’. As Brown (1987) would have it,

“Each is constructed through collective experience in the intersubjective worlds of those persons who share a given paradigm, who operate within the same range of rules and practices.” (Brown, 1987, p. 86)

The emphasis here on the determining factor of the socio-political reality in Burke (1966) checks any deconstructivist tendency towards an epistimological and moral relativism - as some socialists would fear and certain traditionalists would purport to fear.

In way of a short detour, one further stress needs emphasising at this early stage that touches on the role and function of the “public sphere” as already mentioned. Work in this area is indebted to the extensive work of Habermas (1989) who, more than anyone else, placed much responsibility for the proper ordering of democracy on the workings of rational conversation and the obligation to observe the rules of co-operation that this implies. However, while the term “public sphere” is to be used frequently here and in subsequent chapters, it is qualified by an awareness of more recent challenges, notably from Schudson (1997a), who helpfully questions how far the reality of elitist Enlightenment politics, particularly in the USA, conforms, or not, to certain 21^st century idealistic benchmarks. As a general qualifier to such assumptions, Schudson’s (1997a) essay on the beginnings of U.S. democracy concludes that,

“…what makes conversation democratic is not free, equal and spontaneous expression but equal access to the floor, equal participation in setting the ground rules for discussion, and a set of ground rules designed to encourage pertinent speaking, attentive listening, appropriate simplifications, and widely apportioned speaking rights. The primal American political conversation was caefully structured so that - within the eighteenth century limits of who counted as a citizen - it could be genuinely deliberative and genuinely democratic. It thus had to be anything but spontaneous.” (Schudson, 1997a, p. 307)

 

In this important respect, Schudson (1997b) undermines often cherished assumptions that have bedeviled accounts of the Republic’s beginnings by highlighting its essential elitist foundations and how these manifested themselves in the rigid organisation of political debate and the channeling of discourse from its beginnings.

The “public sphere” was to be found predominantly and only, therefore, in the legislature since, the framers of the American republic believed it to be,

“…a relatively small, if overwhelmingly important, space. They believed its guardians to be the enlightened elite whose experience, character and judgment could be counted on to reach consensus about the public good. While these leaders were ultimately responsible to the voters, direct, frequent or enthusiastic participation of the public in the affairs of politics was unwelcome, indeed, positively dangerous.” (Schudson, 1997b, p. 327)

The weight of Schudson’s (1997b) sharp critique opens the term “public sphere” to a more nuanced reading and a more wary consideration of those rhetorics that so easily equate freedom of speech with participatory democracy, an equation continually insisted by and through the corporate media.

For Shudson (1996b), the real focus of attention to political communication should not be angled to specific speech acts, but to the general contextual dimension in which such acts perform as rhetorical manoeuvres. Hence, in closing our short proviso on the question of the “public sphere”,

“If political historians wrote of presidential politics as if they were a rhetorical contest and not the peculiar expression of the American political system and political culture, they would be mystified that Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 or Colin Powell in 1996 (if he had only wanted it) rose to the top not because of their political views but because, so far as anyone knew, they had none.” (Schudson, 1997, b, p. 328.

Returning to our main course, what would otherwise seem a daunting critical task, therefore, is at least made manageable at the outset with recourse to the “dramaturgical perspective” as forwarded in earlier decades by Burke (in Gusfield, 1987). That influence and constructivist agenda is helpfully summarised by Hart (1990) who acknowledges how Burke’s ideas on dramatistic analysis, “…have influenced countless students of rhetoric and literature as well as sociologists, political scientists, historians, linguists, and philosophers. Burke urges the doing of criticism not because rhetoric is powerful, even though it is, and not because criticism is interesting, which goes without saying. Rather, says, Burke, tracking the “rhetorical motive“ is central to understanding what human beings are at root (symbol-users, he feels), what they strive to do (rise above themselves, he argues), and what they have the potential to do (rise up together, he hopes).” (Hart, 1990, p. 341-342)

One useful analytic tool from Burke (1966) is worth underscoring at this stage. Burke’s own frame - the Pentad - provides a form of explanatory metatext or narrative DNA that considers, “…what is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it...”. Thus, answering the question, What is happening?, involves an analysis of:

1. Act: what took place?

2. Scene: what is the context in which it occurred?

3. Agent: who performed the act?

4. Agency: how was it done?

5. Purpose: why was it done? (Burke, 1969, p. xv-xxiii)

The simplicity of the outline is, however, awkwardly complicated when we invariably recognise how each question implies a reduction of view and how, in “reported tellings” of any event, there is an inevitable lack of balance between the parts, or as Burke would have it, ratios. Burke’s example of the ‘good’ shepherd neatly illustrates how this story function/character can be radically re-understood depending on one’s chosen frame of perception, for whom we are telling the story, and, indeed, at which time of the year the story is set.

Such are Burke’s “ways of placement”. Hence, since certain narrative ratios are necessarily configured according to certain needs of the teller (and listener), all such telling/reporting/discussing becomes, in a sense, rhetorical and all communicators are fated as symbol-users (Burke, 1966)

It is in this important respect that we might refigure Secretary Rumsfeld’s ‘innocent’ observation as a form of rhetoric that happened to coincide with a major regulatory review of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, D.C. that would effectively extend the market privileges of the few media corporations who at the same time “accepted” the “invitation” to “join and be connected” to the invasion of Iraq (interestingly, the FCC Committee Chairman, Charles Powell, is also son of Colin Powell, the-then Secretary of State).

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s rhetoric of a free and open press, therefore, chimed all too closely with those arguments as advanced by corporate media for a “roll back” of the few regulations, one of which restricted single station reach to 35% of the U.S. population (Dreazen, 2003). Those arguments pointed, for example, to the wide scope of news delivery systems - of the kind as listed by Rumsfeld - that were now available to the information ‘rich’ consumer which now, asserted the media giants, made continued restrictions on their market reach untenable. Rumsfeld’s impromptu insights, therefore, betray a sly ideological slant that adds indirect support - through the mainstream corporate media itself - to the Bush administration’s favourable concession to corporate media’s own long-term wish-list to advance even further its own invasive campaign strategies over the Homeland airwaves (Chapter Ten).

Burke’s (1966) formulations and influences have directly prompted many considerations of Rhetoric as it is currently understood, taught and used, particularly as it compels the analysis (and alternative construction) of texts traditionally considered outside the realm of Rhetoric’s own Great Tradition. Hart (1990) for instance, assembles a range of texts for rhetorical scrutiny, analysis and comment with examples culled from a range of profiles across literature, corporate life, personal psychology, televised news, print journalism, policy formation, and religious experience that include: presidential speeches (p. 244-247); 60 Minutes from CBS (p. 173); state legislature debates (p. 160); Shakespeare’s King Lear (p. 152); the Western myth (p. 48); the discourses of economic theory (p. 42); Norman Rockwell paintings (p. 229); Steven Speilberg’s Poltergeist (1982) (p. 304); corporate advertising/news (p. 41); broadcast news strategies (p. 366); Dr. Pepper commercials (p. 385); television soap operas (p. 354) and, from an enlivened Marxist perspective, the extensive student car parking regulations at Hart’s own University of Texas (p. 403). Harts (1990) agenda clearly makes hay of the carefully plotted landscapes that have defined orthodox academic disciplines including ‘Rhetoric’ itself. In true interdisciplinary fashion, therefore, this more holistic rhetorical persepctive encourages an “…’undisciplining’ of the human sciences” since, for Roberts and Good (1993), “…central to a rhetorical approach is the expectation that every act of constitution and communication in a discipine is capable of explanation in terms of rhetorical categories. These expose the intentions and strategies of the communicator, the construction of the subject matter communicated, and the nature of the audience that receives the communcication and which, in traditional terms, undergoes persuasion.” (Roberts and Good, 1993, p. 13)

It is through such critical openings suggested by Hart (1990), and Roberts and Good (1993) that we turn more directly to contemporary commentaries on U.S. media other than by Donald Rumsfeld. The field will then be open to introduce the films themselves.

The Persuasive Field and the Corporate Rhetor

The overview so far that has introduced the symbolic operations of the dramaturgical society needs to be seriously qualified since such symbol-making practices operate in a communicative environment where knowledge, we are told, is power but where such knowledge-creation, distribution and sharing capability is ordained within an inequitable field of social discourse that advances the ideological interests and secures the control of the ruling hegemony (Gramsci, 1971). It is argued that the cycle of production which creates permeating imagery and messages is determined by powerful factions that must constantly reinvent their authority and vie for the support of subordinate groups as economic and political conditions change. Consequently, for Curtin (1995),

“…symbolic activity is central to the production of political affinities in modern society, and television is one of the most important domains in which these efforts take place.” (Curtin, 1995, p. 10)

Staying with the point of legitimisation, Curtin’s (1995) own historical account of U.S. television network documentary output in the early 1960s is grounded on a recognition that even,

“…national identities must be constantly nurtured and reinforced…certain moments arise when the nation must be “reimagined” and when those imaginings transcend national borders and international significance.” (Curtin, 1995, p. 8)

We can perhaps recognise the real significance of Secretary Rumsfeld’s speculations on the wonders of the American free press at a time under threat when the sense of America needed to be reimagined. The question to ask is: have we invited a press to witness a war, or have we created a war to show that this freedom of expression is possible? Indeed, as Woodward (1997) in such an instance might wryly remind us, “…having a “free press” is not the same thing as having a press that is free from political or economic pressure.” (Woodward, 1997, p. 32)

In addition, and as forwarded by Artz and Murphy (2000),

“…any understanding of social relations depends on how actions, relations, and conflicts are explained, categorized, and rationalized. Ideology does not replace or transcend the world, but it helps us make sense of material, political, and cultural conditions… In any hegemony, events, activities, and relationships have certain meanings depending on how prevailing ideologies are systematically incorporated and expressed.” (Artz and Murphy, 2000, p. 31)

Artz and Murphy (2000) build profitably from Gramsci’s (1967) consent theories and apply them to the contemporary American scene. Their broad analysis is supported more directly by Schiller (1996) whose critical focus in the chapter Data Deprivation is reserved explicitly for those huge, private, economic enterprises that are,

“extended across national and international boundaries, influencing and directing economic resource decisions, political choices, and the production and dissemination of messages and images. The American economy is now hostage to a relatively small number of giant private companies with interlocking connections, that set the national agenda. The power is particularly characteristic of the communication and information sector where the national cultural-media agenda is provided by a very small (and declining) number of integrated private combines.” (Schiller, 1996, p. 44)

The systematic incorporation of messages from Artz and Murphy (2000) that set the cultural agenda of Schiller (1996) are largely disseminated through and by those corporations which, like General Electric which owns the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), have direct control and ownership over the main public communication networks. Schiller’s (1996) interlocking connections, for example, would recognise the operations of Viacom which links NBC rival the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) with Paramount Pictures; it would associate the operations of NewsCorps and Fox News more obviously with 20^th Century Fox and the American Broadcast Company (ABC) with its owner Disney. Indeed, as of April 2003, General Electric would extend its media interests to purchase Universal Pictures from Vivendi. The extensive portfolios that such corporations enjoy makes therefore any traditional distinction between film and television aesthetics somewhat quaint and renders lacking the analysis of any one single text if it is without consideration of such corporate authoring.

Consent theory, however, reminds us that power must be negotiated, and therefore all forms of communication become in this regard means of identity creation of both audiences and corporate owner of the text/film/television programme which must perform a range of persuasive rhetorical functions. For example, and as a means of foreshadowing our later argument, Cheney (1991) rounds up a sample list of suspects that includes AT&T, General Dynamics, United Technologies, the National Rifle Association, the Roman Catholic Church, the Sierra Club, and Mobil Oil, to argue that, “…there is a profound sense in which organizations are rhetorical and rhetoric is organizational in the late twentieth-century United States. This observation, which is both historically and theoretically grounded, can be generalised for the entire industrialized world.” (Cheney, 1991, p. 9)

 

The stewardship of the public airwaves by specific corporate entities is therefore a vitally significant issue, particularly in a political culture that is encouraged to equate free speech with certain fundamental democratic principles. The pressure to perform credibly and to continually legitimise such control is therefore a high priority for the corporate broadcaster.

One useful strategic opportunity for the corporate rhetor lies, of course, in the power to determine how the operations of the media are to be represented by the mainstream media itself. Corporate control over Hollywood output - a singular feature since the 1980s - would provide a supportive platform on which to build certain representations and narratives favourable to the overall corporate agenda of organisational image management to secure such continued hegemony - both instrumental and ideological. As will be argued, contextual frames that consciously incorporate the political economy in the analysis of such film texts are therefore vital if a full and more engaged appreciation of the intertextual richness of any one text can be achieved and shared.

Following from Schiller’s (1996) central concern about corporate governance over the public sphere, our investigation into how one corporate media (mainstream film) is brought forth to represent another (news broadcasting) is a doubly challenging one that asks, amongst other things,

• how, simply, are the functions and operations of news media represented in film?

• do these representations change over time, from the 1970s, for example, to the 1990s?

• what might these differences betray about the relationship between ‘Hollywood’ and the television industry - particularly in terms of aesthetic conventions?

• how might this relationship be affected by increased corporate control over all media that gradually includes ‘Hollywood’ itself?

• how might this control make itself manifest in the chosen narrative performance of the films and their adopted stylistic features?

• how might these narratives and styles advance certain ideological agendas? and, similarly,

• how might the films function and persuade as ‘meta-discursive’ texts that betray certain rhetorical motives?

 

In keeping with Cheney (1991), one operating rhetorical move of our own, then, is to recognise the legal definition of the corporate owner as an individual as a given and assume from this an auteurial intention in the making of the films - whether conscious or not - though in the case of Up, Close and Personal (1996) we have ample reports of Disney’s very conscious strategic intentions in constructing the early “story parameters” of the script (Dunne, 1997).

We will work on the principle that under such legal agreements that equate corporate product as rightful expressions of free speech, those films can be regarded as symbolic tools designed to forward the rhetorical motive of their corporate author. It is no coincidence, for example, that Disney, through its subsidiary Touchstone Pictures, should consider making Up, Close and Personal (1996), a film that forwards a highly positive account of broadcast news, at a time in the late-1980s when that same company had recently bought ABC but when the public estimation of corporate market-journalism in general was at its lowest (Chapter Six).

Our overall approach that would recognise this text as a specific symbolic tool builds from Cheney’s (1991) own research into corporate rhetorics of the 1980s which acknowledged from the outset that,

“Although all messages are in some way the product of individual efforts, many voices we hear speak for organizations, representing organizational interests. Yet both citizens and scholars find this dimension of communication perplexing; we are left to ponder what it means to speak with a collective voice and how to interpret a collective or “corporate” message.” (Cheney, 1991, p. 2)

Cheney (1991) considers those Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s, which expanded protection over corporate free speech yet which allows continued anonymity and detachment (we should be aware that ‘Inc.’ in both France and Spain corresponds to ‘S.A.’, or “societé anonyme” or ”sociedad anónima”, respectively). However, the deregulated economic landscape since the 1980s prompts a more pro-active public role that activates rhetorical contests of corporate advocacy to secure greater legitimisation and market share by appealing to wider and more volatile audiences/consumers. Hence,

“Corporate messages take the forms of memos, announcements, policy statements, advertising, public relations, treaties, image management, doctrines, issue advocacy, lobbying efforts, resolutions, annual reports, declarations, surveys, and so on. And many of these messages purport to represent entire organizations. These messages cannot be treated simply as though they were from one individual to another; corporate messages have corporate sources, corporate purposes, and corporate audiences.” (Cheney, 1991, p. 3)

Considering the vital triad of “organisation”, “rhetoric” and “identity”, therefore, Cheney (1991) asserts that where corporate brand becomes the product, where ‘markets’ are fractured, and consumers volatile,

“Contemporary organizations do more than manage issues by inculcating values; they also manage identities. In fact it can be said that the nature of organizational rhetoric in the industrialized world in the late twentieth century is the management of multiple identities.” (Cheney, 1991, p. 9).

In other words, communication in such a charged economic sphere - whether it be internal documentation or, as in the case of a public film just ‘entertainment’ - is never neutral. In the case of the latter, it is argued, the owned Hollywood product is a form of image management from the corporate rhetor which is designed - as part of a wider agenda - to dramatically heighten and then persuasively answer certain ideological tensions for a wide cinema audience - one aspect of creating Cheney’s (1991) “multiple identities” - and towards certain ideological consensual agreements. How this understanding can manifest itself in a more constructivist educational agenda is the subject of our final Chapter Ten that advances more effective means of developing the citizen-student-filmmaker-writer as an active and purposeful rhetor in his/her own right.

 

Leaning indirectly on these developments in what has become known as “rhetorical pragmatism” (Roberts and Good, 1993, p. 12), we will therefore develop assumptions from Burke (1966) about what took place (a film text), what was the context in which it occurred, who performed the act (studio), how was it done and why was it done.

The Core Films - Overview and Scope

“Cinema is: so many corporations, such and such turnovers of capital, so and so many stars, such and such dramas.” (Eisenstein, in Mast, Cohen and Braudy, 1992, p. 127)

This dramaturgising of the corporate media persona is evaluated in our detailed account of a range of films from the 1950s and through to the 1990s. Those films are selected from the fairly loose list of titles from what is awkwardly described as ‘The Journalism Genre’ (Ehrlich, 1997). They include Network (1976), Broadcast News (1987), Up, Close and Personal (1996), Independence Day (1996), Mad City (1997), Wag the Dog (1997), Deep Impact (1998), and The Insider (1999). In addition, we consider films explicitly about the working of television itself, outside the news studio - for example Redford’s Quiz Show (1994), The Truman Show (1998) and EDtv (1999).

Our study, therefore, focuses predominantly on journalism within broadcast news - so any omission of key classic texts on print journalism - such as The Front Page (1931/1974), It Happened One Night (1934), His Girl Friday (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Park Row (1952), Deadline USA (1952) or While the City Sleeps (1956) - is an unfortunate but deliberate one. Similarly, with the exception of Redford’s All the President’s Men (1976), more recent films focusing on the working practices of journalist operations in the 1970s and 1980s - however rich in reference and relevant narrative content - that include The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Under Fire (1983), The Killing Fields (1984), and Salvador (1985) - remain untouched but available for further analysis within the context of our discussion. To this list we must reluctantly add Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994).

At the core of this study, then, we will analyse a number of films that explore the tension at work where one form of visual mass media – television - is represented by another - cinema. That tension is first made explicit in the case of our opening analysis of Universal’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) in Chapter Three.

The arc of analysis then takes on a chronological order from the 1960s to the late 1990s which parallels significant industrial, cultural and political changes that have directly shaped (and were in turn shaped by) the mass media in the United States. More pointedly, the overall critical agenda that brings these texts under scrutiny alerts the reader to certain major structural changes that have taken place within the mass media industry - the significant shift, as a clear example, towards the corporate ownership and wider control of the public airwaves since the 1980s.

As will be extensively argued, this contentious shift to a more aggressive market paradigm for news delivery actually features as a vital explicit narrative motif in several films (Broadcast News, 1987 and Up, Close and Personal, 1996). It will be argued, however, that despite their provocative Liberal agenda, there lurks in these and other films a familiar hegemonic move that operates more suspiciously towards justifying the present corporate agenda - either explicitly, as in the former titles, or more implicitly as in The Insider (1998). This, from Burke (1966), would be the “rhetorical motive”, or, we should allow, one of them.

In addition, the analysis of each film will provide the opportunity to apply and test a number of separate theoretical strands from the field of film theory. Industry analysis will be brought to bear on Universal’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) in Chapter Three, while the genre frame that helps define the film’s assembly in the first instance is established in Chapter Four with the analysis of Sidney Lumet’s seminal Network (1976) and as extended to Broadcast News (1987) in Chapter Five. Thereafter, alternative and complementary theories will be called upon to widen and deepen our coverage as we focus more fully on the films of the 1990s. Certain key elements of auteur theory, for example, will help orientate our analysis of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) and, in deliberate contrast, Structuralist theory (Propp, 1968) and Feminist theory will help evaluate the narrative development of Up, Close and Personal (1996), while Lacanian psychoanalytic theory will be in evidence primarily in our study of Deep Impact (1998) and EDtv (1999). Star theory (Dyer, 1979) will assist in tracking the personae of Redford and Hoffman - from All the President’s Men (1976) through Redford’s Up, Close and Personal (1996) to Hoffman’s Wag the Dog (1997) and Mad City (1997). The last title, in addition, will serve as an example of how certain formalist devices of editing have been adopted from Russian film theory of the 1920s - both in Hollywood film and television broadcast news.

This project; to appropriate for our purposes a range of film theories is in keeping with Elsaesser and Buckland (2002) who apply a range of methods in order to explicitly demonstrate that, as within any discipline, the rhetor is best equipped,

“…to learn several theories, so that they can apply specific theories in appropriate contexts, rather than use the same theory in all contexts.” (Elsaesser and Buckland, 2002, p. 6, italics added)

These separate models will therefore be utilised to support an overriding argument that, considering Cheney’s (1991) “corporate rhetor” will claim how these film texts functioned as symbolic tools within certain contexts to advance the ‘voice’ of their corporate authors more fully as the 1990s advanced and as corporate mergers fused the production, distribution and exhibition operations across all media.

It is argued that such films that affected to represent the operations of the news broadcasting industry in particular conspire as corporate texts to persuade audiences - through familiar narrative strategies, casting and film form - of the continued viability of the broadcast journalism as a public service - and of the viable role of a particular style and organisation of television news-gathering and distribution in particular. In this respect, it is argued, these texts - which predominantly posit the news broadcasting industry in increasingly positive terms - function rhetorically to forward the corporate agenda of those companies which, in the deregulated media landscape now prevailing in the United States, act/perform both as film producers and news broadcasters as well.

To illustrate, a few preliminary examples as lifted from Chapter Seven are in order: in the first case, 20^th Century Fox’s Independence Day (1996) would incorporate dramatised tabloid sequences ‘showing’ Fox News and Sky News reports which the narrative of the film text would then ‘prove’ to be correct. Similarly, and on more sober terms, an account of Michael Mann’s The Insider (1998) reveals how a film exposing the dastardly operations at CBS is itself functioning as another rhetorical attack by media conglomerate Disney which, not coincidentally, owns both Touchtone Pictures which made the film and, more significantly since 1995, the ABC rival news network as well.

 

Looking to theories of reader-response, and to anticipate extended discussion in Chapter One, this does not suggest that such rhetorics are necessarily successful (our own rhetorical agenda would be fatally compromised at the start if it did). It does claim, however, that such rhetorical manoeuvres are characteristic and necessary features of the U.S. media and in a social landscape where corporate control is increasingly pervasive (Schiller, 1996; Boggs, 2000).

To strengthen this broad analysis, the analsysis will function much like its corporate subject by appropriating a range of related and parallel discourses and histories across the field of American Studies and merge these with those film discourses outlined above. These begin in Chapter Two with the early construction of U.S. mass media and sound film and then, in Chapter Three, the Hollywood response to the emergence of television in the 1950s. As a case study, we will consider in this chapter the rise of Universal Studios, from B-feature survivor to major corporate player, and producer of our first case study, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955). Thereafter, analysis of the films is enhanced by contextual coverage that includes:

• post 1970s representations of civil rights, minorities and foreign news

• the declining status of journalism in the public sphere

• the lobbying power of the media corporations

• the impact of commercial television on the electoral system, and related

• contemporary debates about media ownership, freedom of speech and

• democracy that includes U.S/U.K. media legislation in both the up to and including 2003

Though nominally rooted in the discipline of Filmwissenschaft/Film Studies, the investigation to follow will therefore take a deliberately interdisciplinary lumping counterstroke that seeks for a confederate common practice amongst disciplines.

Film Studies, Media Studies and the Political Economy

Following the subject content of these texts that focus on the very function of speaking and reporting in the public sphere, our considerations must also invariably embrace issues and debates that touch more specifically on the political economy of the American scene, how, for example, corporate texts function as free speech practices and so define what is understood to be free speech in the first instance. The short example from the Fox News website below serves a useful early example of rhetorical subterfuge that asserts how,

“Viewers like you speak out on the issues, including America’s war on terror. Send your emails along to myword@foxnews.com to get your voice heard.” (www.foxnews.com, 19.03.2003: 6.24 pm EST).

Effects of interpellation, “like you”, setting the agenda, “including America’s war on terror”, and with the importation to “send”, all work rhetorically to engineer the notion that here, at least, the viewer can fulfil his or her political potential by composing a few words to a corporate website that obligingly provides the necessary platform where that “voice” is assumed to be oddly “heard” in a community of others. How those voices are selected, co-opted and then dramatised on air to further corporate ideology in the programmes is of additional interest and concern.

The example illustrates, however obviously, a pervading tendency across all broadcast media that collapses individual consumer engagement with a media product into a form of nominal citizen ‘participation’ and which is more often than not channeled appropriately towards the corporate agenda (Chapter Eight). Boggs (2000) reminds us how far this is at the expense of other possible more emancipatory discourses since,

“…in the United States, huge corporations like Microsoft, AT&T, Time Warner, Disney/ABC, IBM, and General Electric have assumed unprecedented power to delimit, directly and indirectly, what takes place in the realm of public discourse. They can shape the images and exchanges that effectively engage mass audiences…in order to manipulate discourse towards specific (private) ends, resulting in a subversion of the public interest. The corporations use a wide array of media influences…to undercut the threat from consumer groups, labor, social movements, and community interests.” (Boggs, 2000, p. 71)

The manipulation of the discourse that Boggs (2000) refers to is made possible in the case of those corporations with portfolios that extend across the whole range of media outlets and entertainment forms, where each individual text can act as a symbolic support mechanism or rhetoric that helps reinforce the overall economic and ideological programme of the broadcast owner (NBC/General Electric, for example). This on-going persuasive corporate environment appropriates and adopts all forms of rhetoric and often alternative representations, including the symbolic tool of mainstream film and, indeed, the very rhetoric of ‘Hollywood’ itself, to forward its ideological and economic agenda.

It is argued here that as Hollywood became another symbolic tool of the corporate giants, so its own entertainments - their own powerful forms of narrative and representations - serve (more than ever before) as more knowing persuasive instruments in that overall strategy. To be specific, it is a strategy that effectively co-opts alternative forms of representations (Chapter Six) and potentially subversive narrative forms (Chapter Seven) to maintain and uphold the dominant Realist style. If there is one useful definition - or hook - on which this study rests it comes, therefore, from Eagleton (1998, p. 86) for whom rhetoric was and is used “…to enrich the political effectivity of signification”.

The Interdisciplinary Agenda

 

The scope of the work is, therefore, a broad one, but certain common critical frames as developed here will serve to scaffold our progress and hopefully avoid what might otherwise be a smorgasbord of jarring confederate disciplinary perspectives. Operating much in the principle of a conglomerate itself, the account will synergise different but related fields of past research - from American Studies (Keele University), Media Education (Institute of Education, University of London), Film Production (London Film School) and my own series of seminars in cinema studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (2000-2003).

The thrust of this current work attempts to apply Cheney’s (1991) account of organisational rhetoric by considering how film texts - like any other form of media text, whether it be a news report, a newspaper headline or, dare we say it, the Constitution of the United States itself - knowingly operate within a charged field of political and social significances. Further, and as will be repeated, the broad pedagogic agenda is therefore to argue for a more conscious and more effective consideration of the political economy in areas of Cultural and Film Studies - if only to make the critical analysis of such texts even more enjoyable and, dare it be said, relevant for the student-citizen.

The questions raised here will re-emerge more forcefully in our last chapter which will argue for a more active participatory agenda in a shared pedagogic ambition that would position present readers, writers and media creators as rhetorically engaged citizens - as opposed to the information ‘rich’ consumers of access that the U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, amongst corporate others, would clearly wish for.”

2004: Writer’s Inspiration from REM: Bad Day

END

NEXT UP? What not try some media history?:-

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