Preface, 2000-2004

This outcome of research into U.S. mainstream film and factual television news was initially conceived in the aftermath of the air attacks on United States’ corporate and military establishments on 11^th September 2001. More precisely, it found its early focus and motivation as these and subsequent events were represented by Fox News broadcasts and which were beamed via the Astra satellite system to Germany, where I then led seminar programmes in U.S and U.K. Cinema Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Seminar für Filmwissenschaft.

In keeping with all observers I was of course awed by the daylight attacks - their complex audacity, their fundamental simplicity, their horrific outcomes. Throughout the research, I was ever-mindful of Roger Rosenblatt’s TIME article of 24^th September 2001 in which he declared the end of the age of irony - that postmodern slippage in time during the 1980s and 1990s when “…it was difficult for anyone to see anything”. In dramatic and vivid contrast to the charmed postmodern flipness that had now quickly passed,

“The planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were real. The flames, smoke, sirens - real. The chalky landscape, the silence of the streets - all real… The fact before our eyes is that a group of savage zealots took the sweet and various lives of those ordinarily traveling from place to place, ordinarily starting a day of work - or - extraordinarily - coming to help and rescue others. Freedom? That real enough for you? Everything we cling to in our free and sauntering country was imperiled by the terrorists. Destruction was real; no hedging about that.” (Rosenblatt, TIME. 24.09.2001: 81)

No one can doubt the urgent reasons for Rosenblatt’s impassioned certainties. As the days and weeks proceeded, however, I became equally in awe of how these events and their repercussions were reported and shaped by the American media, and particularly the Fox News channel.

Given the dramatic context, one would expect a certain level of partisan coverage of the kind noted in Rossenblatt’s article, where the broadcasters would give voice, for example, to the range of popular, pained, horrified and questioning responses that followed in the grim aftermath. However, Fox News committed itself to a wholly righteous platform that unquestioningly supported - and gave singular voice to the Bush administrations’ charge towards war that soon followed.

There was the feint expectation that such skewed coverage was exceptional, that more balanced and fair accounts were available from rival broadcasters and that, against these, the Fox network was merely airing its usual tabloid characteristics to gain greater ratings share and related profits (which, incidentally, it did). However, from what Douglas Kellner (2003) reports, the U.S. corporate media in general,

“…allowed dangerous and arguably deranged zealots to vent and circulate the most aggressive, fanatic, and downright lunatic views, creating a consensus around the need for immediate military action and all-out war. The television networks themselves featured logos such as “War on America”, “America’s New War”, and other inflammatory slogans that assumed that America was at war and that only a military response was appropriate. I saw few cooler heads on any of the major television networks that repeatedly beat the war drums day after day…driving the country into hysteria and making it certain that there would be a military response and war.” (Kellner, 2003, p. 66)

Indeed, what differences Kellner (2003) does register are of degree and not of kind, and are not unrelated, as we shall explore in greater detail, to aspects of wider corporate interests since,

“…the network anchors as well framed the event as a military attack, with Peter Jennings of ABC stating, “the response is going to have to be massive if it is to be effective”…NBC, which is owned by General Electric, the largest U.S. military corporation, as usual promoted military action and its talk shows were populated by commentators who invariably urged immediate military retribution.” (Kellner, 2003, p. 55)

In keeping with many other witnesses of the passing events that seemed to lead by osmosis towards the invasion of Afghanistan and then war with Iraq, I felt that it was somehow important to both deepen and widen my own understanding of what I was seeing and hearing - both the event contents and their representation - and critically uncover in what ways the two were and are connected.

As touched upon here by Kellner (2003), for instance, it should be of some interest to European readers particularly, that the news broadcasters in question are a comparatively small part of much wider corporate industry portfolios that extend across virtually all areas of the U.S. economy. From this it should be questioned how instrumental they are in shaping the available public discourse over which they have so much power and control - but very little actual social responsibility, despite rhetorical claims to the contrary.

The analysis which follows is intended, therefore, as a timely opportunity to reflect upon the extent of those commercial corporate interests that oversee the U.S./global media industries - which crucially include ‘Hollywood’ as a minor but useful shop-window subsidiary - and critically evaluate the degree to which these communication systems are brought to serve corporate interests that go beyond the delivery of just news and entertainment for the general public.

2005 Coincidences

The publication of the book also coincided with the release of George Clooney’s “Good Night and Good Luck” (2005), which continues to provide an essentail insight into the operations of US broadcast media/CBS in the late 1950s:-

Methodologies

To further this objective, the study draws upon a wide range of recent and noteworthy publications from the 1980s and 1990s in Cinema Studies, Political Science, American Studies and Media Education that as a whole question the role of corporate ownership on U.S. media and how this has impacted upon media regulation histories, the development of what has become known as market journalism, and, indeed, recent U.S. foreign policy drives since the 1980s of which the invasion of Iraq was a latest chapter.

Considering its central focus on U.S. film, the study also brings to bear a range of film theories and histories in the genre analysis on a number of corporate film texts that, interestingly, made their own rhetorical claims on these same issues and debates during this time.

The book, therefore, is grounded on suppositions that question the passive responsive pose of news broadcasters in terms of the news that is transmitted - but which of course is selected, shaped and determined.

At its core, we shall ask how the corporate hold over the U.S. public airwaves contributes - directly and/or indirectly - to the development of those real events which news cameras and microphones then ‘follow’ and which, at their most dramatic end, are passively recorded, rendered ‘objectively’, true and sometimes, as with 11^th September 2001, are transmitted so horrifically live.

As part of its pedagogic remit, the investigation also takes account of how best to justify the integration of key determining aspects of the political economy into the humanities curricular.

Towards a “wakeful political literacy”

In this respect, the completion of the study in late 2004 oddly coincided with the publication of an incisive article by Literature Professor Rhonda Garelick of Connecticut College. In a timely commentary entitled “Careerism has stamped out the fires of feminism”, the Professor widened her critique of the compromised Liberal arts agenda to address more directly and more worryingly a perceived sense of weakened student activism generally. Quoted here at length, for example, Professor Garelick (2004) warily observed how,

“Even this past year, as our country began a war, I encountered mostly silence when I broached the subject of Iraq, a mix of paralysis and anxiety, plus some disgruntlement over my deviating from the syllabus. But each year, frankly, I feel increasingly compelled to look beyond my syllabus and to devote myself more to teaching “wakeful” political literacy: the skills needed to interrogate all cultural messages. Students need to be able to mine the implications, for example, of the “Family Time Flexibility Act” which, while claiming to help women balance home and family, might actually decrease overtime pay. They need to look critically at a presidential address that divides the world into opposing halves labeled “with us” and “with the terrorists”. Ultimately though, if students resist such reading and suffer from amnesia in politics - sexual or otherwise - it’s because they drink from the same pool of Lethe we all do.” (Garelick, The International Herald Tribune. 29.01.2004: 7)

It is in the spirit of the Professor Garelick’s call for a “wakeful” political literacy that this analysis has itself been framed and shaped - if only to allow a more accurate, integrated and critical understanding of the Lethe that pervades U.S. commercial media histories, news narratives and related global entertainments.

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