Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011

From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere

Douglas Kellner

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781441102539
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441185990
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Douglas Kellner elaborates upon his well known theory which explores how media spectacle can be used as a key to interpreting contemporary culture and politics. Grounded in both cultural and communication theory, Kellner argues that politics, war, news and information, media events (like terrorist attacks or royal weddings), and now democratic uprisings, are currently organized around media spectacles, and demonstrates how and why this has occurred.
Rooting the discussions within key events of 2011 - including the war in Libya, the Arab Uprisings, the wedding of William Windsor to Kate Middleton, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the Occupy movements - Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011 makes a highly relevant contribution to the field of media and communication studies. It offers a fresh perspective on the theme of contemporary media spectacle and politics by adopting an approach that is based around critical social and cultural theory. This series gives students a strong critical grounding from which to examine new media.

1

Barack Obama, the Power Elite, and Media Spectacle

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Barack Obama, Feb 5, 2008

The Bush-Cheney administration carried out an agenda serving the interests of big corporations, the military-industrial complex, and the right wing of the Republican Party during its eight years in office.¹ Many major figures in the administration came out of the corporate sector, especially the oil and energy industries, and others came from the conservative wing of the Republican Party that served the military-industrial complex. The process of undoing social liberal and regulatory politics carried out by the Clinton administration began in the first days in office by the new Bush-Cheney administration. While their ambitious right-wing agenda was initially stalled, following the terror attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush-Cheney administration was able to put through a rightist political agenda under the frame of the so-called USA Patriot Act and carried out military excursions into Afghanistan and Iraq that furthered the interests of the military-industrial complex and awarded billions in contracts to corporations to which the conservative regime was tied, including Dick Cheney’s Halliburton corporation.²

Eventually, the Bush-Cheney administration was successful in carrying out policies that directly aided the oil and energy industries, the military-industrial sector, the housing and financial sectors, and other corporations who had supported the Bush-Cheney Gang by passing legislation that deregulated these sectors and by providing copious public contracts to corporations like Halliburton. The media largely went along with the turn toward the right, and, especially following the 9/11 terror attacks, did not directly criticize the Bush-Cheney administration. Thus the Bush-Cheney administration was supported by institutions of the power elite and carried out political agendas in their interests.

Power elite theory played a significant role in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s within certain sectors of the academic establishment, and among some individuals who would come to constitute the New Left. C. Wright Mills, for instance, in The Power Elite argued that Big Business, Big Government, Big Labor and a growing military-industrial complex were coming to dominate American society and politics (Mills 1956). Mills was also one of the first to see that emergent mass media were coming to be a powerful force that served the interests of dominant elites. In White Collar (1951), Mills stressed the crucial role of the mass media in shaping individual behavior and in inducing conformity to middle-class values. He argued that the media are increasingly shaping individual aspirations and behavior and are above all promoting values of “individual success.” He also believed that entertainment media were especially potent instruments of social control because “popular culture is not tagged as ‘propaganda’ but as entertainment; people are often exposed to it when most relaxed of mind and tired of body; and its characters offer easy targets of identification, easy answers to stereotyped personal problems” (Mills 1951, 336).

Mills analyzed the banalization of politics in the media through which “the mass media plug for ruling political symbols and personalities” (1951, 338). Perceiving the parallel between marketing commodities and selling politicians, Mills analyzed tendencies toward the commodification of politics, and in The Power Elite he focused on the manipulative role of media in shaping public opinion and strengthening the power of the dominant elites. In an analysis that anticipated Habermas’ theory in The Structural Transformation in the Public Sphere (1989), Mills discusses the shift from a social order consisting of “communities, of publics,” in which individuals participated in political and social debate and action, to a “mass society” characterized by the “transformation of public into mass” (Mills 1955, 298ff). The impact of the mass media is crucial in this “great transformation” for it shifts “the ratio of givers of opinion to the receivers” in favor of small groups of elites, who control or have access to the mass media (ibid). Moreover, the mass media engage in one-way communication that does not allow feedback, thus obliterating another feature of a democratic public sphere. In addition, the media rarely encourage participation in public action. In these ways, they foster social passivity and the fragmentation of the public sphere into privatized consumers.

The rise of media power in the succeeding decades followed the logic of Mills’ power elite arguments. Successful presidential candidates in the US had the backing of one of the two major Big Government parties, the Democrats and Republicans, and tended to carry out polices that would serve the interests of corporate elites, the military-industrial complex, the two major political parties, and Big Government. In retrospect, the Bush-Cheney era can be explained by the elite theories of C. Wright Mills in that during this era, Big Business, Big Government, and the military-industrial complex were aligned to carry out an agenda in the interests of these elites. The election of Barack Obama seemed to put in question classical power elite theory, although Obama’s challenges in office and the defeats received by Obama and the Democratic Party in the 2010 elections suggest that elite theory still has purchase in explaining American politics and should not be abandoned out of hand in favor of a new pluralist theory and notion of a postmodern politics. I will, however, argue that the phenomenon of media spectacle has become a central factor in contemporary American politics and society, and that this creates new political openings and a terrain of struggle visible during the Obama campaign, the Arab Uprisings, and the Occupy movements.

In this chapter, my argument is that the presidency of the Bush-Cheney administration (2000–8) followed the logic of power elite theory, but that the victory in the 2008 presidential election by Barack Obama points to a new political logic governed by the rise of media spectacle and a pluralization of US politics in an age of new media and social networking in the Time of the Spectacle. I argue that in the contemporary era of media politics, image and media spectacle are playing an increasingly important role in presidential politics and other domains of society. With the growing tabloidization of corporate journalism, lines between news, information and entertainment have blurred, and politics has become a form of entertainment and spectacle. Candidates enlist celebrities in their election campaigns and are increasingly covered in the same way as celebrities, with tabloidized news obsessing about their private lives. In this context, presidential candidates themselves become celebrities and are packaged and sold like the products of the culture industry.

In the following analysis, I will suggest some of the ways that the logic of the spectacle promoted the candidacy of Barack Obama and how he has become a master of the spectacle and global celebrity of the top rank. I will discuss how Obama became a super-celebrity in the presidential primaries and general election of 2008 and utilized media spectacle to help win the presidency. Finally, I will discuss how Obama and his administration came up against the forces of traditional power elites, including relatively new forces of right-wing political power, which weakened his presidency after the 2010 midterm elections (i.e. the Tea Party that may or may not be an ephemeral configuration of the moment). Throughout the chapter, I will provide diagnostic critique of what the Obama spectacle tells us about contemporary US politics and the role of media spectacle. This analysis begins in the next section, in which I discuss the power of media spectacle in contemporary US and increasingly global politics and the emerging role of political figures as celebrities.

Media Spectacle, Celebrity, and Contemporary US Politics

“Going forward as president, the symbols and gestures—what people are seeing coming out of this office—are at least as important as the policies we put forward”

Barack Obama

In the contemporary era, celebrities are mass idols, venerated and celebrated by the media. The media produces celebrities and so, naturally, the most popular figures promoted by the media industries become celebrities. Entertainment industry figures and sports stars have long been at the center of celebrity culture, employing public relations and image specialists to put out positive buzz and stories concerning their clients, but business tycoons and politicians have also become celebrities in recent years. Chris Rojek distinguishes between “ascribed celebrity,” which concerns lineage, such as belonging to the Royal Family in the United Kingdom, or the Bush or Kennedy families in the United States; “achieved celebrity,” which is won by outstanding success in fields like entertainment, sport, or talent in a particular field, compared to “attributed celebrity,” through which fame is achieved through media representations or spectacle, as in scandals or tabloid stories (2001, 17ff), with Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian being obvious examples of this category.

Celebrity is dependent on both constant media proliferation and the implosion between entertainment, news, and information. The proliferation of media outlets has created an ever more intense and diffuse celebrity culture with specialized publications, internet sites, and social networking fanning the flames of celebrity culture and mainstream media further circulating and legitimating it. Celebrities have thus become the most popular figures in their field, and publics seem to have insatiable appetites for inside information and gossip about their idols, fueling a media in search of profit in a competitive market to provide increasing amounts of celebrity news, images and spectacle.

Indeed, celebrity culture is such that there is a class of faux celebrities—think Paris Hilton—who are largely famous for being famous and being in the media, supported by a tabloid media that is becoming more prevalent in the era of the internet, new media, and social networking sites that circulate gossip and celebrity trivia. In this context, it is not surprising that politicians, especially political leaders frequently in the media spotlight, have become celebrities, as publics seek news, information, and gossip about their private and public lives, turning some politicians into media superstars and relegating politicians caught in scandal to tabloid hell and damnation.

In addition, politics in the United States and elsewhere in global culture have become propelled in recent years by media spectacle. I argued in the Introduction that the mainstream corporate media today in the US and elsewhere increasingly process events, news, and information in the form of media spectacle, which in turn increases its importance in political campaigns and even governance. In the next section, I suggest some of the ways that the logic of the spectacle promoted the candidacy of Barack Obama and indicate how he has become a master of the spectacle and global celebrity of the first rank. I will discuss how he became a “super-celebrity” during the presidential primaries and general election of 2008, and how he utilized media spectacle to help win the presidency. Then, in following sections I will discuss how Obama has, in the first years of his presidency, deployed his status as global super-celebrity and utilized media spectacle to advance his agenda, while confronting the limits of spectacle politics and the enduring power of traditional elites.

The Democratic Party Primaries Spectacle

“Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.

Hope is what led me here today—with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.”

Barack Obama, January 3, 2008

Looking at the 2008 Democratic Party primaries, we see exhibited the triumph of the spectacle. In this case, the spectacle of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—the first serious African American candidate versus the first serious woman candidate—generated a compelling spectacle of race and gender as well as a campaign spectacle in the incredibly hard-fought and unpredictable primaries. As a media spectacle, the Democratic Party primary could be seen as a reality TV show. For the media and candidates alike, the Democratic primary was like reality TV series “Survivor” or “The Apprentice” (“You’re fired!”), with losing candidates knocked out week by week. With the two standing candidates Obama and Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Party primaries, it was like “The Amazing Race,” “American Gladiator” and “American Idol” all rolled into one, with genuine suspense building over the outcome.

Barack Obama (left) and Hillary Clinton (right) address supporters in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries.

The primary was also a celebrity spectacle because Hillary Clinton was one of the major celebrities in US culture, as well as a former First Lady and New York Senator, while Barack Obama, a community organizer, Illinois state legislator and then US Senator, was emerging as one of the major celebrity figures in US and even global politics.³ The spectacle of race and gender in a major US party primary was unprecedented, as presidential politics have previously largely been the prerogative of white males. As Jackson Katz (2009) argues, masculinity and presidential packaging of the candidate as the strongest leader, as a protective father and a true man, has been a major determinant of presidential elections in the media age. Having both a woman and an African American as candidates thus broke with the dominant code of the Great White Leader; and, as we shall see, Barack Obama came to challenge dominant conceptions of presidential masculinity as well as race in the campaign.

For Obama, beginning his campaign for the presidency in October 2007, it was a steeply uphill battle, with an American Research Poll putting him 33 points behind Hillary Clinton with only three months to go until the Iowa caucus that kicked off the Democratic Party primary season.⁴ Yet from the first primary in Iowa, where in January, 2008, he won a startling victory, the Obama spectacle emerged as one of hope, of change, of color, and of youth. The spectacle on election night of a young politician of color surrounded by his beautiful wife and two beaming daughters evoked a spectacle of transformation into American politics that would characterize the campaign as a whole.

In addition to his everyday campaign stump speeches that mobilized record crowds, on every primary election night Obama made a spirited speech, even after his unexpected loss to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, proclaiming: “‘Yes We Can’ was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot … and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land.” Obama’s primary campaign was calculated to use every primary to get out a message, even when he lost.

On Super Tuesday, in one of the most watched events of the primary season’s first weeks, Obama gave a compelling victory speech, which became the most circulated speech on the internet that week. With that multi-state primary victory, Obama pulled slightly ahead in delegate count. Obama then won 11 primaries in a row, and made another striking speech after the Wisconsin primary in which he took over the airways for about an hour, offering a vision of the US coming together, mobilizing people for change, carrying out a progressive agenda, getting out of Iraq, and using the money spent there to rebuild the infrastructure, schools, health care system, and so on.⁵ Even when Obama lost primaries, he gave inspiring and impassioned speeches.

There was also an impressive internet spectacle in support of Obama’s presidency. Obama raised an unprecedented amount of money on the internet, generated more than two million friends on Facebook and 866,887 friends on MySpace, and reportedly had a campaign listserv of over 10 million email addresses, enabling his campaign to mobilize youth and others through text-messaging and emails.⁶ Videos compiled on Obama’s official campaign YouTube site were accessed over 11.5 million times (Gulati 2010, p. 195), while the YouTube (UT) music video “Obama Girl,” featuring a young woman singing about why she supports Obama interspersed with images of his speeches, received well over 5 million hits and is one of the most popular in the site’s history.⁷

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Triumph of Media Spectacle
• 1: Barack Obama, the Power Elite, and Media Spectacle
• 2: The North African Arab Uprisings: From Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and Beyond
• 3: War in Libya: Challenges of Liberal-Humanitarian Interventions
• 4: Spectacles of Terror
• 5: Theorizing the Contemporary Moment: From Murdochgate and the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere!
• Notes
• Bibliography