Media Events in a Global Age

Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp, Friedrich Krotz, Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp, Friedrich Krotz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780415477109
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135278540
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

"This volume assembles an estimable range of critical analyses of one of the most important mediated artifacts of the modern world—the media event. The authors challenge the construct, extend its usefulness, expand its theoretical basis and application, and examine media events in a far larger and richer context than ever before. Students of global media today are well served by this superb collection of essays."

David Morgan, Duke University, USA

"A welcome and worthy successor to Dayan and Katz's path-breaking study that expands and enriches the discourse on global media events."

Daya Thussu, University of Westminster, UK

"This is an excellent collection, that will enable new kinds of argument about, and hopefully research into, the spectacular functions of the contemporary media."

Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia

We live in an age where the media is intensely global and profoundly changed by digitalization. Not only do many media events have audiences who access them online, but additionally digital media flows are generating new ways in which media events can emerge. In times of increasingly differentiated media technologies and fragmented media landscapes, the 'eventization' of the media is increasingly important for the marketing and everyday appreciation of popular media texts.

The events covered include Celebrity Big Brother, 9/11, the Iraq war and World Youth Day 2005 to give readers an understanding of the major debates in this increasingly high-profile area of media and cultural research.

1 INTRODUCTION

Media events in globalized media cultures

Andreas Hepp and Nick Couldry

DOI: 10.4324/9780203872604-1

The interest in exceptional forms of media communication may be traced back to the beginning of interdisciplinary media and communication research; for example, Hadley Cantril's (1940) study on the panic caused by Orson Welles' radio play The Invasion from Mars (written with the assistance of Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog). We find early research on outstanding ceremonial events in broadcasting (cf. Lang and Lang 1969 [1952]; Shils and Young 1956; Chaney 1983). Other authors, more cynically, such as Daniel Boorstin (1963), complained about an increasing number of “pseudo events” in media communication. However, in their 1970s and 1980s work, culminating in the path-breaking book of 1992, it was Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz who brought this hitherto somewhat neglected discussion to a new stage, drawing our attention to certain phenomena which they called “media events.”

In this introductory chapter we want to consider this intervention carefully, in its full theoretical context, in order to establish the basis for researching media events today as an important aspect of power processes in a “global age” (Albrow 1996; Beck 2005). In doing so we want to reflect on the academic discussion that started from Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz's book Media Events, and resulted in a rethinking and extension of the original concept. While we find highly important arguments in the original discussion, we need to update our understanding of contemporary media events within an analysis of globalized media cultures. Through these reflections we come — at least that is our endeavor — to a core definition of media events in a global age, that can offer an orientating frame not only for the different chapters in this book but also for future research.

Media events: an intervention

From today's perspective we can understand the book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History and its preceding articles and chapters¹ by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz as an intervention in media and communication studies in at least a double sense: theoretically, it brought together the traditions of social science's mass communication research with semiotics-influenced media and cultural studies, trying to capture a new phenomenon of broadcasting; methodologically, it broke with the notion that a focus on the “average” — the “ordinary” viewer, the “normal” program or the “regular” production — is the only or necessary approach to studying media communication in present cultures and societies. In contrast, and making a highly innovative link to anthropological research, Dayan and Katz argued strongly for the relevance of “single,” “outstanding” ritual ceremonies in media communication: the media event.

Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz's intervention was made through a highly nuanced understanding of the phenomena of media events. In short, they defined media events, metaphorically, as “high holidays of mass communication” (Dayan and Katz 1992: 1),² or more concretely as a “genre” of media communication that may be defined on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels (Dayan and Katz 1992: 9–14). On the syntactic level, media events are “interruptions of routine”; they monopolize media communication across different channels and programs, and are broadcast live, pre-planned and organized outside the media. On the semantic level, media events are staged as “historic” occasions with ceremonial reverence and the message of reconciliation. On the pragmatic level, media events enthrall very large audiences who view them in a festive style. The main point of these criteria is that each as a single attribute may also be found in other forms of media communication; however, when they come together, they constitute the distinctive “genre” of media events.

Drawing on Max Weber's three ideal types of authority (rational-legal, traditional and charismatic: Weber 1972: 124) Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz distinguish three basic “scripts” of media events. First, the “contest” (like the Olympics) developed as a cyclical media event, taking place under agreed rules in an arena, stadium, forum or studio, person by person, marked by the drama of “who will win?” and presented in a non-partisan way to a judging audience, organized around rational-legal authority, and focused on the present. Second, the “conquest” (like the televising of the first steps on the moon) which operates as a single media event, lying beyond any rules at the frontiers and limits of social space, with a hero acting against norms, belief or nature, marked by the drama of “will the hero succeed?” and presented in a bardic way to a witnessing audience, organized around charismatic authority focused on the future. Third, the “coronation” (including in this category the funeral) which is not a fixed but recurrent media event, taking place based on traditions in public spaces, marked by the drama of “will the ritual succeed?” and presented in a reverent way to an audience renewing the contract with the center, confirming traditional authority, focused on the past. The idea is that within this frame of three basic “scripts” all different media events can be analyzed, something Dayan and Katz go on to do focusing on the production and negotiation of media events, their performance in media coverage and their celebration by the audiences.

If we look at this intervention from today's perspective we may characterize it as an approach to ritual media events (Hepp 2004a: 326–32): the main argument for studying media events may be seen in their ritual character, and their role in the integration of societies. In this sense the approach to media events outlined by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz may be understood as an attempt to describe important “mediated rituals” (Rothenbuhler 1998: 79); that is, “ritual celebrations” that “may play the role of periodic social gatherings for the celebration of society as discussed by Durkheim” (Rothenbuhler 1998: 79). Thus Dayan and Katz's approach is marked by a “neo-Durkheimian” (Couldry 2003: 61) perspective in the way media events are researched as occasions “where television makes possible an extraordinary shared experience of watching events at society's ‘centre’ ” (Couldry 2003: 61). Dayan and Katz formulate this, linking to Edward Shils (1975), when they write that the origin of media events “is not in the secular routines of the media but in the ‘sacred centre’ (Shils 1975) that endows them with the authority to preempt our time and attention” (Dayan and Katz 1992: 32). On this reading, media events as a form of ritual become a force of social integration:

during the liminal moments [of media events], totality and simultaneity are unbound, organizers and broadcasters resonate together; competing channels merge into one; viewers present themselves at the same time and in every place. All eyes are fixed on the ceremonial centre, through which each nuclear cell is connected to all the rest. Social integration of the highest order is thus achieved via mass communication.

(Dayan and Katz 1992: 15)

Thus in Dayan and Katz's account, the relevance of media events depends on their character as one of the most important institutions “integrating” the highly dispersed members of national societies — and maybe also beyond. We return later to some potential problems with this formulation.

Approaching media events: rethinking and extending

If we want to appreciate the reception of this ritual approach to media events, we first of all have to consider its origin more carefully. Our reference to the number of articles and chapters by Dayan and Katz published in the 1980s and early 1990s already indicates that the book Media Events was the outcome of a longer research process, beginning shortly after Anwar el-Sadat's journey to Jerusalem in 1977 (cf. Dayan and Katz 1992: 295). In this process, from 1980 to 1984 Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz held a number of seminars at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Annenberg School, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. At these seminars, a number of students participated who are nowadays well known in the field of media and communication research; among others Tamar Liebes, Eric Rothenbuhler, Barbie Zelizer and Gabriel Weimann. These seminars not only influenced Dayan and Katz's approach to media events,³ the work of the young scholars at that time offered a thoroughgoing assessment of the original approach. This may be demonstrated from the work of Eric Rothenbuhler, Barbie Zelizer and Gabriel Weimann.

While taking the general approach of Dayan and Katz, Eric Rothenbuhler (1985; 1988) investigates the audience of the media event of the 1984 Olympics based on a representative telephone survey, asking whether the Olympics qualified as a celebration of a coherent set of values, beliefs and symbols through the formation of a special public around the media event. The idea was to examine how far the media event may be understood as a celebration of the “civil religion” of American society. Perhaps the most striking point of this early empirical work is that while Rothenbuhler does not avoid the frame of standardized mass communication research or the analytical frame of the integrative character of ritual media events, his interpretation of his data already indicates the potentially contradictory character of the supposed “integrative function” of media events. He highlights the inconsistency of media events when arguing (albeit in relation to Parsons) that “both the games and the values they celebrated were diffuse phenomena throughout American society” (Rothenbuhler 1985: 200f.). This intense discussion was continued in the doctoral dissertation of Barbie Zelizer, and developed in her book Covering the Body: Kennedy Assassination, the Media and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Taking the Kennedy assassination, Zelizer (1993) does not merely investigate the Kennedy funeral as a ritual media event (in Dayan and Katz's sense, a form of “coronation”), but the Kennedy assassination and resulting media coverage in its entirety. In this way, she demonstrates how far such media coverage is intended as performances by the media or by other social actors who have an interest in constructing reality in specific and perhaps conflicting ways, in order to establish certain discursive positions and to maintain power. Within such a power analysis, we find an emergent critique of media events as a genre.

An additional assessment may be seen in the early work of Gabriel Weimann (1987; 1990), who was interested in researching media coverage of terrorism within the frame of media events research. Very early on he insisted on an understanding of “mass-mediated terrorism” as a further scenario of media events he called “coercions,” meeting many of the criteria of ritual media events but in a conflict-orientated way where rules are not affirmed but contested (cf. Weimann and Winn 1994: 108). Implicit here was a critique of Dayan and Katz's typification (conquest, contest and coronation) of media events which seems to have no space for such a conflictual process.

We will organize these early moments in the development of the media events approach into three main points of wider importance which structure the discussion that follows: a critique of a certain reading of the ritual perspective on media events, a critique of the core definition of media events as genres, and finally a critique of the narrowness of the three typical scenarios of media events (cf. Hepp and Krotz 2008: 266–7). Let us now discuss each in turn.

1 Ritual perspective: Dayan and Katz defined media events as rituals of mediated communicative integration and their considerations are often marked by a neo-Durkheimian perspective focusing on the question of possible (national) order, although their argument may also be developed in other ways. The problematic assumption which needs to be isolated here is the consideration that “rituals are sig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: media events in globalized media cultures
• PART I Media events rethought
• PART II The history and future of the media event
• PART III Media events in the frame of contemporary social and cultural media theory
• PART IV Media events and everyday identities
• PART V Media events and global politics
• PART VI Media events and cultural contexts
• Index