Cultural Chaos

Journalism and Power in a Globalised World

Brian McNair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134301874
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

With examples drawn from media coverage of the War on Terror, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the London underground bombings, Cultural Chaos explores the changing relationship between journalism and power in an increasingly globalised news culture.

In this new text, Brian McNair examines the processes of cultural, geographic and political dissolution in the post-Cold War era and the rapid evolution of information and communication technologies. He investigates the impact of these trends on domestic and international journalism and on political processes in democratic and authoritarian societies across the world.

Written in a lively and accessible style, Cultural Chaos provides students with an overview of the evolution of the sociology of journalism, a critical review of current thinking within media studies and an argument for a revision and renewal of the paradigms that have dominated the field since the early twentieth century. Separate chapters are devoted to new developments such as the rise of the blogosphere and satellite television news and their impact on journalism more generally.

Cultural Chaos will be essential reading for all those interested in the emerging globalised news culture of the twenty-first century.

1 Cultural chaos and the globalisation of journalism

As a student of the news media in the early 1980s it was necessary, if one wished to make empirically substantiated statements about news content, to take into account a finite number of national newspaper titles – in the UK, ten dailies, and another ten or so Sunday publications – and news bulletins on three television channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV), amounting to perhaps two hours per day of TV news in total. Radio carried hourly bulletins and some current affairs, mainly on the BBC’s Radio Four. Monitoring, archiving and analysing this material, as I had to do on becoming a postgraduate research student with the Glasgow University Media Group in 1982, was an expensive and time-consuming task, though satisfying in the feeling the exercise gave of inclusivity. Even after the arrival of a fourth terrestrial channel in January of that year, systematic content analysis of news output was still the realistic goal of a do-able research methodology.As late as 1991 one could still aspire to ‘know’ one’s object of study – news content – in something approximating to its entirety.

Fast forward another decade, to September 11 2001. On that day, British viewers had access to coverage of events unfolding in New York not only on five terrestrial TV channels,¹ but also on three indigenously produced, dedicated 24-hour news services (BBC News 24, Sky News, ITV News), as well as the output of CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg and others available through subscription. There was also Radio Five Live, set up by the BBC in 1993 and dedicated to news and sport.

By then, too, there was the internet, providing hundreds of millions of people all over the world with round-the-clock access to online coverage from established titles such as the Guardian and the New York Times, as well as thousands of independent information and news-based web sites – not yet the ‘blogosphere’, as it has come to be known, but even in late 2001 a vast and growing network of online journalism. In 2002 the internet was estimated to contain some 533 petabytes of information (one petabyte = 1012 bits), including 7.5 terabytes of downloadable information, or the equivalent of the entire contents of the Library of Congress.Add to that an estimated 440 petabytes of annual emails, and the scale of online media was, even then, truly mind-boggling. It has expanded hugely in size since these estimates were made, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.²

The effect of these technological developments on the communication environment has been to increase exponentially the quantity of news and related forms of journalistic information which are available to the world’s populations, whether they live in an advanced capitalist society, an emerging economic superpower such as India or China, an authoritarian Middle Eastern state, or a developing country in Africa. A graph depicting this expansion over a quarter of a century would begin in 1980, pre-CNN, with total journalistic information available at a low and steady level. This information would comprise national media outputs in print and broadcast form, a few global newspapers and transnational radio outlets such as the BBC’s World Service. Thereafter the line would begin to rise as first CNN, then the BBC’s World Service TV, News Corporation’s Star, Bloomberg, CNBC, Al Jazeera and other transnational TV channels came on stream. By 2001 the quantity of news available had risen to infinity, from the perspective of the individual, since by then it was possible for any cable or satellite TV viewer, almost anywhere in the world, to watch TV news or surf online journalism sites for every hour in the day, and still not access more than a minute fraction of what was out there. The availability of news had reached saturation point.

Not only is there more news and journalism, but it circulates further and at much greater speed than ever before. The speed of news flow has increased, reducing the gap between an event’s happening, its being noted and reported, analysed, discussed and acted upon. This acceleration is a function of the combined technologies of cable, computer and satellite, and of the highly networked nature of the global media environment, in which online journalists and bloggers who post an article or item in one part of the world immediately become part of a globally accessible system, their postings indexed, linked, signposted for others, rapidly becoming part of the common conversation of millions.

This book is about the impact of these trends on people and power, so let me begin here with a personal anecdote. I was on sabbatical study leave in the far north-east of Australia, 12,000 miles from my home in Scotland, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11 2001. It was approximately 10.45 p.m. in that geographically isolated part of the world, and my wife and I were eating pizza with a friend at a local restaurant. When we got home just after 11 o’clock I switched on CNN, as I often did at that time of night while ‘down under’, to enable me to keep up with events on the other side of the world. Like all those who were not in the immediate vicinity of the twin towers I missed the first strike, tuning in to the live TV coverage at a point when the north tower was already burning, but nobody as yet knew why. CNN’s correspondents were speculating about the possible causes of the fire clearly visible on camera, but without firm information.

Along with the hundreds of millions of people by now following CNN and other broadcasters I witnessed the second strike as it happened a few moments later, and stayed with CNN throughout a night of journalistic confusion, panic and disbelief. As the realisation of what had happened grew and the towers fell, from that remote outpost in tropical Queensland I joined a global audience of spectators to an act of mass murder which would shape the course of world events for the foreseeable future, and which happened in real time, before the eyes of everyone on the planet with access to a television.

The sense of connection between my location in Australia, and events occuring 15,000 miles and 14 time zones away, was both exhilarating and unsettling. My feelings of anger, incapacity and impotence in the face of such an act were the same, I imagine, as those experienced by CNN correspondents narrating the drama from their Manhattan offices, although we were half a world apart. That sense of belonging to a new kind of global community was sharpened in the course of the Coalition invasion first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq when, like millions of others across the globe, I watched as live TV images showed Saddam’s troops hunting frantically for a downed US airman in the River Tigris, or when Saddam’s statue was pulled down on the day of ‘victory’ itself.

By coincidence I was again in far north Queensland watching CNN Asia when I received news of the July 7 suicide bomb attacks in London. Again, confusion and chaos reigned for several hours, in the TV studios as on the London streets, until the true nature of the events began to be clarified. The London bombings of July 2005, like the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, were exceptional events that demonstrated in the most graphic way how growth in the quantity of journalistic and fact-based information in circulation, in conjunction with parallel trends in political culture and the media economy which I explore in the chapters below, are transforming the way individuals, institutions and societies relate to and interact with the world around them. The scale of that transformation suggests the need for what I have previously characterised as a new sociology of journalism, equipped to make sense of a different world to that in which the established paradigms of media sociology were formed. I characterise this re-orientation as a movement from a control to a chaos paradigm; a departure from the sociologist’s traditional stress on the media’s functionality for an unjust and unequal social order, towards greater recognition of their capacity for the disruption and interruption, even subversion of established authority structures.

The control paradigm stresses the importance of structure, stasis and hierarchy in the maintenance of an unjust social order. It is premised on economic determinacy, whereby ruling elites are presumed to be able to extend their control of economic resources to control of the cultural apparatuses of media, including the means of propaganda and public relations, leading to planned and predictable outcomes such as pro-elite media bias, dominant ideology, even ‘brainwashing’.These outputs are then implicated in the maintenance of ideological control in the interests of dominant groups, whether these have been defined in terms of class, gender, ethnicity or some other criteria of stratification. The control–outcome– impact process is viewed as linear and mechanistic. It is, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s phrase, a ‘machine model’ (2000) of the media–culture–society relationship.

By contrast, the chaos paradigm acknowledges the desire for control on the part of elites, while suggesting that the performance, or exercise of control, is increasingly interrupted and disrupted by unpredictable eruptions and bifurcations arising from the impact of economic, political, ideological and technological factors on communication processes. These lead to unplanned outcomes in media content – dissent from elite accounts of events rather than dominant ideology or bias; ideological competition rather than hegemony; increased volatility of news agendas;and this routinely, rather than exceptionally. In September 2005 the random natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina unleashed a cascade of critical news coverage upon the administration of George W. Bush, setting in motion a chain of events with unpredictable political outcomes for the United States. This was a result not just of Katrina’s destructive power (a naturally chaotic phenomenon) but of the 24-hour coverage that it generated, both in America and beyond. Body counts of ten and twenty thousand were reported in the first week of the crisis; grisly tales of looting, rape, murder and even cannibalism commandeered headlines. In the end, a few hundred died, and most of the atrocity stories turned out to be false. Before calm returned, however, the Bush administration was put on the defensive as never before since 2000.

The main argument of this book is to suggest that while the desire for control of the news agenda, and for definitional power in the journalistic construction of meaning, are powerful and ever-present, not least in a time of war and perceived global crisis, the capacity of elite groups to wield it effectively is more limited than it has been since the emergence of the first news media in the sixteenth century. To repeat, this is not an approach that seeks to deny the importance of control as a goal of elite groups in the political, military and economic spheres, or of social actors in general. Nor does it assume that the potential for control of cultural processes and information flows is entirely or forever lost.³ We are living, after all, through an era in which religiously rather than class-inspired vanguardists – jihadists on the one hand, neo-conservatives and evangelical Christians on the other – are engaged in ferocious propaganda wars for global public opinion, using the full range of new information and communication technologies in their attempts to control and shape the global news agenda. As we shall see in Part IV, governments of both the democratic and authoritarian type, as well as non-state actors like Al Qaida, constantly develop and refine their media management tools in the effort to assert control and/or restore order to turbulence in the globalised public sphere. The chaos paradigm acknowledges this, while questioning the extent to which communicative control can in contemporary conditions ever be more than an aspiration to which all social actors, whether resource-rich or -poor, must work with ever-decreasing guarantees of success. It views journalistic organisations and the professionals who staff them as more independent and disruptive of power in their communicative activity than their allotted role in critical media sociology (which is to act as agents of elite domination) has allowed. The chaos paradigm does not abolish the desire for control; it focuses on the shrinking media space available for securing it ideologically.

Cultural chaos in the era of dissolutions

The adoption of a chaos paradigm is a necessary response to what is emerging as a period of political, economic, ideological and cultural dissolution and realignment, unfolding globally across a range of axes and dimensions. The most visible aspect of this process, in relation to news and journalism, has been the technology-driven dissolution of the spatial boundaries which throughout human history have separated countries and continents. This has meant the narrowing of that distance from his or her mediated experience of remote events which was formerly imposed on the consumer of news by the passing of time. Our ancestors read or heard about events that had occurred in far-off places only long after the fact, a period of time determined by the level of technological development of the transport and communicative infrastructures which allowed information to be borne back from the point where things happened to the locations where they could be narrativised, packaged and disseminated as news. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries weeks passed between the battle and the news of it entering circulation. As the technologies of news gathering and distribution advanced that period shortened until, with the introduction of live broadcasting by satellite in the 1950s, it had shrunk to the time required for information to be electronically encoded and decoded, beamed to and from satellites in orbit, and for the carrier medium of light waves to cross the earth. For logistical reasons, journalists working in print and broadcast media still experienced delays in getting their news on air or into print of up to three days as recently as the 1970s and the Vietnam War. Only in the 1990s did conflict journalism become part of real-time news, and only in the post-9/11 conflict in Iraq did live reportage from the battlefield, with journalists embedded amongst front-line troops, become part of the routine experience of TV audiences around the world. We are not describing a revolution, then, but a long historical process, characterised by the gradual erosion of what Anthony Giddens has called time–space distanciation (1990), rather than a single event; a process of cultural evolution, but one that has accelerated in the half century or so since the first live global broadcast provided pictures of the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the world.

Giddens identifies a feature of modernity as the separation and regulation of time and space through ‘disembedding mechanisms’ such as money and media.These allow the extension of social relations across geographical space, while maintaining the physical separation of social actors. For Giddens the concept of ‘high modernity’ – what others might call postmodernity⁴ – describes an era in which these separations are eroding through technology, and globalisation accelerates. The world has been ‘shrinking’, in this sense, for ever, or at least since the first communication media were invented. Drums and smoke signals, letters and morse code, newspapers, telegraph, radio and TV – each in turn brought human beings closer together, although decades and centuries separated the main technological leaps. What has changed with electronic media, and the invention of communication satellites and computers in particular, is the speed of this dissolution, and the abruptness with which we have been confronted with its results.⁵ In 1990 Michael Gurevitch observed that the evolution of satellite communications technology had ushered in ‘a qualitatively new stage in the globalisation of news’ (1990: 179). Only four years later the launch of the world wide web produced another huge leap, of even greater cultural impact.

As with other aspects of technological progress, the rate of change has been exponential, facilitated in recent decades by the end of broadcast spectrum scarcity and the proliferation of dedicated news channels with transnational reach. Since the rise of CNN in the 1980s, the medium of rolling satellite TV news has made it possible to experience in real time, or ‘live’, events that are far away, so that news in this form has become something that is happening, rather than something that has happened. Images on a television screen are always a simulation of reality, of course, since what we see and hear through even the most advanced TV monitor can only ever be approximations of actual sights and sounds. But the immediacy and proximity of the illusion are real enough as we become spectators of, perhaps even feel ourselves to be participants in, events which in an earlier era would have been available only as verbal or written accounts days, weeks or months after their occurrence.

News is still what news always was: a socially constructed account of reality, rather than reality itself, composed of literary, verbal and pictorial elements which combine to form a journalistic narrative disseminated through print, broadcast or online media. No matter how ‘live’ the news is, and regardless of how raw and visceral the account of events being brought into our living rooms appears to be, it is still a mediated version of reality, what Niklas Luhmann (2000: 1) describes as ‘a transcendental illusion’. But it is an illusion which, when we receive it, and when we extend to it our trust in its authority as a representation of the real, transports us from the relative isolation of our domestic environments, the parochialism of our streets and small towns, the crowded bustle of our big cities, to membership of virtual global communities, united in their access to these events, communally experienced at this moment, through global communication networks.

Since Anthony Giddens coined the term, the erosion of time–space distanciation has continued to the point where it would appear to have reached a limit defined by the speed of light itself.⁶ CNN broke journalistic ground with its live coverage of the first Gulf War in 1991. Just ten years later we watched in awe as the twin towers collapsed before our eyes, and then followed Coalition military forces live into Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of my British readers will recall the unsettling experience of watching Sky News in April 2003, as a correspondent and camera crew followed British troops into a building where Iraqi soldiers were believed to be hiding. In the 4 a.m. darkness, illuminated only by ghostly-green night vision lights, we watched as the skirmish unfolded. At one point, a British soldier emerged from the building, his clothes in flames, and the camera rolled on while his comrades beat out the flames with their hands. At ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: a note on chaos
• 1: Cultural chaos and the globalisation of journalism
• Part i: Critiquing critical theory
• Part ii: The political economy of chaos
• Part iii: The Infrastructure of Chaos
• Part iv: The consequences of cultural chaos
• Notes
• Bibliography