Mediating the Nation

Mirca Madianou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136611056
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What does it mean to watch two-hour long news programmes every evening? Why are some people 'addicted' to the news while others prefer to switch off? Television is an indispensable part of the fabric of modern life and this book investigates a facet of this process: its impact on the ways that we experience the political entity of the nation and our national and transnational identities.

Drawing on anthropological, social and media theory and grounded on a two-year original ethnography of television news viewing in Athens, the book offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective in understanding the media/identity relationship. Starting from a perspective that examines identities as lived and as performed, the book follows the circulation of discourses about the nation and belonging and contrasts the articulation of identities at a local level with the discourses about the nation in the national television channels. The book asks: whether, and in what ways does television influence identity discourses and practices? When do people contest the official discourses about the nation and when do they rely on them? Do the media play a role in relation to inclusion and exclusion from public life, particularly in the case of minorities?

The book presents a compelling account of the contradictory and ambivalent nature of national and transnational identities while developing a nuanced approach to media power. It is argued that although the media do not shape identities in a causal way, they do contribute in creating common communicative spaces which often catalyse feelings of belonging or exclusion. The book claims a place in the emerging sub-field of media anthropology and represents the new generation of audience research that places media consumption in the wider social, economic and political context.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

On 26 April 1999, thousands of people gathered in the central square of Athens for a concert, albeit a rather unusual one. People were holding flags of all sorts: Greek flags were prominent, often tied together with Serbian ones; there were also flags symbolising the Byzantine Empire, as well as flags of the Communist Party. Some people were also holding candles and posters with anti-military and anti-American slogans. On stage paraded over sixty of Greece’s artists, mainly musicians, singers and actors. In the end they all sang together under the direction of Mikis Theodorakis, a famous Greek composer and public figure. The concert, which lasted five hours, was a peace concert against the NATO bombings in Kosovo and Serbia. It was co-organised by one of the private television channels and was broadcast through live links by almost all terrestrial channels.

Images like this were common in Greece throughout the 1990s during protest marches and rallies in defence of ‘national rights’. The reader may be familiar with the large, well-attended rallies that took place during the Macedonia controversy in 1993.¹ Television was omnipresent in these events, sometimes not only broadcasting, but also co-organising them (as happened in the case of the peace concert mentioned above). It was through the observation of such events in Greek public life that the idea for this book was born. What role did the media play in the gathering of one million people in the centres of Athens and Thessaloniki in 1993?

This book investigates the relationship between media and identities in Greece. My interest in this topic stemmed from my observations of the resurgence of nationalism in Greece in the 1990s, and the deregulation and commercialisation of the Greek broadcasting system. These two issues are related as private television channels played a central role in orchestrating and broadcasting public events, as well as adding a sensationalist touch to the reporting of national issues during that period. Moreover, the chaotic broadcasting landscape, which caused deregulation and the proliferation of channels, led to the dominance of television in Greek public life. The Greek media system is characterised by what Papathanassopoulos has described as an excess of supply over demand:

By the mid 1990s there were about 160 local, regional and national daily newspapers, as well as 800 popular and special interest magazine titles, 150 national and local television channels and 1,200 radio stations for a market of 11 million inhabitants. (1999: 381)

Television news featured prominently in the programme mix and created the phenomenon of wall to wall news. It was common for news broadcasts to last two – and in exceptional circumstances up to three – hours and one wonders what impact this might have had on public and everyday life.

My initial research question was whether the media, and television in particular, is a catalyst for belonging to the nation. How do viewers interpret what they see on their screens? What does it mean for their sense of nationhood? Does television provide some kind of ‘social glue’, binding people together, as the relevant literature suggests?

Popular perceptions about the relationship between media and identities often take media power for granted. I was confronted with such views during my fieldwork when, for example, the satellite dishes in the Turkish-speaking neighbourhood of Gazi were considered as the ‘umbilical cord’ that links the minority with the ‘home’ country, Turkey. Such views have gained prominence across Europe, particularly in relation to the use of satellite television by Muslim populations. In academia, theories about the relationship between media and culture have generally oscillated between two assumptions: on the one hand, there are theories that assume that the media play a powerful role in shaping cultures and identities, while on the other, there are those that contend that it is national, ethnic, or local cultures that shape media and their consumption.

In the above paradigms, identity seems to be taken for granted while culture is left under-theorised. Moreover, the problem with a media-centric approach is that foregrounding the role of the media from the start inevitably influences the conclusions of a study. In order to understand the relationship between media and identity it became increasingly clear that I had to start with identity. A historical perspective on identities in Greece revealed their changing and dynamic character through time. The awareness of the constructedness and changing character of identities in the Greek context emerged in stark contrast to the official discourses about the nation, which are found in the media and school textbooks. To ignore these historical trajectories and the diversity within the nation would be to start with a false assumption. Moreover, focusing on an isolated national case and its media emerged as problematic. Greek audiences do not rely solely on national news sources to become informed; they have access to a variety of resources, from global channels and the foreign press to the internet and their personal experiences through travelling, working or studying abroad. A wider – global – media structure needs to be taken into account.

Taking the constructedness and dynamism of identities as a starting point, I became increasingly interested in the different ways in which identities become reified and naturalised. Recognising that such constructions are ongoing, I decided to focus on the ways in which people articulate their identities and how they shift from open to closed discourses. In this context I became particularly interested in whether the media have any role to play in these shifts, from openness to closure and vice versa. Instead of asking whether the media catalyse a sense of belonging, I decided to ask what impact, if any, the media have on the ways people talk about themselves and the nation.

Thus, the initial research question – ‘Is television a catalyst for belonging to the nation?’ – needs to be rephrased to emphasise the interplay between identity and the media. The theoretical framework of mediation that is proposed in the book allows the dynamism and diversity, which the concept of culture contains, to emerge. Mediation involves following the circulation of meanings about culture and the nation in different media and non-media related contexts. This book argues that there is a need for a bottom-up perspective that will examine identities as lived and as performed. The juxtaposition of the bottom-up and the top-down approaches is part of the effort to point to the power of the media. In other words, to reply to the question: whether, and in what ways and contexts do the media influence identity discourses? What role do the media play in relation to inclusion and exclusion from public life?

This book explores how people of different cultural or ethnic backgrounds who live in Athens, namely the Greeks, the Greek Cypriots, the Turks, the Pomaks and the Roma,² articulate their identities, both in the context of media consumption and in relation to the news. Fieldwork took place from October 1998 to May 2001 and involved participant observation and interviews with seventy-two informants. The inclusion of minorities in this study was driven by the recognition that it is problematic to examine an increasingly multicultural society without taking into account its diversity.

The book also examines the news by focusing on the reporting of two events; the first involves the reporting of a relatively frequent incident between Greece and Turkey, which was reported as ‘the violation of Greek airspace by Turkish planes during a joint military exercise of Greece and Cyprus’ in October 1998. Such incidents have been common (even despite the recent rapprochement), and in that respect may be considered routine.

The second case study focuses on the reporting of an international crisis, the NATO offensive in Kosovo³ and Serbia in the spring of 1999. The main reason that led me to consider the ‘Kosovo crisis’– apart from its significant impact at a public level (for example, demonstrations and protests against the bombings became an everyday routine) – was that it introduced a local/global dimension in the analysis, allowing me to explore the ways in which viewers living in Greece articulate their identities, both in relation to the Greek and global media.

DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK

Chapter 2, after reviewing the dominant approaches for the study of the media/ identity relationship, proposes a bottom-up perspective that sees identities as lived and as performed. The perspective from below is then juxtaposed to a top-down approach, in order to establish whether the media influence any shifts in identity articulations, from openness to closure.

Chapter 3 provides a historical account of identities in the Greek context. Instead of a singular and homogenous Greek identity, this chapter highlights the diversity within the nation state and the different layers and experiences of identities that co-exist giving rise to different sets of discourses of identity and belonging. By focusing on some particular instances of recent Greek history, this chapter performs the additional function of introducing the dramatis personae of this book, namely the Greeks, Cypriots and the Turkish speakers who live in Athens, thus providing the context for the study.

Following the emphasis on a bottom-up perspective, Chapter 4 theorises audiences and media power. In particular, Chapter 4 aims to develop a working approach toward a theory of mediation (Couldry, 2000b; Silverstone, in press), drawing on developments in audience research and the emerging field of media anthropology. Media are understood as a process and media power is diffuse, extending beyond the point of contact between texts and audiences. The chapter proposes a holistic, ethnographic approach that takes into account not only consumption and reception, but also issues of access and availability, and personal experiences with journalists. At the same time the chapter also argues for the retaining of the notion of the text in the analysis of media and identity. Representation is still important in relation to identity articulations and in the investigation of processes of inclusion and exclusion, especially when ethnic minorities are concerned.

Chapter 5 maps out the media used by the informants. This chapter, however, is not only descriptive, but provides an empirically informed answer to the question of whether the media have an impact to the informants’ identity discourses. Are identities shaped by technologies? Are technologies shaped by identities? Also, of course, how do all these relate to existing material and power structures? The focus of Chapter 5 is on the media as technologies, not as texts. As there are separate chapters on the news and its reception, this chapter can be seen to complement what follows as it provides the context in which the reception and the interpretation of the news takes place; but it also stands on its own as an exploration of the relationship between identities and the media as objects and technologies. In Chapter 5 I challenge the dominant view that media and identities are linked in a causal way. However, it emerges that the media create a common point of reference for some, which is experienced as exclusive by others. In interpreting these processes I draw on Barth’s theory in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969a) to argue that the media, through a number of practices, often raise symbolic boundaries or reinforce existing ones, thus playing an important role in the ways that people talk about themselves and the nation.

The fluidity of identities (albeit grounded in material conditions and limitations) explored in Chapter 5 is in sharp contrast to the news discourse about the nation discussed in Chapter 6. Drawing on the analysis of 473 news reports during two different periods, one period being during the routine reporting of Greek-Turkish relations and the other during the Kosovo conflict, the chapter discusses how the nation, the common ‘we’, is continually invoked both through the text and the form of the news. The analysis also takes into account the televisation of public rituals in the context of the news. By way of the Kosovo reports, Chapter 6 explores the global dimension of identity articulations. The Kosovo conflict, being an international crisis, inevitably introduces concerns about how Greece positions itself in the world and how it defines itself in relation to its others. The analysis shows how the conflict was nationalised and internalised and points out that the essentialism in the anti-American reports during the Kosovo crisis was also a reaction to the essentialist representation of the Balkans as a volatile and flammable area where ‘anything can happen’.

Chapter 7 focuses on the viewers’ reactions to, and interpretations of, the news reports analysed in Chapter 6. This chapter brings together the theoretical framework on identity discussed in Chapter 2 and the research on audiences (Chapter 4), in order to examine whether the news influences the ways people talk about the nation and their position within it. In particular, what happens to the rather open identity discourses identified in Chapter 5, when they come into contact with the dominant discourse about the nation analysed in Chapter 6. Do critical viewers contest the ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995) and the essentialist projection of the nation in the news? When do people become more essentialist about their own identities and those of others?

Discourses about the nation (through the news media) are not homogenous and uniform, but rather dynamic and relational. This does not mean that people become Greek and then Turkish; it rather implies that in some contexts people contest discourses about the nation and its representation in the media, while in some other contexts, especially when challenged externally, people rely on a more emotional framework that essentialises themselves and their others. This chapter is about competing definitions of the nation and in this context I draw on Herzfeld’s concept of cultural intimacy (1996) to account for my informants’ discursive shifts. Chapter 7, as well as Chapter 5, points to the power of the media to raise the boundaries for inclusion in, and exclusion from, public life. This is particularly relevant in the case of the Turkish speakers who, in other everyday contexts, express a more open discourse about their position in Athenian society.

The book argues that the media/identity relationship is not a causal one. Media consumption is a complex process that involves a number of parameters, material, social and individual. Although the media do not shape identities, they do contribute, through a number of practices, to the creation of symbolic communicative spaces. Such spaces are experienced as exclusive by some informants, suggesting the power of the media to determine the boundaries that affect practices and discourses about ‘home’ and ‘belonging’. The book argues that essentialism produces essentialism. When informants reflected on their identities and place in society there was openness in their discourses. Conversely, when they were confronted with closure they often reverted to an ‘us and them’ binary scheme of thought. Such closure can have far reaching effects, taking identity politics into a vicious circle.

The book points to the pervasiveness of media power that is not only found at one level (the text, or the institutions), but rather at various interconnected levels. This has important theoretical and methodological consequences that media studies need to address. Here, we consider the media as a text and as a technology, people’s direct experiences with the journalists and the media, and news reception. The book is a contribution to the theoretical developments towards a theory of mediation (Couldry 2000b; Silverstone in press) and media anthropology. What an anthropological perspective on the media can offer is insight to the subtlety and unpredictability that is involved in the processes of mediation.

1	In the 1993 Athens rally ‘For Macedonia’, around one million people gathered. For a discussion of the Macedonian Conflict, see Danforth (1995) and Mouzelis (1994).
2	The Turkish, Roma and Pomak populations of Greece are officially recognized as the ‘Muslim minority’. For a number of complex reasons detailed in Chapter 3 they are referred to here as Turkish-speaking.
3	Kosovo and Kosova are the respective Serbian and Albanian names of the province. The choice of name used is politically charged (as well as the choice between Kosovars or Kosovans, the names of the people of the province). In Greece, only the Serbian name was used. In the book I use the name Kosovo on the grounds that this has been the name most commonly used to refer to the conflict in the relevant literature (see, among others, Ignatieff 2000; European Journal of Communication, Special Issue on ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Rethinking Identities in a Mediated World
• 3 Changing Identities: Greece and its Minorities in Context
• 4 Texts, Audiences, Contexts: Toward a Theory of Mediation
• 5 Mediated Everyday Lives: Media Consumption, Belonging and Boundaries
• 6 News and the Projection of a Common ldentity
• 7 Negotiating the Nation: Critical Viewers, Cultural Intimacy and ldentity Experiences
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Bibliography
• Index