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Lecture 5: Television Geopolitics: Communicating Crisis (INTRO: *…
Lecture 5: Television Geopolitics: Communicating Crisis
INTRO: * Television as a medium of communication has been underrepresented in geopolitical discourse and analysis. But with its scope of coverage being so on-demand, we must understand the role of television in our geopolitical lives and imaginations.
Popular representations of the geopolitical world.
Even if things are not true, they can play in corroboration to geopolitical imaginations.
They portray landscapes, bodies, scenarios and imaginaries
Go towards building narratives.
Constitutive of international influence and soft power. Influential towards controversy and diplomatic relations.
Television can be agents of change.
Case Study:
Beurk for BBC News, 1984
- Ethiopian Famine
Consider:
What bodies are shown? Which are not?
Journalist, cameraman, who is of focus?
Describing the famine "biblical", "closest thing to hell on Earth"
Its explicity and first time coverage of such a matter in the "Third World Order" induced affect and garnered international response through the likes of Band Aid.
Sorenson, 1991
However its coverage was problematic.
"Despite an ethic of impartiality professed by journalists, many theoretical and empirical studies have concluded that media news discourse is not ideologically neutral"
:223
This was a matter that was predicted years ago, ignored by the media until it saw opportunities for sensationalist coverage.
Buerk quoted in
Harrison and Palmer, 1986
stated to edit the coverage to indicate blame of a
"marxist, black government"
Not only enforcing anti-communist sentiment, but clear echoes of British imperialism.
"During the intensified Cold War atmosphere of the 1980s, even a cursory reference to 'the Marxist-Leninist government of Ethiopia' structured the interpretation of any media report
: 226-227
"The Derg did use famine as a weapon against its political opponents, but famine also gave western media a means to discredit ideological enemies
: 227
"
Small items of foreign news are not recorded unless they build to a crisis, in which case they function to reinforce the image of the Third World as dangerous and unpredictable"
: 224
Acknowledges that to garner global coverage, such events in the global south must attain an "aesthetic" worthy of entertainment.
Gill (1986)
- One photographer hovering about a dying child, attempt to capture on film the very instant of her death.
Anderson Cooper CNN, 2010
~ Saving a boy during Haiti riot.
I found it interesting because Anderson specifically stated that the riot footage should NOT be taken as a token for the whole of Haiti.
Journalism of Attachment -
i need to do a reading for this
CNN ~ Operation Desert Storm (1991)
Satellite technology pushed forward a new age of media coverage of war with CNN being the world's first 24 hour service.
Covered Gulf War from Baghdad
In an attempt of "greater transparency", live press conferences were set up. The media acted as a "cheerleader" of the war and American exceptionalism to intervene was justified through a a new wave of so called transparency.
Post-9/11 Anxieties
Spooks
MI5 not MI6. Threats on home soil. Cast of law enforcers very white English - enforcing geopolitical imaginations of identity politics.
24
A political thriller racing against the clock to thwart terror plots, links to Blair's administration falsifying claims of Iraq's nuclear weapons hitting UK in 45 minutes. And Bush's State of the Union address in 2002. Makes certain actions more permissible.
Bush's SotUA was a statement of preemptive action not waiting for evidence on the war of terror but highlighting a lack of time to justify action.
"The Bush administration appear not only to have taken the premises of the ticking-bomb scenario seriously but also to have drawn the same permissive conclusions regarding torture as many ethicits
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Hannah, 2006