http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/417/op2.htm
Al-Ahram Weekly
18 - 24 February 1999
Issue No. 417
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
Public spectacle, public history
By Edward Said
The recent death of Jordan's King
Hussein offered the world media -- and
CNN in particular -- a unique opportunity to
do what it seems to do best so far as its
consumers and sponsors are concerned: give
spectators the sense that they are present at
an important Historical Occasion where
something of Great Significance unfolds before
one's very eyes. CNN has now shot to an
enviable position of almost total global
hegemony. Its format (which I shall describe
in a moment) is now the dominant one, which
dictates to all other broadcasting outlets how
they should do things. The formula is a
superficially simple one. A prominent reporter
sits behind a desk at a news centre like
Atlanta or London; then the cameras are kept
focused on the event, which is usually a
procession, ceremony, or an unfolding series
of happenings (like the bombings of Iraq). Then you cut from the
public event to reporters who are at the scene itself, often with
a local, native accredited expert. And so on for hours and days
if necessary (as in the case of the Clinton trial). Thus
television outlets like CNN come to be considered the voice and
eyes of authenticity and truth: if one wants to get the best
perspective on news of major importance, there is now the
prevailing assumption that CNN will be the first to deliver that
perspective, since what CNN relays is what is the most important
news.
The tautology is important. News is what CNN broadcasts, and
what CNN broadcasts is therefore news. Therefore the subjects on
which CNN spends the most time (for example, the Gulf War,
Princess Diana's funeral, the Clinton impeachment) are
immediately elevated to the position of preeminence. A generation
ago the major global authority was Time magazine, like CNN an
American pioneer in the diffusion of news. In both cases it is
sheer coverage that matters, the sense encouraged in the consumer
that what is served up before his eyes has been put there by an
all-knowing, wisely experienced, and tremendously influential
authority of some sort. Most important is the feeling that what
isn't there to be seen or commented on either does not exist or
does not matter if it does. In short, this is a literal instance
of contemporary history in the making. A trenchant American media
critic, George W S Trow, has described this process succinctly as
follows: "The work of television is to establish false contexts
and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to
establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it."
Let me try to explain what I think he means. Reality is a
confusing, complex dynamic of events, processes, personalities.
Consider as an example King Hussein's death, the final chapter in
one man's life. The king of Jordan was of course a real person,
but he is also the conjuncture of a particular family history
(that of the Hashemites), a series of processes that involved
several great powers including Britain, the US, the Arab states,
and Israel, and events that included (I mention only a few at
random) the West Bank elections of 1956-7, the civil war of l970,
the relationship between Jordan and Iraq, between Jordan and
Israel, the cleavages and problems within Jordanian society,
including army, Prince Hassan, the political class, Palestinian
refugees and a tiny, but prosperous bourgeoisie.
So far as the presentation of Jordan in the media prior to
Hussein's death is concerned, it is safe to say that none of
these facts was given much prominence, although some may have
been mentioned in passing in accounts of the Middle East peace
process. But certainly, to return now to the king's funeral, the
perspective provided by CNN and the others is that this was an
event that had mostly to do with the passing of "a man of peace",
as if a rich, often tragic and contradictory human life, a story
of power, struggle, historical collisions and conjunctures,
achievement and error, could be reduced simply and neatly to that
of someone who served the US peace process as a wise and gifted
partner. In other words, the local context was totally removed.
Very little, if anything, of Jordan's history as a country was
referred to. Occasional "experts" were summoned to aid star
reporter Christiane Amanpour -- who has now become almost a
parody of the star or celebrity journalist who flies in and out
of places to give them some momentary credibility and interest,
then flies out, leaving each place to a perhaps deserved
subsequent obscurity, until the next crisis may warrant her
re-appearance. These local experts were never allowed to say very
much -- they were used just to identify somebody, or to give a
tiny bit of background, none of it distracting the star reporter
or her audience from the story and spectacle at hand. It was
striking that a steady dose of misinformation was routinely
delivered, e.g., that it is an Islamic tradition that women do
not attend funerals, or that the crowd's grief was "authentic"
and was unlike the scenes "of sham or manufactured grief so often
the case in Arab crowds", which was a comment made by a prominent
journalist during the proceedings. According to the coverage,
what seemed most important in the end about Hussein was that he
served others (i.e. the United States and Israel) more than he
thought about himself. This ultimately Zionist perspective on
what constitutes a "good Arab" had the dual function of
maintaining a general attitude of hostility to all other Arabs
and Muslims, and at the same time transforming Hussein --
rescuing him in effect from his own Arab history and thereby
placing him into a new, universal one: that of being approved by
the US.
Without knowing it, the American spectator was given a false
context about Hussein and Jordan, Arabs, Muslims, and others, and
in the process encouraged to regard the history of Jordan and its
king as essentially unravelled, simplified, reduced from and
cleansed of all its density and gravity to the status of a
dignified funeral attended by a lot of world leaders, especially
Americans and Israelis. Such considerable facts and forces as,
for instance, power interests, the structure of Jordanian society
influenced by the Palestinian conflict, the composition of the
state, its army, bureaucracy, failing economy, difficult
political future -- all these were dissolved, and spun away as so
many useless threads whose existence no longer mattered to the
powerful story constructed before our very eyes. As Trow remarks,
a new "no-context" emerged during the transmission: that this man
whose funeral was being shown belonged to legend, idealised
history, acceptable heroism, and approved-of reality (in the
manner of Princess Di), all of them controlled not by his people,
for example, but by the camera, the commentators, and in the end
CNN itself.
The troubling thing is that CNN's broadcast represents all that
one needs to know about the world, reduced, packaged, and
delivered without a trace of conflict or contradiction. Its
thought, its sensation, what it sees are insidiously substituted
for what the spectator might himself see, feel, think about. This
gradual replacement of a private and personal process with a
ready-made, manufactured and processed system is nothing less
than a hijacking of the mind by a sophisticated apparatus whose
purpose is, I believe, deeply ideological. The kernel of this
ideology is that "we" define the world, state its purposes and
meaning, control its unfolding history. In effect then, the
funeral became the occasion for re-asserting control over a
distant country, its people, history and departed monarch. And
this seizure or hijacking permitted a whole series of further
distortions which were later amplified by print journalism.
To give one example: The Nation magazine, a prominent
left-liberal weekly journal of opinion for which I write
regularly both as music critic and as political commentator (it
has a circulation of about 100,000) sought the services of one
Milton Viorst, a free-lance journalist who has made the Middle
East his speciality over the past 10 years or so. It is clear
from what he writes that he is attracted to the Arab and Muslim
world (without knowing their languages, by now a common
qualification for "experts" on the Middle East!) mainly because
he is fascinated as to why Arabs and Muslims are in a state of
prolonged decline and degeneration. In his article for The Nation
he described Hussein as a good and unusual leader in that, unlike
most Arab leaders in history, he tried to get close to his
people. The vast generalisation is astonishing. What does Viorst
know about "Arab history?" Where is his research and writing on
the subject? Second, according to the sage Viorst, Hussein
single-handedly tried to pull Jordan out of the "second-rateness"
of the Arab world, its fate for many centuries. I doubt first of
all whether any liberal and respectable journal would allow so
enormous and hateful a descriptive phrase for any other culture,
but it's considered appropriate for the Arabs. The point, though,
is that, given the context provided for Hussein by CNN, this
vision of him as something outside the ordinary framework of the
other Arabs is now the acceptable one. Interestingly, Viorst
further compliments the late king on his achievement in providing
his people with "clean water", no doubt forgetting the recent
water scandal that plagued Jordan just a few months ago. Never
mind: facts are less important than the new context adopted
unreflectingly by Viorst, whose lack of knowledge, originality,
and insight are irrelevant to the "spin" he has taken over from
television and the State Department.
This is not a trivial matter. CNN is now watched by Arabs as an
authority on the Arabs. With its new position of dominance goes
an uncritical, almost unconscious belief indeed in the spectator
that public events are being recorded faithfully as they happen.
What we urgently require is a conscious resistance to the
framework and its elaboration, a spirit of criticism and
sceptical awareness that challenges the new hegemony. Yet
unfortunately, this awareness is neither taught in schools nor
compensated for by the Arab media, still chained undemocratically
to state and corporate interests whose mode is to forbid
criticism and disallow open debate. One can take heart, however,
that a new generation of intellectuals and young people is not
likely to tolerate this state of affairs for long: there are
signs everywhere that censorship is under considerable attack.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that a critical
response to what can be called the CNN world view will not arise
out of simple rejection of it as "imperialist" or as an unwelcome
symptom of "globalisation". What is required is the emergence of
critical approaches to the media as exemplified in the work of
Trow, Pierre Bourdieu, Chomsky and many others. As their work is
better known (and a sophisticated Arab critique arises), one
hopes that a new interplay will develop between consumers and
suppliers of public spectacle. In the meantime, CNN's distortions
and misrepresentations will continue, like Britannia in the 19th
century, to rule the waves.
