Bringing it all back home: 11 September and television as a small medium

The broadcasting assumption

Nick Couldry, in his response to my first contribution in openDemocracy, called for a more detailed debate about the politics and ethics of symbolic power in the global media system. The catalyst for that debate was television coverage of 11 September, and Couldry’s argument that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon constituted a kind of public statement made on a global stage – television – to a worldwide audience.

And because that ‘statement’, however murderous and contemptible its form, was made on behalf of the symbolically disadvantaged – those who are systematically neglected or marginalized by global media organisations in their coverage of world events – we need (somehow) to intervene to alter the policies and practices of those organisations, principally by changing their news operations. By taking this kind of action against symbolic inequality we can perhaps avoid the ‘global endgame’ in which spectacular violence, televised live, becomes the most effective method of communication.

It is a compelling argument, but fundamentally flawed. While Couldry’s analysis of the symbolic power of the attacks is acute, his call for intervention is based on two mutually reinforcing assumptions that invite serious questioning.

The first assumption is that television transmission and viewing still operate primarily according to a broadcasting model, characterised by a core of national ‘generalist’ TV channels (such as BBC1 and ITV), a mass viewing public routinely committed to these channels (though they switch between them), and, perhaps most importantly, a professional appreciation – matched by public habituation and expectation – of the centrality of news and documentary programming in television schedules.

The second assumption is that the ‘global flows’ of television programming reproduce this broadcasting model on a worldwide scale, and should therefore be amenable to ‘intervention’.

11 September as exceptional television

These assumptions are undermined, however, by making a simple observation – one that is implicit in Couldry’s own analysis: that TV coverage of 11 September was exceptional, as was the scale of its dissemination and the size and involvement of its viewing public. It was representative neither of global transmission patterns nor of a chimerical worldwide audience. Rather, it was the spectacular swansong of broadcast television in an age of multiple specialist channels, subscription services, supra-national and sub-national transmission, fragmented audiences, and new media.

There’s no question that coverage of the attacks made powerful viewing, and provided a singular demonstration of television’s mythical power to create a global audience. An unanticipated occurrence, viewed in real-time by tens of millions of people worldwide, it disturbed the routines of broadcasters and the fixity of television schedules for days.

Just as impressively, it momentarily disrupted the viewing habits, expectations and sensibilities of audiences and their perceptions of television. However, 11 September belongs to an extremely rare category of live occurrences which Katz and Dayan call ‘media events’ or ‘ceremonial television’.

These are exceptional collective experiences in which the social magnitude of the event being covered (the death and funeral of Diana, the funeral of Rabin), and the social intensity of the viewing experience, magnify one another: the awareness that almost everyone else was watching was part of what made the destruction of the World Trade Center so momentous. And, as Dayan has more recently reiterated, the publics created by media events are transitory and ephemeral, ‘publics for a day’ – an observation which seems increasingly accurate as the experience of 11 September.

Audience tune-out

Obviously, the bulk of television programming is quite simply not like that. On 11 September, watching anything other than the news was for many people unthinkable. Yet most of the time, in multichannel media systems, national television news broadcasts are increasingly avoidable and avoided: one can always escape to cooking programmes or re-runs of Seinfeld on any number of local and international cable or satellite channels.

And it is this feature of ‘unexceptional’ television that largely undermines Couldry’s case. For why intervene to make media organisations report “wars or campaigns of systematic terror by states and others we have not seen” (Couldry’s words), when, to be honest, more and more viewers are watching something else – and those who do watch are, in relatively large proportion, those who already know. This is not to say that such coverage is not a good or a duty in its own right, but to recognize that in current conditions its political impact will be minimal.

There are a number of intertwined factors here. The first is the fragmentation of the audience in contemporary media systems. The second is the related rise of subscription-based TV delivery in competition with free-to-air transmission, sequestering at least part of the audience from the other on the basis of both choice and financial means. The third is the creation, largely but not exclusively within subscription services, of content-specific channels (movies, sport, cartoons, comedy, drama, soaps, music etc.) whose schedules are completely divorced from television’s traditional ‘environment-monitoring’ news function (of course, these exist alongside dedicated news channels).

The fourth, and most slippery factor, concerns the ways in which viewers use and make sense of television within this environment: the increase in interactivity and channel choice; the declining interest in traditional genres of factual reporting and documentary (though by no means with ‘factual’ programming altogether: witness the popularity of docu-soaps and reality TV); changes in the design, size and visual and acoustic performance of television sets; and the penetration of alternative media (the computer and the internet) into the home. And the last point – actually more of a quizzically raised eyebrow – is how any of this might be affected by ‘political intervention’ in global news operations of the sort Couldry recommends.

What is to be done?

The case of Israel is both extreme yet instructive with regard to all of these factors. A notoriously news-obsessed (not to mention self-obsessed) society, Israel’s electronic media landscape has changed radically over the last decade or so.

It has been transformed from a system based on one public-service TV channel and two government-controlled radio stations to an environment that today encompasses three national TV channels (one license-fee funded, two commercial – the youngest of which was launched this January); digital and analogue cable TV (which reaches around seventy per cent of Israeli homes, over a million households) and subscription financed satellite TV offering a wide variety of local, national and satellite channels; advertising-financed national, regional and sectoral radio stations; and growing internet access (twelve per cent of households connected in 1999, with forty-one per cent of households owning PCs (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2000).

The last two years have been particularly significant, with the arrival of competing digital cable and satellite services which offer around a hundred and fifty different channels. The effect on news audiences has been startling: the combined audience share of both prime-time national news broadcasts has dropped from around fifty per cent in 1998 to less than thirty per cent today, and it seems likely that the decline will continue. Now thirty per cent may be an impressive figure for many societies, and it is also possible to argue that Israeli “audience tune-out”, as Todd Gitlin calls it, is less a consequence of a fragmented media environment than of collective battle fatigue.

Nevertheless, the brutal truth is that fewer and fewer Israeli viewers are encountering the voices and faces of the symbolically disadvantaged (unless they are Palestinians), however avidly, in our ideal post-‘intervention’ media system, news editors and documentary producers might chase them.

If 11 September was exceptional TV, and if even successful intervention in global news and documentary operations is an unlikely cure for the symbolic inequality at the heart of Couldry’s endgame, what then is to be done? Possible courses of action can be divided into ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ solutions.

A weak solution could involve, for example, more stringent public regulation over the numbers and types of subscription systems and content-specific channels permitted to transmit. Such a course has the advantage of recognizing that media ownership has become important not so much because it gives a small number of transnational corporations power over content, but because it increasingly enables them to determine the entire structure of delivery, and hence to set the parameters by which audiences might be formed and given access to certain types of programming.

The chief disadvantage of the ‘regulation’ solution is that any regulator has to be sufficiently open and accountable to refute charges of elitism and despotism (however enlightened), which is not an easy task: who could justify regulating to make other people watch the programmes one thinks they ought to see? Nevertheless, regulation by bodies open to public scrutiny, and ostensibly working in the public interest, is certainly preferable to de facto regulation by unaccountable media empires working in their own interests.

The utopian programme

But there is something missing here in this to and fro between public regulation and private delivery, something that the exceptional nature of the coverage of 11 September throws into relief. For what characterizes Couldry’s call for intervention, as well as debates about media ownership and public vs. commercial channels (both issues tackled fairly exhaustively in openDemocracy), is a shared assumption that television is and has to be a ‘big medium’, requiring immense resources, huge centralized organizations, highly skilled professional staff, extensive state regulation, ‘quality’ content – and above all the large and engaged audiences who can justify this vast edifice.

But does it have to be that way? Shouldn’t we take the opportunity offered by rapid structural and technological change to make some ‘strong’, radical proposals about television as a medium of both individual and collective self-expression. And shouldn’t we do so before the fluid situation that is currently developing hardens into a ‘given’ system that appears both technologically pre-ordained and politically unchangeable – rather like broadcasting before it?

We need a more radical programme: actually, a ‘utopian’ programme that starts by looking at what television is becoming and imagining what it could be. Focused around a critique of our current conception of television, such a programme could do worse than begin an area frequently neglected by mainstream media researchers (myself included): the question of television design.

Intervening here is important because technology has significant implications for how we use television – the remote-control, for example, has hugely affected the way we watch (just try channel-surfing without one) – but these tend to seem inevitable and natural. What we are able (and encouraged) to buy in the shops is the result of a consciously directed research, development and design process.

Current trends for larger cinema-style screens and sound systems for certain areas of the home (usually the living-room) privilege ‘cinematic’ viewing (imagine seeing the Twin Towers destroyed on a forty inch screen): viewing as a totally absorbing aesthetic and sensuous experience in which our main shared living space becomes a kind of extension of the TV set. At the same time the promotion of smaller sets for other areas (e.g. bedrooms), plus limited interactivity, suggest an increase in the privatisation of viewing among family members, replacing the collectively negotiated (or argued-over) selection of programmes and channels with the immediate satisfaction of personal wants via personal TV sets.

Hence television manufacturers and designers are making decisions about the functionality, shape and size of televisions that have at least as much impact on viewing behaviour as the number and type of channels and the content they transmit. These are effectively political decisions, and while they appear to open up realms of viewer choice (portability for smaller sets, cinematic viewing for larger ones) they also close off other avenues.

Television as a small medium

Re-opening those avenues is what utopian imagining is all about. For what if we were to embrace the trend towards fragmentation while radically transforming it – pushing it to its limits by insisting that technology be developed to give the maximum productive power to television users (as Hans Magnus Enzensberger long ago argued) as well as the maximum receptive power, to make the creation and transmission of messages as important a part of the television experience as the viewing of others’ programmes.

The convergence of television, telecommunications and new media technologies seems to offer some such potential, the crucial questions being whether and how it is likely to be developed by the corporations currently investing in future media design, including many with vested interests in retaining the strict distinction between those who make television (professionals usually in large organisations) and those who watch it.

Of course, any such transformation in television along these lines would challenge some of our core assumptions of what television is. Speaking about a ‘quality’ programme will, in many cases, make about as much sense as talking about a quality telephone conversation. And similarly, understanding television as constituting some kind of ‘public sphere’ will have to be fundamentally re-thought.

How will such utopian imagining help rectify the symbolic inequality of the global media system which Couldry describes? In the short term, certainly, ‘weak’ interventions around the regulation of channel types are likely to be more fruitful, though even their success is by no means guaranteed – and the audience will continue to tune-out. The problem is that in the process public regulation threatens to become an end in its own right, blocking any conception of a radically transformed technology by which the faceless and voiceless might make television for themselves.