War and Media Network

Critics of the US-led war in Iraq, and broader war on terror, often differentiate between their affection for American friends but opposition to US foreign policy. But mention the opinion polls that suggested a majority of US citizens believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks, and one may be met with bafflement and despair. How news media bring world affairs to the attention of US citizens is, in this light, of critical political importance for those inside and outside US territory. This question has been the subject of numerous academic studies and public polemics. In Tabloid Terror, Debrix attempts to demonstrate how a particular media culture in the US produces a form of news that inhibits public understandings of international relations.

‘Tabloid geopolitics’ is this form, Debrix argues. This book surveys its constituent elements, including the major news networks and photojournalist spreads, through to O’Reilly, Fox News and Michael Moore, and (largely) neoconservative punditry cascading down into popular debates. This may be familiar ground, but does Debrix add anything new? Tabloid geopolitics is a product of a ‘tabloid or trash culture’ in which media stories only have meaning if they refer to other media stories, and these stories become the ‘all-encompassing dimension of a vast majority of people’s lives’, Debrix writes (p.6). A set of parameters emerge about what is salient and newsworthy. Politicians must work within these parameters. A political event counts to the extent it fits existing cultural narratives; we find sense and certainty this way. Debrix’s alternative is to resist any such false sense and certainty, admit trauma and precariousness, and begin some ‘democratic questioning’ of the geopolitical decisions generated by and within this culture (p.160).

Tabloid geopolitics has two principal adverse consequences. It puts a blanket over consideration of events: the daily ‘churnalism’ of celebrity, gossip and political platitudes acts to ‘neutralize’ whatever effects images from war and conflict zones might have on audiences (p.4). The importance of 9/11 was that it stood as a ‘primal scene’, a breaking through of a reality usually unrepresented or unrepresentable in tabloid, mainstream media. Journalists and politicians struggled momentarily to put the event into existing categories or rationalise it. Not for long: the silence was soon filled in by talk of war. Debrix is correct to highlight this dynamic. As Grusin argues, ever since 9/11 mass media have ‘premediated’ any potential threat, filling airtime with speculation so that all imaginable catastrophes are familiar and we can never face a silencing shock1 again . Far from amplifying terror, media contain it, render it manageable2 . One might say they secure terror.

The second adverse consequence follows: these tabloid rationalisations of new events serve to warrant militarised responses and legitimise antagonistic understandings of world affairs. Debrix uses Kristeva’s notion of abjection to explain this process. It is not simply that the tabloid geopolitics of Fox News or CNN represents the war on terror as an ‘us versus them’ scenario. US culture was directed to embrace abjection – despair at acts of terror such as 9/11, yet ‘fascination’ with an unacceptable other (p.72). By responding to aggression with aggression, the US was able to find itself and a new meaning in the world. This may sound over-general, but Debrix’s analyses of neoconservative publications, TV drama and other elements of popular culture skilfully demonstrates how abjection became manifest, at least in certain texts for a period. His analysis is enriched by using Butler’s exploration of Levinas’ ethics on facing the other as well as Kant and others’ notions of ‘the sublime’ as a passage through which images that initially bring confusion and anguish catalyse re-interpretation and, ultimately, a new understanding. Unfortunately, Debrix argues, media producers have used sublime images to ‘trick’ audiences into supporting war (p.137).

Debrix’s analysis focuses on texts and their contexts: news broadcasts, movies, photo journalism spreads, and the political climate in which they were produced. Insights are derived though discourse theory, exploring the intertextuality and self-referentiality of news media to offer an understanding of how this tabloid discourse is sustained. However, this approach limits the sort of claims that can be made about how media work, and Debrix steps beyond these limits. Take the claim that tabloid geopolitics is a discourse which works to suppress dissent or alternative perspectives. Debrix writes, ‘The goal of such media productions is to not allow us to perceive or experience any reality that has not been previously massaged, manufactured, or operated on by the medium itself’ (p.4). It is unclear on what basis agency and intentionality can be attributed to ‘media productions’, nor whether the result is that ‘we’ do or do not perceive a particular reality. Unless Debrix investigates the role producers and consumers of texts, such claims are speculative and faintly sinister. Of the Y2K media-political anxiety, he writes, ‘The point was … to mobilize the public through fear and to do it in the flashiest of fashions’, and ‘the viewer was left with … the uncertainty that something similar to [a] simulated attack would take place’ (p24-25). Do discourses have a ‘point’ or purpose, and how does Debrix know what meaning this protypical viewer was left with?

The root of this methodological problem is a theoretical muddying of discourse and ideology. Tabloid geopolitics is, in Foucault’s terms, a ‘discursive formation’, defined as ‘a principle of technique of organization, calculation, arrangement, or redistribution of discourse or language’ (p13). Certainly Debrix shows how events, actors and historical narratives are organised and arranged, and worthiness or justice distributed, by news reporters and in news packages. The argument follows that such reports organise and assemble ‘the truth of war’. Yet some of the mechanisms this tabloid discursive formation employs are apparently ‘ideological’, for instance use of the sublime by filmmakers who use images to unsettle viewers then direct them to new understandings (p137). Such techniques act as a ‘filter’ of the actual event; they disguise or manipulate an independent truth of the event. The term ideology, and studies of it, had little use for Foucault, since they took for granted an epistemological position he sought to explain3 . For media productions to ‘massage’ or ‘manipulate’ a reality, as Debrix argues (above) presupposes a reality outside discursive formations that viewers are being denied sight of. Mixing notions of ideology and discourse means mixing together two understandings of power and mediation which, for Foucault, were irreconcilable. As a result, the analysis lacks the coherence it might have. This is a shame, because Debrix’s analysis of news and popular culture texts is often dexterous and insightful.

Review by Ben O’Loughlin
Department of Politics and International Relations
Royal Holloway University of London Egham Surrey TW20 0EX
Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk

Notes
Grusin, R. (2004) ‘Remediation’, Criticism, 46 (1): 17-39.
Hoskins, A. and O'Loughlin, B. (2007) Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse, London: Palgrave.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge, Brighton: Harvester Press.

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