| Review of: | Carnage and the Media: The Making and Breaking of News about Violence by Jean Seaton |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Maurice Walsh |
| Reviewed in: | The Political Quarterly |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 78, Issue 1, Pages 182-196 |
Book Reviews: Violent news
In her father's butcher's shop in London in the 1950s, Jean Seaton learned to skin rabbits and gut chickens, and developed a daily intimacy with blood and carcasses. The sight, feel and smell of the butcher's yard, with its stacks of blood-streaked bones and its hissing vats of boiling fat, are fondly and sensuously evoked in the opening chapter of a book that goes on to survey the media's portrayal of violence and war. She contrasts her memory of the pride she felt in being able to expertly carve a rabbit's pelt from its flesh at the age of six with her adult ambivalence about butcher's shops: now she combines a tutored appreciation for properly cut meat with a sense of unease at the sight of corpses. This biographical opening, a richly written memoir in itself, is by no means a mere diversion from the main argument of the rest of the book. Instead, it provides a motif for her approach to the media and violence; the nuanced and complicated story of her personal relationship with meat and her historically informed understanding of its changing value as a commodity is replicated in her treatment of the production and reception of violent news. A central theme of this book is the malleability of taste both for meat and for portrayals of political violence. People like to be disturbed, Seaton writes, by news that 'they instinctively recoil from'. And she notes the similarity between the desire to conceal the slaughter that puts meat on the table and the elision of the process 'that leads to suitably entertaining, informing and pleasantly horrifying images in the news'.
In the same way that she mixes memoir and analysis, Seaton ranges broadly through philosophy, history and political theory to identify the residue of enduring ideas in contemporary media forms. Chapters on the butcher's trade and its similarity to journalism are followed by a comparison of the relationship between modern news rituals and the Roman Games, and the evolution of the depiction of suffering in Christian medieval art: 'When we do something as casual as watching a news tragedy unfolding on television, we are part of a long historical tradition of contemplating pain-for self improvement.' This breadth of reference and allusiveness is mostly hugely enlightening and suggestive, although occasionally some lines of thought are abandoned or unsustained. There are many layers of reflection and observation folded into its main theses. In essence, it amounts to a compelling argument against a strain of media criticism that focuses solely on the media as agents of controlling and manipulative propaganda.
The news, Jean Seaton argues, is not just fashioned by the media, but also by what we as its consumers feel 'and what we feel it is appropriate to feel'. Thus, those who make the news must engage with the audience's sense of understanding and sympathies. The reluctance to portray the consequences of real slaughter on television is not always a strategy of concealment, but is prompted by a widely shared sense of propriety-what she calls a 'civilizing reverence' towards the victims of slaughter and how they should be portrayed. The authority of media images is negotiated and not guaranteed.
This leads to her critique of the prevailing notion that the media are a powerful source of remedy for moral and political failings or, in another reading of the same notion, that, particularly when it comes to the depiction of war, the media are enlisted in a wider conspiracy to prevent the emergence of a transforming truth. But the idea that 'if only the public could inspect the unedited horror of events this would alter its response to the needs of others' is not proven.
The best example for this is the war in Chechnya between 1994 and 1996. Journalists were allowed freedom of movement and their reports were not censored. With American coverage of Vietnam as a model, Russian reporters flocked to the front and showed the effect of the war on civilians, the blundering of the army and the Kremlin's lies using graphic images of destruction and violence. Invigorated by the oxygen of huge public interest and the sense of euphoria generated by the liberation from censorship, the Russian media forged a new authority. Public opinion turned against President Yeltsin's punitive and self-serving war. But when elections brought the opportunity to punish Yeltsin, all the affecting coverage of the brutality and futility of the Chechen war was set aside and he was re-elected. The lesson, Seaton notes, is that 'the media always depend on a wider political climate (as well as helping to shape it.) They could not make a new Russia alone-even though they were a vital component of such a possibility.'
Journalistic myth is loath to acknowledge this, even though the health of journalism is inseparably linked to the condition of the wider political culture. In the same sense as some critics see the media as all powerful purveyors of official reality, journalists are often solipsistic defenders of the prevailing fashion, uninterested in why conventions of form and style change under the influence of economics or politics. Thus, Seaton identifies the contemporary elevation of emotion and sentiment as in broadcast news as largely just another convention adopted from a culture in which 'sentiment is now seen as less calculating than reason, and more reliable'. Richard Dimbleby's broadcast from the liberation of Belsen in 1945 was re-recorded because the broadcaster had made his feelings too clear. Now, a display of emotion is essential to a certain kind of reportorial performance. Which is more trustworthy-to suppress genuinely held feelings to achieve an austerity of delivery or to project emotion to create an image of compassion? Coolly, Seaton argues that much coverage of faraway suffering amounts to moralising, prescribing empty rituals of feeling rather than delivering real knowledge. Again, she returns to politics, arguing that 'media-aroused sentimentality is no substitute for the sensitive responses of a politically educated public'.
But whatever the flaws of particular news coverage, Seaton finally concludes that news is indispensable: without this form of trust-worthy public knowledge, societies would be governed by suspicion, apprehension and rumour. She even goes further in describing news as 'the most significant contemporary realist form', not in the sense of its professed devotion to accuracy but because '[realism] in journalism, as in art, means seeking to persuade the audience to believe in the realty of the images presented and the story told, and that these convincing devices are based on scrupulous observation and human judgement'. As with many other arguments in this richly discursive book, this opens up a new way of approaching the history and practice of journalism.