AC640 Political Communication

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AC640--Political Communication

• Media, Terrorism, and the Other
• A Reflection

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outline

• Media and terrorism (Carruthers)
• Orientalism and the Other (Said)
• Questions for week 3, Public Sphere

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1. Media and terrorism

• definition of terrorism
• Terrorism is the illegitimate recourse to
  particularly reprehensible forms of violence,
  directed to ends which may have as much to do
  with gaining publicity as rectifying political
  grievances.
• Carruthers, p. 163
• The major sources for this brief presentation in
  support of the week 3 material are
• Susan Carruthers, chapter 4, Media and
  Terrorism. The Media at War Communication and
  Conflict in the Twentieth Century
• Edward Said, Orientalism

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war and terrorism how they differ
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What is the symbiosis of terrorists and media?

• scholars have defined terrorism as a form of
  violent political behaviour that has a special
  relationship with media
• we can respect this given the interest by
  terrorists to communicate ideas to the public via
  communiques and manifestos, to attack symbols of
  the state, and to otherwise draw public and state
  attention to a particular cause, e.g. winning
  independence for Northern Ireland
• the conventional terms in which this relationship
  between terrorism and media are defined is in
  terms of symbiosis, i.e. a relationship of
  mutual benefit and dependence
• that is, it is alleged that the media unwittingly
  lend support to terrorists insofar as media
  allows terrorists access to the public through
  interviews, the publication of their manifestos,
  news coverage, etc.
• terrorists, in turn, play to the media by making
  spectacular violence, e.g. suicide bombers in
  Israel, for the purposes of propaganda and access
  to a wide public for the terrorists views
• this access to the public is sought for a variety
  of reasons, including the desire to win support
  for a cause, to attack the state, to raise the
  costs to an occupying force or hostile state,
  e.g., African National Congress and white
  supremacist apartheid state

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What are the consequences of this symbiosis?

• the assumption behind the symbiotic view of
  media and terrorism is that media is oxygen for
  terrorists, and once the spotlight is removed,
  terrorism loses its reason to be
• media have thus been accused often of furthering
  terrorism by covering the acts of terrorists and
  publishing their views
• the growth of global terrorism and the growth of
  a global media system after World War II are seen
  as related phenomena
• terrorists work with a sophisticated sense of how
  the media operate, and produce spectacular events
  that conform readily to news reporterss sense of
  newsworthiness, i.e., the violence compels the
  audiences attention, it makes news, it is a
  spectacular break from routine, it is inherently
  controversial, makes for a powerful story of
  terrorist and victim, has colour and excitement,
  etc.
• the typical response of governments is to seize
  control of this symbiosis away from the
  terrorists, or else the contagion of terrorism
  is at risk of spreading further due to the
  medias coverage
• governments have thus sought either to encourage
  media to adopt policies of voluntary
  self-restraint, where media sets its own
  guidelines with respect to limiting terrorist
  access to the media (U.S.), or where the
  government intervenes directly in what the media
  can and cannot do (UK and Europe)

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2. defining Orientalism

• Orientalism is a style of thought based upon
  ontological and epistemological distinction made
  between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the
  Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers,
  among who are poet, novelists, philosophers,
  political theorists, economists, and imperial
  administrators, have accepted the basic
  distinction between East and West as the starting
  point for elaborate accounts concerning the
  Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and
  so on. . . . the phenomenon of Orientalism as I
  study it here deals principally, not with a
  correspondence between Orientalism and Orient,
  but with the internal consistency of Orientalism
  and its ideas about the Orient . . despite or
  beyond any corrsespondence, or lack thereof, with
  a "real" Orient.
• Edward Said, Orientalism
• Orientalism is the corporate institution
  for dealing with the Orient dealing with it by
  making statements about it, authorizing views of
  it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it,
  ruling over it in short, ruling over it in
  short, Orientalism as a Western style for
  dominating, restructuring, and having authority
  over the Orient.
• Karim Karim, p.g 52 in his book

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Who is Edward Said? (1935-2003)

• Edward Said was a Palestinian intellectual who
  was primarily educated in the United States, and
  teaches at Columbia University in New York
• Said is also one of those rare intellectuals
  whose work is read and discussed outside the
  academic culture
• published in 1978, his book Orientalism has been
  the source of 20 years of debate, and important
  to the development of postcolonial criticism and
  other related forms of cultural criticism
• the concept of Orientalism (as discussed in the
  AC640 unit notes) is his
• the term the Other is a way of referring to
  peoples that are used as a foil, counterpoint, or
  a cultural phenomenon against which you or we
  are defined

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What is postcolonialism?

• Said was one of the founders of postcolonial
  theory heres a definition
• Post-colonial studies is a literary movement,
  emerging mostly from within English departments
  in the United States and elsewhere, that attempts
  to describe and understand the experience of
  colonized peoples -- before and after
  colonization -- by an examination of texts
  books, images, movies, advertising, and so on.
  (From Kiss of the Panopticon site)
• in a literal sense, "post-colonial" is that which
  follows or comes after colonization
• a standard dictionary definition gives us the
  following definition of post-colonialism "of,
  relating to, or being the time following the
  establishment of independence in a colony"
• although there is considerable debate over the
  precise parameters of the field and the
  definition of the term "post-colonial," in a very
  general sense, it is the study of the
  interactions between European nations and the
  Latin American, African, and Asian societies they
  colonized in the colonial period

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Orientalism and culture

• as indicated in the AC640 unit notes, Saids work
  is an application of Foucalts power/knowdge and
  discourse concepts to an actual historical
  phenomenon how the West has represented and
  constructed the East in various kinds of high
  culture, religious, government, and popular
  culture texts
• the distinction between West and East is one of
  the oldest dualisms around which historical and
  cultural identities have been structured, e.g.,
  the medieval Crusades against the infidels" of
  Islam
• the tropes by which the East has been defined and
  by which the West has been defined against the
  East are familiar to us
• think here of "Indiana Jones", of "1001 Arabian
  Nights", of Disney's "Aladdin", of the Iraq War
  coverage, and of coverage of Islamic
  fundamentalism, for evidence of Orientalism in
  media and popular culture

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Orientalisms features

• the West is depicted as rational, driven by the
  work ethic, efficient, modern, and capable of
  practising self-control
• the East is represented as the opposite of the
  West
• savage, sensual, lazy, oil rich, fundamentalist,
  anti-modern
• a golden world and earthly paradise
• the simple innocent life of the people people
  living in a pure state of nature
• the lack of developed social organization and
  civil society
• the frank and open sexuality of the people,
  especially the women (harems)
• Orientalism typically refers to the Middle East,
  but similar features are also seen in Western
  depiction of First Peoples, and other cultures
  around the world

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How are Orientalist representations created in
the media and culture?-(i)

• (i) idealization
• the reality of non-Western peoples is airbrushed,
  and they are represented via European aesthetic
  conventions as having European features, a life
  of abundance and ease, all following on European
  fantasies of Eden
• we see this in the Noble Savage theme, e.g.
  Tarzan, Geronimo, or in the images of ethnic
  sidekicks to Western heroes, e.g., Tonto (native
  American sidekick to Lone Ranger), Kato (Asian
  sidekick to Green Hornet)
• (ii) the projection of Western fantasies of
  desire and degradation
• sexuality regularly features in Western
  representations of the non-West
• often, non-West represented as a woman or female
  figure that can then justifiably be dominated by
  the male West
• the non-West becomes a safe place whereby
  Western anxieties and repressed fantasies with
  respect to sexuality can be explored, e.g., child
  prostitution in Thailand and other Asian
  countries, Western ideas of the Arab harem

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How are Orientalist representations created in
the media and culture?-(ii)

• (iii) the failure to recognize and respect
  difference
• early explorers refused to see the vast amount
  of difference between various cultures in the
  areas that they explored, e.g., compare the
  highly urban, technologically developed Inca in
  Peru and the simpler lives of the Huron people in
  Canada
• North American peoples became "Indians" today
  Arab peoples defined in reductive "Islamic
  fundamentalist" terms
• (iv) the tendency to impose European categories
  and norms on the non-West, and see Them on Our
  terms
• all these strategies were underpinned by the
  process of "stereotyping", whereby the
  multi-dimensional and complex nature of human
  society (or any phenomenon for that matter) is
  collapsed into a simple one-dimensional picture
  of exaggerated simplicity
• stereotypes are often dualistic in nature,
  insofar as we split our representations into a
  "good" and a "bad" image, e.g., the "Noble
  Savage" versus the crazed, bloodthirsty savage
  (or "Dances with Wolves" versus every cowboy and
  Indian movie ever made)

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How are Orientalist representations created in
the media and culture?-(iii)

• (v) removing people from history
• by treating a living people as if they live in
  the ancient past, we remove them from history and
  from any sense of connection to them
• in effect, by removing them from history and
  treating them as living fossils, we dehumanize
  them
• in anthropology, this problem of dehistoricizing
  people is often referred to as the problem of the
  ethnographic present, the tendency to regard
  non-Western peoples as if they lived in some
  ethnographic never-never land before contact with
  Europeans and in their original, primitive
  purity
• (vi) absence
• Orientalist and other similar representations of
  non-Western peoples tended to depict their lands
  as empty of people and thereby inviting
  colonization

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3. Questions for week 3 (i)

• Some have argued that the Wests response to
  terrorism, notably the 9/11 attack on the World
  Trade Center, has led to a culture of fear.
  What is a culture of fear, and what are its
  consequences for Western democracies and their
  publics?
• Wikipedia reference for culture of fear
• Is there an aspect of Orientalism in the way in
  which Arab and Islamic terrorism is represented
  in Western media? If so, what are the
  consequences of this Orientalism for our response
  to the war on terror?

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3. Questions for week 3 (ii)

• (3) In a recent article on soft power in the
  major international political journal, Foreign
  Affairs, Nye argues that the U.S. needs soft
  power in order to fight the war on terror
  effectively. That is, the cooperation of other
  countries with U.S. objectives depends on a
  positive international view of the U.S. But
  worldwide antipathy toward the U.S. -- that is,
  anti-Americanism -- leads to a decline in U.S.
  soft power. Nye writes
• Anti-Americanism has increased in recent
  years, and the United States' soft power -- its
  ability to attract others by the legitimacy of
  U.S. policies and the values that underlie them
  -- is in decline as a result. According to Gallup
  International polls, pluralities in 29 countries
  say that Washington's policies have had a
  negative effect on their view of the United
  States. A Eurobarometer poll found that a
  majority of Europeans believes that Washington
  has hindered efforts to fight global poverty,
  protect the environment, and maintain peace. Such
  attitudes undercut soft power, reducing the
  ability of the United States to achieve its goals
  without resorting to coercion or payment.
• Terrorism is clearly a global problem,
  notwithstanding criticism of merits of the U.S.
  presence in Iraq. What contributions does soft
  power have to making the world a safer place?