International Relations

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Temporality, Proximity and Security: Terror in a Media-Drenched Age Andrew Hoskins International Relations 2006; 20; 453 DOI: 10.1177/0047117806069407

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TEMPORALITY, PROXIMITY AND SECURITY

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Temporality, Proximity and Security: Terror in a Media-Drenched Age1 Andrew Hoskins, University of Warwick, UK

Abstract With newsmakers striving for ever greater visual immediacy and proximity to events, developments in the portability and the availability of audio-visual recording and broadcast devices continue to transform both how we experience mass-mediated terrorist attacks and their impact. At the same time, through shifting context, the reframing of meaning and massive selectivity, television and the broader media plunder the past for signs of stability, as though to mitigate the inherent instability of an obsession with the here-and-now with an intelligible there-and-then. This article addresses some of these temporal and spatial transformations of the media–catastrophe nexus of the post-9/11 climate in both containing and exacerbating insecurities. Keywords: 9/11, London bombings, media events, news media, security

Media events: shifting connections in global news The connectivity of everyday life with an external world is unparalleled in the modern age.2 Our predominantly Western mass media surround not only cloaks daily existence with visual images and sounds but also, through so-called ‘news’, presents an exterior world that is contiguous with our own. Our public and private spaces are drenched in a media mix of information and entertainment, as immediacy, intimacy and proximity have become increasingly dominant modes of representing crisis, conflict and catastrophe, the core business of the media. There is a history to this state of affairs. Notably, it was the years 1989–91 that witnessed the most significant sustained transformation in television’s global connectivity, with the continuous coverage of events in Tiananmen Square, and the making of CNN through its coverage of the Gulf War. But even these ‘media events’ which continued to mark the 1990s (a period Martin Bell has called the ‘decade of the dish’) appear to have given way to a constant stream of wars and disasters, many without obvious end or hope of resolution. The archetypal televisual delivery of momentous and catastrophic occurrences up until the turn of the twenty-first century was the ‘media event’. Notably, the routine schedules of television channels were interrupted as part of intensive global attention. These are the ultimate media frame, based around a particular (mostly televisual) discourse that reflexively situates the medium, newsmakers and audiences in the production of an unfolding event. Media events are characterized by their intensity and self-referentiality in the sense that they capture a nation’s (or the world’s) attention for International Relations Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol 20(4): 453–466 Downloaded from http://ire.sagepub.com by on July 4, 2007 [DOI: 10.1177/0047117806069407] © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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a limited period. The 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 war over Kosovo, the 1997 aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, are all examples of a disruption to everyday topics of conversation and debate through a mass-mediated concentration on a single evolving event. Analysis is often related to the work of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz who identify three subdivisions of media events, namely, ‘contests’, ‘conquests’ and ‘coronations’.3 Their focus is on the narrative of the ‘festive viewing’ of television and the celebratory and ceremonial unifying of audiences on such occasions. Since the publication of Dayan and Katz’s influential work, however, the constancy of connectivity that characterized the media event is now available through 24-hour news which, despite its highly segmented and cyclical temporal structure, still affords a continuity, an enhanced sense of the world unfolding in the real time of everyday life, whether or not the television is switched on. Of course the penetration and constancy of other media and their convergence contribute to a sense that we inhabit an environment saturated with news. Ian Hargreaves and James Thomas, for example, define this phenomenon as ‘ambient news’ – suggesting it is ‘like the air we breathe, taken for granted rather than struggled for’.4 There is much evidence to support this assessment. For one, the medium of television has multiplied both within and outside the home. Television screens (and audiences) are scattered throughout private and public spaces, including airport lounges, bars and railway stations.5 Moreover, the globalization of news formats has tended to assert a dominant and recognizable frame via which the world is routinely represented to us on television. On screen, brevity and movement have become the predominate framing devices as television news has become a concatenation of the tabloid front-page headline and byline and a busy computer desktop. For example, in recent years, BBC News 24’s banners have grown larger and brighter as they have adopted the tabloid red top of Sky News, and rolling text across our screens is standard. The huge headline banner, the breaking news icon, the five- or six-word byline summary reduce the news to instant but essentially familiar fragments. Rolling news and news bulletins employ a ‘media event script’ as their default framing. Indeed, almost any occurrence is today classified as ‘an event’, being pushed relentlessly through this format. And it is the event apparatus of television that prompts mimetic responses to the most significant occurrences while affording disproportionate status to the least significant. This utter equivalency of television news operates more routinely and more extensively than even that characterized by Neil Postman in his 1986 critique of the disconnected and entertainment-driven nature of television news in Amusing Ourselves to Death, now back in print. Yet ‘ambient’ is far too innocuous a term to characterize the ubiquity and standardization of television news, for it suggests a passivity that obscures precisely the cocooning function of the ‘electronic media surround’. That is to say the representational modes and production routines of the electronic media deliver a familiar mitigating layer of language, visuals and personalities, which stand between the viewer and the terrible events that are routinely represented. The catastrophic and the dangerous, through their televisual representation, are rendered seemingly less harmful and contained by the medium. And at times of extreme shock, uncertainty



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and insecurity, it is precisely these familiar media frames that function to mitigate responses to catastrophe, even as the primal shock is first delivered through the same media. Roger Silverstone, for example, considers the mitigating function of the media coverage of the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001: Its reality had to be contained. It had to be dragged, kicking and screaming into the as-if of daily mediation, for without that containment, the containment of metaphor, of cliché, of stereotype, it would outrun our capacity to make enough sense of it; and without enough sense of it, our lives would be unliveable.6 However, ‘9/11’ marked a shift in the way the media – in particular the US media – oriented itself to events in promoting security in the present. I shall return to consider this below. Media templates The media routinely draw upon past images, video, phrases, people, places and events, as well as other media, to locate and to shape what today passes as ‘news’, and they do so in different ways. In the coverage of catastrophes, the news media often proffer reassurance through the use of comparisons with past events, and particularly those where there is sufficient distance and closure to offer an optimistic narrative for the present; often that the war has ultimately been won and the nation has survived. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, however, commentators struggled to establish adequate historical frames of reference, that is to place ‘media templates’ over the unfolding coverage to shape explanations.7 News narratives are reflexive in that they feed off themselves, generating their own easily recognizable contexts and histories, and which are employed in interpretations of unfolding events. These can be referred to as ‘media templates’ or the multiple ways in which television news and other media impose a particular interpretation, organization or narrative on a current news story with reference to archived images, sounds and stories. A media template employed widely on the day of 9/11 itself was the bombing of Pearl Harbor, accompanied by public figures appearing on TV who were associated with traumatic histories (for example, Henry Kissinger, the 56th US Secretary of State, compared the attacks – and the response needed – with those on Pearl Harbor, live on CNN on the afternoon of 11 September 2001). The insertion of particularly well-known figures (often in the form of journalists and news anchors) between disasters and audiences is another of television’s mitigating strategies. For watching audiences, and for journalists, by 2001 the driving mode of television news presentation was immediacy, or ‘liveness’, as constructed through broadcast talk, on-location coverage and a subsequent enhancement of dramatic intimacy. The terrorists’ global stage was well chosen in this respect and not least because of the amount of audio-visual recording equipment in the hands of bystanders and the concentration of news providers and other media in New York City.


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As technological developments and the culture of news reporting have enabled journalists to become temporally, physically and emotionally closer to those they report on, their role in the televisual containment of catastrophe has been transformed. Critical distance, both as an objective or a reality of news reporting, has been undermined by the role attributed to and played by journalists as witnesses. Media frames have often privileged the spectator’s view of events as authoritative and evidential, yet now journalists act more often as eyewitnesses, as well as authors (and often editors) to news stories. The TV news environment is one in which the here and now of television contributes to the foregrounding of the speaker as part of the events on which they are reporting. Journalists (and media managers) juggle proximity to and distance from their stories in new and interesting ways. ‘Immersion’ appears to be an ascendant strategy in this respect, as demonstrated by the widespread use of ‘embedding’ in the 2003 Iraq War. One of the promotional trailers for BBC News 24, for example, highlights the value attributed to this kind of engagement with reference to its Baghdad correspondent, Caroline Hawley: Hawley: It’s a privilege to work and report from a place where history is literally unfolding in front of your eyes. You need to spend time with people, talking to people to see what the changes mean for them and to understand what’s really going on. Events are moving so fast you have to live the story to keep up with it. Voice-over: One of 200 correspondents in over 150 countries. If it happens, it happens here. BBC News 24.8 This trailer neatly encapsulates a contradiction in news reporting in respect of the relationship between correspondent and subject matter. On the one hand, events happen, in this case ‘unfolding in front of your eyes’, separate from and unaffected by the bystander journalist. On the other hand, however, there is a journalistic desire to get involved, to be co-present with and to ‘live’ the story, in order to ‘make’ the story. Furthermore, News 24 promotes itself as synonymous with where stories happen, affording a degree of ownership to news organizations in relation to the location of the story. Even the relatively remote studio anchor, in commenting on an unfolding catastrophe, for instance, is intrinsic to the construction of the event. Mary Ann Doane, for example, considers this point in relation to NBC’s Tom Brokaw’s anchoring of coverage of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in the US: the possibility is always open that Brokaw might stumble, that his discourse might lapse – and this would be tantamount to touching the real, simply displacing the lure of referentiality attached to the catastrophe to another level (that of the ‘personal’ relationship between anchor and viewer).9



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So the mediator of the catastrophe for the watching audience does not sit somewhere between the vicarious spectator and the event, but actually pivots the event, notably what later comes to be more widely understood and referred to as the ‘Challenger disaster’. It is precisely that the mediation of 9/11 was a rupture – not just in political or cultural terms, but in its very representation on television – that realigned the media– catastrophe axis. That is to say, the ‘lure of referentiality’, to return to Doane’s point above, was displaced. The shock of the attacks on New York and Washington challenged the then established televisual representations of catastrophe, for none seemed adequate to the event itself – no construction of immediacy was required. For example, US news networks rejected even the sanctity of their television studios for some of the time, with Judy Woodruff and Aaron Brown anchoring CNN’s continuous coverage sat outside with the skyline of Washington and New York as their backdrop.10 Their presence within these traumatic spaces was reassuring, as they were seen to bear witness to the event and, as Barbie Zelizer writes of the media response to 9/11: ‘journalism itself loosened its adherence to usual norms of news gathering and presentation to frame the act of seeing as an integral part of the coverage’.11 This was also a watching second by second of the aftermath, as the New York skyline continued to smoulder for days to come as the stories of the heroic, the missing, the search for survivors and the massive clean-up operation unfolded. However, the genuine mediated shock of 9/11 can be said to have diminished over time through endless repetition and the recycling of the images and sounds in the days and months that followed, but also since its embedding in the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ narrative, and with the media’s obsessive commemorative marking of the anniversary of events. This is one strategy in the collective processing of catastrophe: the rendering of an event utterly transparent and familiar so that even the initially most shocking of images can become inuring. Of course, the video footage and stills of the planes hitting the twin towers of the World Trade Center, now perhaps some of the most instantly and widely recognizable images of the twenty-first century, raise questions as to the ultimate conscience-moulding function of the saturating news media, not to mention their historical imprinting. Even the images of those jumping to their deaths from the burning WTC towers, despite an initial hesitation to broadcast close-up views on the day itself and calls for some images to be banned, have nonetheless been endlessly recycled since, and have even been the subject of a television documentary, The Falling Man.12 Television is a uniquely powerful medium in its visual capacity to revisit and to reconstruct entire events, both as a reinforcing mechanism and to edit, embellish and transform past events into a form deemed appropriate for new political and cultural contexts. The role of media templates in moulding and remoulding social memory is particularly influential in this regard as templates often involve the nearinstantaneous imposition of a selective genealogy: powerful televisual narratives that sequentially connect events, and crucially also function to speculate on and to promote the next in series.


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Media, memory and habituation As well as templates functioning as routine televisual (as well as other media) devices to shape unfolding events, the extensive commemorative culture which is an obsession of modern media – which Andreas Huyssen refers to as a ‘hybrid memorial-media culture’ – has become a site of contention over whether past catastrophes – and the insecurities embedded within them – are assuaged or exacerbated by their perpetual (and often annual) revisiting.13 In the case of terrorism and other atrocities, the adoption of a media strategy to lessen the enduring impact of these events over time (on victims and their families, and to deprive terrorists of the oxygen of continued publicity), through applying some kind of limit to the replaying of images, is controversial. Obviously, these strategies change with political, cultural and geographical context (of victims, audiences and perpetrators) and certainly change in relation to how fresh an atrocity is in living memory. The public/media debate over the release of the movie Flight 93 in the US in the spring of 2006, for example, centred around the notion that this was ‘too soon’ to be tolerable for America’s historical consciousness. Very rarely are images of an event overtly and uniformly suppressed by the mainstream media, once those images have already been broadcast/published. Being viewed as already part of ‘the public domain’, their reproduction – especially by the medium of their first representation/dissemination – is seen as legitimate. A notable exception to this trend, however, occurred on the first anniversary of the 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombing (Spain’s so-called ‘3/11’). The Spanish Prime Minister, under pressure from families of the victims, urged media outlets not to broadcast grisly footage and photos of the train bombings that had been previously shown after the original event. And the Spanish media responded by effectively sanitizing this event, seen as a demonstration of the country’s resilience through its return to ‘normality’ in the aftermath of the bombing. For instance, Spain’s TVE television news coverage of the anniversary did not show images of the injured or dead, or even close-up shots of the train wreckage, but only some very fleeting distant aerial footage of the scene of the terrorist attack from one year earlier. As with many significant national and international events in the West, both the actual images of the bombing and the context of their experience, become bound up for many with the media that broke the story. In fact it becomes difficult to imagine, or to remember, historic events of the modern age outside of or separate from the media that ‘produced’ them. The omission of certain images of the aftermath of the Madrid bombing in some media on its anniversary is one means of managing traumatic memories at a national level, but it is also a mechanism for closing down the space for explicit detail that perhaps connects more with the perpetrators than with the victims. This, of course, contrasts with the virtual paralysis of the mediated obsession with anniversaries of other similar events, and not least 9/11. So one contradiction of the nature of the relationship between media and memory – part of the phenomenon of ‘new memory’ – is in the differential impact of the explicit reflexive role in the later representation of some events over the often implicit sanitizing of others. That is to say, on the one



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hand the media overpower human memory, or even diminish the need for memory, through potentially unlimited and increasingly complex documentation, storage and instant retrieval and reassemblage of our past(s). On the other, and according to Jesús Martín-Barbero, the media weaken the past, erasing it, diffusing it and arguably rendering it ‘painless’ or even ‘neutral’.14 In these circumstances, Martín-Barbero advocates the pursuit of a ‘living’ representation and memory of ‘difficult’ pasts that is wounding and partisan, but potentially redemptive: ‘the media . . . seek a memory that overcomes conflict, a memory that does not upset us, that instead appeases us, closes the wound, but falsely; the scarring process is false’.15 Here Martín-Barbero refers to the media’s treatment of debates over Columbia’s ‘missing’ and its amnesiac function in neutralizing a painful period in a country’s history, rather than an explicit social engagement with it and thus a greater opportunity for a genuine healing through full recognition. A key problem with the cyclical and repetitious nature of today’s electronic media is that its standard response to a catastrophe is to reduce it to one of a handful of what soon become iconic images. The most shocking or disturbing images are either shown partially or edited out of a sequence. The heightened contradiction in the highly competitive news environment where news sources and channels have proliferated to saturation point is that exclusives must be sought that attract audiences but which do not offend them. The grotesque and the truly shocking can, however, be referenced more easily with their broadcast on, say, non-Western media, or by reporting on their inevitable availability on the Internet; this avoids endangering viewers’ relatively low thresholds of sensitivity (especially in respect of scheduled television news programmes) by exposing them to the true horrors of war and terrorism, especially when the victims do not fall into the category of ‘other’. Yet can an image that truly moves or shocks possess enduring impact once it is inevitably rendered familiar by its very representation and re-representation? This is an issue that is prominent in the work of Susan Sontag. She asks, for example: ‘Does shock have term limits? . . . As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.’16 Perhaps the answer is found in the extent to which one can equate repetition with habituation, which returns us to the issue of the constancy and the continuity of catastrophe that appears as an inevitable component of our media surround. It is precisely the connectivity to near and remote terror and the apparent risk of terror that promotes insecurity without end. Ambient news is not the product of twenty-first century media: rather our surround is characterized by a claustrophobia of uncertainty and risk. John Urry, for example, argues: The world appears to be particularly risky and there is little likelihood of even understanding the temporally organised processes that culminate in newsworthy tragedies routinely represented. Such time-space compression magnifies the sense that we inhabit a world of intense and instantaneous riskiness.17



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It is a media modulation of temporality and proximity in this way that promotes uncertainty. Alternatively, a continuous but relatively ‘low-level’ exposure to a world of increased riskiness nullifies the actual impact of catastrophic events when they do occur. Thus the media may mitigate the potential shock of the new through the playing out of potentially catastrophic scenarios, if, that is, ‘expectation’ can be equated with ‘preparedness’. Continuous (rolling) television news fulfils at least the former function. It is geared up to track the time–space horizons around the globe, surveying them for signs of potential danger. Television news is part of a surveillance culture, notably multiple and remote recording devices and correspondents around the globe, as in the BBC News 24 trailer: ‘If it happens, it happens here.’ TV news is a potential buffer that not only reveals and documents the shock of the new but will also contain it and place it in an instantly recognizable narrative. However, with the opening of the new century and 9/11, rolling news delivered a seemingly unmediated immediacy, as the televisual filtering apparatus itself went into a stasis, despite its highly tuned temporal rhythms, dramatic frames and structures. Anyhow the idea of immediacy and the media is something of a contradiction, as Todd Gitlin argues: ‘Life right now: this is the high promise of modern media. A wonderful paradox – that media, which are by definition connections, betweenthings, should promise immediacy, the condition of not being mediated.’18 Indeed, it is the very televisual discourses of immediacy and representation that in their familiarity act as a buffer between the viewer and the actuality of the event. However, these devices were spectacularly compromised on 9/11, with the searching for appropriate templates and a script within which to place the unfolding attacks. In the absence of an adequate explanatory and reassuring narrative from the past, a paralysis of repetition of the shock of the new ensued. ‘Premediation’ The longer-term consequences of this televisual rupture is discernible in the emergence of a post-9/11 media strategy intended to prevent the ‘touching of the real’ (in Doane’s terms, above) from reoccurring and to fully restore the ‘safety-valve’ of the televisual. Notably, the mass media have adopted a frame embedded in the political rhetoric that characterized the 2003 Iraq War: pre-emption. Richard Grusin, for example, argues that: the media’s preoccupation with premediating the future strives to maintain a low level of anxiety among the American public in order to protect them from experiencing the immediacy of another catastrophe like 9/11. The desire that no future event (war, snipers, terrorism, etc.) be unmediated is the desire to see, or more precisely to premediate, the future, the desire that the future never be free from mediation.19



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Here Grusin extends the model he developed with Jay David Bolter of ‘remediation’, namely that the cultural significance of new visual media is acquired through their ‘refashioning’ of earlier media forms.20 However, Grusin contends that a ‘double logic’ of premediation was evident in the global networked news media response to 9/11 through their combination of the visual collage look, synonymous with CNN, with the absence of this mediation through the full-screen immediacy of extreme close-ups of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Thus the act of mediation was multiplied at the same time as the television medium was ‘erased’ from the act of vicariously witnessing the horror of the unfolding events, respectively.21 Grusin’s (and Bolter’s) work is important in highlighting the ways in which form and event are inextricable in modern networked media. Moreover, one can situate these debates in a fundamental shift in the modern media experience: the enmeshing of different temporal horizons with the televisual form, through its enhanced scopic versatility. The simultaneity afforded through split screens and multiple feeds from remote places and different time zones – the temporal and textual messiness of ‘televisuality’22 – effects an intensification of whatever ‘story’ is fed into the mix. In the light of Grusin’s future-oriented model of premediation, I will first consider the changes in our mediated experience of this temporal horizon, before returning to the somewhat overlooked presence of media memory in this context. Like Gitlin (above), Scott Lash identifies a paradox in what he calls the ‘informational media’ in the diminishment of time for reflection under conditions of heightened immediacy: ‘While they mediate great spatial distances, they are so immediate, they leave no time for meaningful mediation. In this sense it is not nonsense to speak of the “mass immedia of communication”.’23 From this perspective, the information society provides no time/space for anticipating the risks and insecurities of a future far beyond the real-time environment. Instead, rapid and flexible responses are required to be adequate to the complexities of our networked age, and not least in relation to the uncertainties of global terrorism. Under such circumstances, there is said to be a greater orientation to the anticipation of the near future and comparably diminished contingencies for the time beyond, as the time beyond loses its significance. Thus there appears to be a growing permeability between the categories of the present and the immediate future. This argument is prominent, for example, in the work of Helga Nowotny, who claims that there is a ‘changed balance’ in the experiencing of time, with the present being ‘extended’ into the future by the heightened expectations of what innovation can deliver in the present.24 Television, in its capacity to instantly represent disparate communication feeds, functions like a fine electronic net. We need only return to the media event of the 1991 Gulf War to find a marker of the beginning of these transformations. For instance, McKenzie Wark employs Paul Virilio’s concept of the ‘vector’ to describe the electronic linkages forged by the emerging global news media of the day: The vector created a space where one can appear quite ‘naturally’ to respond to the other, in the blink of an edit. We witnessed the montaging of familiar and surprising sites into the seamless space and staccato time of the media vector.25


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And Wark develops a definition of the media vector as a paradox: ‘The technical properties are hard and fixed, but it can connect enormously vast and vaguely defined spaces together and move images, and sounds, words, and furies, between them.’26 So although the intensive and extensive connectedness of times and places has been availed by the electronic media for some time, the relative fixity of the media machine, at the points of recording, broadcast and reception, has been dissolved in a media age characterized by a wholesale shift in mobility and portability. Moreover, the technological apparatus, the Internet and an array of digital recording and transmission devices, are no longer, in a revolutionary way, the exclusive property of what are still called the mass media. It appears that the micro is in the ascendancy in a multitude of ways as the mesh of the media vector becomes finer and finer. Notably, a much greater proximity to certain events delivered through the huge proliferation in remote and mobile recording devices effects the shock immediacy of Grusin’s premediation (above). Moreover, it is the combination of the shift in the extreme close-up afforded by technological advances and the significance afforded to the human witnessing of events that produces a new intimate proximity to terror and catastrophe. 7/7: Up close and personal The news coverage of the bombings of 7 July 2005, London’s ‘7/7’ (mimicking ‘9/11’) was profoundly shaped through these foci of perception. The mesh of the media vector of the London bombings was filled in by the images and sounds recorded by members of the general public on their mobile phone cameras and videos, and afforded a proximity to scenes of fear and death that would, until relatively recently in the history of media, have remained obscured or unseen. The actual mobile phone video recordings of co-present witnesses to events led the main television news reports and filled newspaper pages. For example, on the night of 7/7 Feargal Keane’s report for the BBC, and Mark Thompson’s for Channel 4 News, began with the eerie footage recorded by survivors as they were led through and out of the wrecked tube trains. This footage and hundreds of images were sent in to the television news networks, as Sky, ITV and BBC News had put out requests for witnesses’ recordings and photographs by lunchtime on the day itself, online and on-screen. The low resolution, and thus often dark and grainy images, and shaky video enhanced the immediacy of the coverage. In fact, the intersection between media and public could not have been greater; think only of images captured by tube survivors as they were led away through dark tunnels by emergency workers to safety at Kings Cross, for example. And with an army of so-called ‘citizen journalists’ somehow compelled to stop and record even the most horrific scenes, below and above ground on 7 July 2005, the London bombings were quickly rendered transparent in the public imagination. From a terrorist perspective the connectivity of the electronic media along a vector in which the public are plugged in functions like a virus, extending to impact at all the critical nodes of the network. There seems little prospect for a rapid media



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containment of catastrophe in circumstances in which there is a public extension and indeed amplification of the vector. So despite the continuity of the low-level threats, warnings and terrorist attacks on other world cities and elsewhere prior to 7/7, the extensive granular intimacy of the visual exposure of 7/7 appeared to wound the capital as it dominated the story. The impact of mobile media in the hands of the victims/witnesses of the London bombings in this way should not be underestimated. One only needs to reflect on how very differently 9/11 would have looked and been remembered if the people inside the twin towers and on the airplanes had had mobile phones equipped with cameras and video, as they surely would have had if these attacks had occurred today.27 Caught up in the sheer exposure of the extended present of the London bombings, which combined the shock with the massively heightened state of alert, immediate refuge from and resistance to the intensely mediated insecurity of the event was sought in the certainty of the past. Like the US media’s use of Pearl Harbor on 9/11, the British media/public sought a sign of catastrophe, resilience and survival, in the face of the 2005 bombing of the English capital, through which to interpret and mitigate events (and maximize their news value). The September 1940 to May 1941 intense and continuous German bombing of London (and other major UK cities) – the Blitz – was the obvious template to employ, not least owing to its invocation of the ‘Blitz spirit’: the capacity to carry on with everyday life in the face of daily bombing attacks. On the day following the attacks, for example, The Sun, in a multiple-page spread headed ‘Worst Since Blitz’, placed the London bombings of 7 July in a visual series, beginning with the 1940 Blitz, and various other bombings – the Old Bailey in 1973, Harrods in 1974, Hyde Park in 1982 and Canary Wharf in 1996.28 Its anchoring archival piece was what appeared to be a cropped, inverted image of Herbert Mason’s shot of St Paul’s Cathedral standing defiantly above the smoke and flames of the blitzed capital in December 1940. No media template is complete, however, without the (living memory) account of a witness to authenticate the comparison. The Sun duly delivered by carrying an interview with 71-year-old Daphne Brundish, a survivor of the Blitz, who is cited in a column next to the St Paul’s image: ‘The Germans couldn’t destroy us. Neither will these terrorists’, along with photographs of her then and now. The widespread and sometimes crass tabloid use of the Blitz template in the aftermath of 7/7 did attract some criticism. For instance, Charles Glass, in an article in Harpers entitled ‘The Last of England’ questions the validity of the comparison and argues that in London during the Blitz people got on with their everyday lives and shops and businesses stayed open, compared with the shuttered capital of 8 July 2005.29 His critique is one of the relative scale of the two events, and he asks how it could be that if Londoners ‘did not fear nightly bombardment that destroyed thousands of houses why were they so afraid now?’ He also contrasts the relative ‘normality’ in Madrid on the night of 11 March 2004, when the restaurants and bars were as full as usual, with the more paralysed London, and lists other comparisons with Beirut, Sarejevo and Northern Ireland. Yet in terms of our understanding of the function and effect of the use of templates, the question of the actual occurrence or


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accuracy of the original event(s) now being represented and compared is not one that should be dwelled on too much. It is an irony that, like most kinds of social and cultural memory, it is to the present rather than to the past that memory is oriented, being continually reshaped and afforded meaning, or discarded through its absence. Memory is always dynamic and ‘new’ in this respect. Templates pervaded broadcast talk, column inches and the blogosphere in the aftermath of the London bombings. In the post-9/11 period, news networks and organizations had no shortage of terrorist templates on which to draw and to instantly insert into narratives to place on top of the breaking stories of new atrocities. For example, on 7/7, Sky News was already running a report containing a visual series of terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, Bali in 2002, Istanbul in 2003 and Madrid in 2004.30 This kind of visual schema through the immediate connecting of horrific events nonetheless contributes to containing the shock of the London bombings by placing them among events presumed already familiar to audiences, and, in this series, notably ‘one-offs’ (and thus already contained) in the locations concerned. However, the powerful mixing of times and places and the intersection of media with public in the circulation and imposition of discourses and the rearticulation of meanings about events poses significant challenges in terms of the appropriation of public space, especially at times of crisis and catastrophe. For example, one appropriation of ‘the public voice’ in response to the events of 7/7 was utterly exposed, following a front-page headline in The Sun newspaper, ‘Terror Laws’, with a pagefilling and widely used image of a blood-soaked and bandaged victim of the Edgware Road tube train bombing. The image was anchored with the words printed underneath, ‘Tell Tony He’s Right’, as though unambiguously the view of the victim depicted. Unfortunately for The Sun, however, they had not chosen a passive subject as the vehicle of their message in the form of John Tulloch, a British professor in Media Studies. Like the powerful iconic image of his injured state framed by The Sun’s campaigning slogan, Tulloch’s response was widely reported on the web and in print, and was broadcast on radio and television: This is using my image to push through draconian and utterly unnecessary terrorism legislation. It’s incredibly ironic that the Sun’s rhetoric is as the voice of the people yet they don’t actually ask the people involved, the victims, what they think. If you want to use my image, the words coming out of my mouth would be, ‘Not in my name, Tony’.31 Instead, a significant proportion of the mainstream media reporting of 7/7 focused around the ‘public mood’ of shock, fear and resoluteness. Or rather the public mood appeared indistinguishable from the media framing of events. The discursive becoming ‘one of us’ mixes and thus cloaks responses (in The Sun’s case the British government’s terrorism legislation). Yet, as Tony Schirato and Jen Webb argue: ‘the very strengths of the techniques that enable the media to occupy the public sphere, and effectively stand in for and direct public speech on any range of issues, also constitute a serious weakness’.32 In this way, Schirato and Webb argue that the authority of the



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media to comment is diminished when they shift from a position of speaking ‘on the social’ to one ‘of the social’.33 This discursive shift does seem more prevalent under the technologically enabled trends in some newsmaking practices exemplified by coverage of 7/7 that I have outlined. Despite the highly individual, random and non-journalistic sources of many of the sounds and images that comprised the news coverage of 7/7, it was nonetheless their selection, framing and repetition by ‘Big Media’34 that dominated the public sphere. (‘Citizen journalism’, anyhow, is a label used by Big Media to disguise the fact that they ultimately remain Big Media.) What the introduction of mobile image and sound narratives into the media mix produces is a much more visually intimate and proximate, although nonetheless mass, experience, and ultimately mass record, of crisis, conflict and catastrophe. The news reporting of attacks and their aftermath visually and orally anchored in this way can be said to be a mediated enabling of terrorism, but without requiring the showing of more graphic images of bodily injury (which Big Media has always and will always mitigate against anyway). At the same time that new and ever more proximate views of events are availed through the media vector in the extended present, complex digitalized information storage and retrieval systems facilitate their immediate contextualizing in discourses of the past: in established emotions, histories and associated narratives. The prognosis for the future (premediated or otherwise) view and impact of catastrophic and other events, as those from the past are reframed and revised in present circumstances, is, at best, uncertain. The reflexive prism of the mass media inflected with new modes of representation will continue to both shock and inure as it innovates and repeats, respectively. In so doing it will shape and reshape a shifting environment of insecurity, torn between the prospects of the unknowable future and a yearning for the certainties and stability of the past. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This article is based on research funded by the ESRC as part of the New Security Challenges research programme (Award Ref. RES-223-25-0063). For full details see www.mediatingsecurity.com. Thanks to Stuart Croft, Marie Gillespie and Ben O’Loughlin for their helpful comments and suggestions. For a nuanced analysis of the connections and disconnections between media and contemporary ‘news publics’, see Marie Gillespie’s piece in this issue, pp. 467–486. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Ian Hargreaves and James Thomas, New News, Old News (London: ITC/BSC, 2002), p. 44. Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Roger Silverstone, ‘Mediating Catastrophe: September 11 and the Crisis of the Other’, May 2002, available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/pdf/mediatingcatastrophe.pdf (accessed 20 January 2006), p. 5. Andrew Hoskins, Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq (London: Continuum, 2004). Emphasis added, BBC News 24, 18 August 2004. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, in Patricia Mellencamp (ed.), Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism (London: BFI, 1990). CNN, 13 September 2001.


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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 20(4) Barbie Zelizer, ‘Photography, Journalism, and Trauma’, in Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (eds), Journalism After September 11 (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 57. The Falling Man, Channel 4, 16 March 2006. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 255. Jesús Martín-Barbero, ‘The Media: Memory, Loss and Oblivion’, GSC Quarterly, 4, Spring 2002, available at: http://www.ssrc.org/gsc/newsletter4/martinbarbero.htm (accessed 14 May 2004). Martín-Barbero, ‘The Media’. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 82. John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 127. Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), p. 128. Richard Grusin, ‘Premediation’, Criticism, 46(1), Winter 2004, p. 26. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (London: MIT Press, 1999). Richard Grusin, ‘Premediation’, p. 21. John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality – Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Scott Lash, Critique of Information (London: Sage, 2002), p. 75. Helga Nowotny, Time – The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 11. McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography – Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 11. Wark, Virtual Geography. Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism, by the People, for the People (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2006), p. 49. The Sun, 8 July 2005, pp. 20–1. Charles Glass, ‘The Last of England’, Harpers, November 2005. Sky News, 8.30 p.m., 7 July 2005. Ros Coward, ‘They Have Given Me Somebody Else’s Voice – Blair’s Voice’, The Guardian, 10 November 2005. Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Understanding Globalization (London: Sage, 2003), p. 11. In this respect Schirato and Webb draw upon the work of Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). Gillmor, We the Media.
