Arquembourg - 2004 - Media Events as a Collective Process of the Constitution of Reality

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MEDIA EVENTS AS A COLLECTIVE PROCESS OF THE CONSTITUTION OF REALITY © Jocelyne Arquembourg What is the part of the media in the constitution of public events? This question usually puts the emphasis on the activities and the practices of the media themselves, but it rarely questions the definition of the concept of event and how the media take part in a collective process of comprehension of what is happening as far as a collectivity is concerned. My purpose would be to apply to such concern a phenomenological approach which makes a distinction between facts and events based on experience. I will also illustrate my analysis with the study of two different media coverage of the same event, because my concern is both theoretical and empirical. The comparison between the coverage of the tsunami which happened in December 2004, mainly in Asia, in a French and in an Indian newspaper will lead to a reflection on how the media link together the descriptions of the facts and the stories of the reactions to the facts in the story of an event. This comparison stresses the different sorts of publics which arise from the event as collective subjects, KEYWORDS event; media events; phenomenology; public events Facts and events in the process of the constitution of reality

Media events as a construction

The media are criticized by a great number of researchers in social sciences or

history for a certain number of reasons. The main argument is usually that the media misrepresent reality whether because media events are pseudo events created by the media themselves (Boorstin, 1961), or because they overdevelop some facts of small importance in reality in order to target wide audiences (Champagne, 1991, Nora, 1974). In the field of discourse analysis, researchers also say that media events are a discursive construction and put the emphasis on the discourse analysis of the different media as a mean to deconstruct the events themselves (Charaudeau, 2005, Veron, 1981).

A reflection of reality

On the other hand, the professionals of the media tend to consider that media

events are simply an exact representation of the events which happen in reality. They stress their efforts to cover the events with a maximum of objectivity. Objectivity being often considered as an equivalent of transparency, the journalists, apart from editorialists, step back as subjects of discourse and image. According to journalists, reality would exist en soi without any human agency to organize it and shape it at least through language.


Events would exist in reality and the journalists would only have to tell what happened in the most neutral and transparent way. In that sense, they are supposed to tell the facts to their public.In the present state of affair we can observe the divorce between a professional and practical approach which keeps its own agency in the background as much as possible, and a scientific and critical approach which on the contrary, puts the emphasis on the role of the media. But this role is generally criticized and supposed to be motivated by financial or economical considerations.In both cases one can notice that facts are considered as existing en soi, not as the result of human agency and events are considered as something rather disturbing and disruptive but the concept of event itself is never specified as if everybody knew what is an event. Actually, the term is currently used to designate anything that occurs from a football match to a war, the declaration of a prime minister or the concert of a famous group. But what do we mean exactly when we are talking about facts and events? It seems that it is necessary to work on the definition of both terms in order to cast a new light on this debate.

The phenomenological definitions

The difference between facts and events is not consensual depending on the

theoretical framework which rules over their definition. Different theories draw different limits. On the one hand, for the analytic philosophy the definition of facts and events is ontological. For Davidson or Vendler, the question is: what kind of objects of the world are facts and events?I would rather follow a different perspective elaborated in France by Claude Romano, who develops a different viewpoint on the concept of event based on the philosophy of Heidegger. According to the phenomenological standpoint an occurrence is a fact or an event depending on how what is occurring appears, which means, depending on the experience of a subject. An apple which falls from a tree is a fact that can be observed but does not change the course of the life of anybody. An earthquake is an event in the sense that it affects a lot of people, has several types of consequences, human, physical, environmental, economical etc. We can say that it breaks an order of things. Events have this capacity of disorder when facts are only noticed, recorded or certified. This distinction which draws new borders between facts and events calls different remarks: Claude Romano notices that an event is not a change in a substance. Rain, flashes of lightening do not exist out of the fact of raining or lightening. In these particular cases the verb does not affect a subject that would exist before, it is the verb that gives birth to the subject and creates it somehow. The change happens in an order of things, let’s say, a landscape, a garden, a field or a mountain, the sky, generally speaking what we would call an environment and the people and things which belong to or are concerned with this environment, it does not properly happen in a substance. We can generalize this observation and consider that some events have this capacity to create their subject. Claude Romano calls such a rising subject, an advenant.While we can say that facts simply happen, events happen to subjects, breaking the course of their lives, reorienting their stories, bringing new opportunities, ending others, casting a new light on the past, opening new futures. The distinction between facts and events could lie in the distinction between the expressions “to happen” and “to happen to somebody or something”. The fall of a stone for instance, is only a fact if it does not affect anybody but is an event if it causes an avalanche in a mountain that destroys houses and kills several people. Such distinction is not ontological, it is based on our experience, because facts and events are often interwoven depending on who is concerned by what is occurring. The same occurrence can be a fact as well as an event depending on who is affected. The death of Michael Jackson for instance, is a fact that can be certified by a doctor or the police of L.A,


but for the Jakson family it is an event which means suffering, a change in their life which has affective and practical (financial?) consequences. According to these definitions, the media are hardly able to cover an event, its capacity of disorder as well as producing novelty for a subject, whether individual or collective. The media cover the facts in the sense that the news coverage are oriented toward the production of explanations of what has happened. Pre-existing frames of interpretation are raised to determine the causes of an occurrence which can be therefore explained through a context or an environment. Following C. Romano, the factual objectivity of the media is not able to give account of a deep social experience, because facts do not happen to anybody in particular. Consequently, the public is defined as a collection of individuals watching what is occurring in the world as a show without being concerned.Although I shall keep Romano’s definitions of what is a fact and what is an event, I shall make some objections to his different conclusions. I would like to underline that, most of the time, facts and events are intertwined in the coverage of what is called media events. Then, I shall demonstrate that the reactions to the facts are part of the coverage of an event. These reactions, which are not the reactions of the people who are directly affected by what has occurred, arise as far as norms, believes, rules are concerned and reveal the figure of an advenant. Therefore, we will be able to observe the rising of collective subjects in the terms of Romano, who are the real subjects of the event, those to who it happens. I shall give an example with the study of the tsunami coverage of 2004 in a French and in an Indian newspaper. Then one question will come out of this example which regards the future of journalism: how do the NTC change the role of the media in this collective process?

Facts and events in the coverage of the tsunami (2004) in Le Monde and The

Hindu The following considerations result from a comparative study of the French and

Indian coverage of the tsunami which happened in Asia in December 2004. Both newspapers appear as a reference regarding the reporting of international events and are supposed to be reliable in terms of objectivity, let’s say, factuality. The comparison is based on the observation of a lack of information about India in the French newspaper, although the consequences of the tsunami in India were disastrous. This observation was rather puzzling and one could wonder why the French newspaper paid so little attention to India. Concerning our theoretical framework the question would be: Can we say that the newspapers only reported the facts? Did they report the same facts in the same way? What does it mean to say that they also reported an event? Did they report an event of the same kind? And last but not least if we ask: “who did the event happen to?” in both cases, we will observe that it did not happen to the same subjects.

The reports of the facts in the first articles of the Hindu

In the Indian newspaper, the tsunami appears first as a huge wave:”Huge seismic

sea waves, triggered by a massive undersea earthquake off Sumatra in Indonesia, left over 9,300 people dead and tens of thousands homeless in India, Sri Lanka and South-East Asia on Sunday”.To a certain extent we can say that the article gives a description of the facts, and provides an explanation of the causes of the big waves. It yields geographical localization and quantitative human consequences. More scientific explanations are to come in the rest of the article concerning the epicenter, the shifting of the geological plates, the measure of the quake on the Richter scale etc. Most of the scientific news comes from the United States Geological Survey. The toll of the dead


people, country by country comes from official sources.The style of the article is neutral using lots of passive structures like:”the toll is expected to rise” or “thousands of people were reported missing”. But the facts are not reported as the story of an observed phenomenon with a beginning, and an end. The news is dispatched without any order whether chronological or geographical. For instance, the news from Sri Lanka comes after the news from India, and Malaysia after the Maldives, and this order does not follow the succession of the different phases of the earthquake which started in Indonesia. There is little news from Thailand and it gives poor information. Yet, different comments of survivors appear at the end of the article. Verbs at the first person expressing emotions, feelings of surprise and horror, find place in this first article which, in that sense, intertwines the story of the facts as they could have been observed by experts or official sources and the personal reactions of those who suffered from the event, the people who are directly affected by the wave. The fact that the news are given without order reflects the image of a world which is literally falling apart. Although, this article seems neutral from a stylistic point of view, it is not the report written from a distance by an expert or a detached spectator of a natural phenomenon. In an implicit way, the article expresses the rising of an important event. But, at this stage of the coverage, the extension, the measure of the event, are uncertain. The newspaper report of the event is concerning what happened to the victims and will concern a wider public later.

The reports of the facts in the first articles of Le Monde

This first article reads like a neutral account of the facts. It gives precisions in terms

of time, local and universal, space, localizations and distances, chronology, magnitude etc. It is the description of a natural phenomenon observed through the “eyes’ of at least two centres of observation located in Djakarta and Hawaï. From that point of view we can say that the tsunami is not described as a total breakdown in an order of things because it can be still explained through preexisting frames of interpretation. The phenomenon has been clearly identified, and its different phases are described as a quake first, then a wave, then a second seism a few hours later. There is no wondering, no inquiry about what happened.If the distinction between facts and event lies on the distinction between to happen and to happen to, we find a very clear illustration of this distinction in the first article. There is no mention of those to whom the tsunami happened, of the people being affected by the disaster. The quake and the wave, strike the coasts of different countries, tremors are to be felt in Singapour, but the article does not mention by whom and gives few information about the victims.We can easily qualify this article as purely factual. But if we analyze how this factuality is produced we can notice that it is not the simple recording of the facts, nor the observation of the facts as they simply happened. There is more human agency in the production of this sort of “factuality” than it seems. First of all, the observation of a tsunami as a single phenomenon which develops itself from a beginning to an end is a pure fiction. Actually, the narration of the phenomenon is the result of a vast amount of observations and data recorded by several observers dispatched through the world which then can be organized in a story of the facts. It means that factuality is the result of a system of socio-scientific observation and transmission, as Bruno Latour demonstrated in his study of “Science in action”. Then, it is also the result of a discursive manner of accounting what happened in an impersonal and neutral way. Against Bourdieu or Champagne, one can notice that there is more human agency, more “construction of reality” in establishing the facts than in reporting an event. But a great deal of this construction lies on socio-technical agents rather than on the media themselves.


The forms of narrative understanding of events We have to pay some attention to the narrative forms of the reporting of events.

Most of the newspapers productions are narratives and we have to consider what narratives generally achieve. According to Paul Ricoeur, narratives should be considered as models of connections and of attributions.

Models of connections: intentions and aims

But what does it mean to say that a narrative is a model of connections?The

semantics of action which underpin the emplotment of the event draw on networks of relationships linking intentions, motives and aims to subjects, circumstances etc. In Le Monde’s accounts, these subjects are often collective, designating international organizations, nations or States and non-governmental organizations. These collective entities are often endowed with intentions, aims and motives and with a capacity for action in the same way as any individual agent. Paris, The White House, The United Nations are personifications which enable multiple agents to be gathered under one designation to which behavior, actions and reactions can be attributed just as to single agents. They take part into a plot as if they were a single character.The emplotment of the event then consists of the act of linking these agents and causing them to interact in narratives. Two plots are developed by Le Monde. The first one is the story of a competition between the United Nations and The United States for the leadership of the international aid. The second one suggests that someAsian countries are driven by a similar desire to exploit their role in the international solidarity effort in order to exercise regional domination and to become members of the Security Council. This emplotment of the narrative appears as a kind of reading between the lines which attempts to discern rivalries and conflicts of interest behind the apparent global solidarity. Across the links woven between the hopes of some and the ulterior motives of others the emplotment of a narrative and its model of connections become apparent. This is also how it appears for what it is: a way of understanding reality. In this case we are able to grasp, across the relationships and interactions described as a power struggle between nations and veiled by the solidarity efforts, the complexity of international relations challenged by the demands of this event.The articles published inThe Hindu present a different picture of a succession of facts, statements and micro-narratives unrelated one to another. But it would not be appropriate to conclude that this juxtaposition of unrelated news items stems from some kind of fragmentation of narratives. The general impression given by the paper’s news pages is rather that of an accumulation or build-up of gestures towards a single aim: the raise of money to help the devastated areas and their reconstruction. Day after day, the newspaper reports the gift of money by people from every single level of the society: employees, churches, trade unions, political parties, enterprises, banks etc. It gives account of a massive organization built up to organize the collect of money and information. The comparison with a “flood” of money is frequently used by the journalists as if the flood of solidarity would defeat the destructive power of the wave. The juxtaposition of news items across all the articles creates a ‘pile-up’ effect. Without making any explicit links, they are nonetheless mutually reinforcing and converge on a single point: the national mobilization to face the catastrophe.

Models of attribution: the ways in which collective ‘advenants’ appear


Although very different from classical narratives, journalistic accounts of the tsunami are nonetheless models of attribution which tell us the who of the event, that is to say, who it happened to. In the French case, there is no doubt that the international community is a collective advenant which arises from the event. Despite its blurred outlines and internal divisions, it still appears to have had an, at least virtual, existence before the event. The headline in Le Monde declaring that international aid is mobilizing, by its personalization of the subject and the way it employs a designation with which the reader is assumed to be familiar, is referring to an entity which existed before its appearance in the emplotment of the present event. But does ‘international aid’ exist in the public domain outside its current mobilization? Of course, the UN then takes on a central role in this organizational effort, but it also includes a number of other agents who do not necessarily have links of solidarity outside the present event. The international community here becomes the who of the event, both in the register of suffering and in the register of action. Equally, the daily paper does not make this collective agent into a united figure. On the contrary, it continually plots divisions within the collective entity and the two main stages of the narrative deal with the competition between the UN and the US to lead the international aid effort and then the supposed ulterior motives of some Asian countries who may be angling for regional dominance. The event also, however, brings to light these more or less veiled intentions. The figure of this ‘advenant’, in the phenomenological sense, is in reality a dispersed figure which includes a significant number of agents. These same agents may also form part, or may have formed part, of other collective advenants on other occasions. The significant fact is that the event provokes the establishment of networks of relationships which organize the emergence of a collective figure endowed with a form specific to these particular circumstances. We shall note that those who suffered and those who acted in the event are also linked together in a single figure. The narrative, as a model of attribution, thus reveals the way in which the event brings together subjects in the two-fold register of suffering and action by means of links, the most effective of which in this instance is solidarity or giving. But, as a collective figure, the advenant is not only composed of those who have been affected by the event, it is a wider as well as a more abstract figure in the sense that it includes also those who are concerned by the event in the name of some human or moral values.If we apply the same kind of analysis to the Indian newspaper, the figure that arises appears to be that of the Nation, or more precisely the union of Nation and State. The fact that the event is described as a national disaster has provided a decisive framework for the structuring of rescue and reconstruction activities. The narrative curve, which starts with the disaster and finishes at the moment when India, not content with having put into operation an enormous emergency structure, offers aid to other countries like Indonesia, clearly shows the meaning of the narrative. The processes of accumulation, by which the efforts of all the authorities are piled up anyhow, reinforce this aspect of the picture. The accumulation of donations, from the humblest to the most extravagant, actively constructs the political figure of a self-sufficient Nation demonstrating its ability to take its place among the donors. Here the Nation is neither an imaginary community nor a nationalist ideal, even if both these dimensions are present in the Indian political and media context. It emerges much more as an ‘advenant’ of the event which mobilizes it and causes it to appear.

The figure of collective ‘advenants’

What is it that enables us to characterize the Indian Nation or the international

community as a collective advenant? First of all, there is the fact that they are collective subjects, entities endowed with a real unity, consisting of a plurality of agents organized


around a shared commitment. On this occasion, the shared commitment depends on actions of giving. Individuals, because, confronted with the event in question, they come together in giving or give something to one another, together form these units of the Indian Nation or the international community. Of course we can observe that these units take different forms. The Indian Nation is a pre-existing historical entity structured by a particular political framework, while the international community is quite different and appears to have a much less defined shape. In reality, selfless action does not have the same meaning in both cases. In the first, actions of giving among members of the same nation constitute a response by means of which the Nation confronts what has happened to it. As soon as the event is described as ‘national’, the disaster affecting fishermen on the coast of Bengal is a matter for the whole Nation. In the second case, the international community exists on both sides of the frontier between donors and recipients. In reality, Both the Nation and the international community are also what comes into being [advient] at the end of this process of circulating money and information. There is therefore also a temporal dimension to the construction of these collective subjects, which are never completely given in advance but are born precisely out of their shared commitment and are shaped as entities through the media narratives. Thus, on the one hand we see a community of donors appear and on the other hand we witness the phenomenon of reversal which moves a Nation from the domain of suffering to that of action. This means that reporting the facts and the reactions to the facts are part of the coverage of the event and that the subject, the advenant is not only composed by the individuals which are directly affected by an occurrence, it also arises from distance as far as values are concerned.At the end of this analysis we can no longer say that the media are producing by themselves a distorted image of events (Champagne, Nora) nor that the publics are a collection of individuals watching what is happening in reality without being concerned (Romano). We could rather say that the media take part in vast collective processes of understanding a common reality in which different sort of agents and publics are committed. Traditionally, the positions of agents, media and publics in the process were clearly defined. The question that I would like to ask in my conclusion is whether these positions have been affected or not, or may be affected or not in the future, by the rising of NTC and the development of UGC or social networks on Internet such as Twitter.

Conclusion: how does the rising of NTC change the role of the media in these

collective processes? The coverage of the tsunami has been the first big international coverage using

UGC. Most of the images of the wave as well as of the devastated areas have been produced by amateurs. Tourists had been able to shoot the wave before any professional camera and the circulation of these pictures on Internet before being published by the media has been a mean to share such a dreadful experience, and to search for missing persons. The comments following the photographs or the videos were usually highly subjective expressing fear, sorrow and anxiety as well as the nostalgia of a lost paradise. But, when used by the media, extracts of videos and amateur photographs were often presented as factual representations of a physical phenomenon. They could show what the professional cameras had not been able to shoot, show what the wave was looking like. The pictures were detached from their subjective comments and imported into objective reports of the facts which were hardly (or vaguely) précising who had filmed the wave, in what circumstances etc. But the views had been taken by somebody who was threatened by the wave and, as a spectator I could face the wave through his own eyes, be at his place. In spite of the factuality of the journalistic comment the amateur


photographs or videos extracts create a link from one subject to another one and this subjectivity cannot be erased.Nowadays, Twitter plays an important part in the coverage of events such as the crash of a plane in Holland and in New York, gunfire in Germany or terrorist attacks in Pakistan. In these different cases non professionals have been able to testify what was happening, to produce data and pictures, and to comment and analyze the media coverage. The boundaries between the different positions structuring the constitution of media events, that is to say, actors, media and publics have faded. The circulation of the news goes in every direction, from actors to publics, from publics to actors, from actors to the media and from publics to the media. Meanwhile, the classical transfer of information from the actors to the media and from the media to the public has fallen apart. In that sense, we can say that the consequence of the use of social networks is that anybody has the capacity of being alternatively in any of these three positions. But another consequence seems to go deeper. In the collective processes analyzed above, the media transform a particular event suffered by some individuals into factual reports which can generate reactions as far as norms, values or believes are concerned into an event giving birth to an advenant. The media are involved in a process of transformation of an event which affects some individuals into a more general event which concerns a wider and probably more abstract community such as a Nation or an international community in our examples. Though artificial it may be, the production of objectivity is a mean to operate this sort of transformation. The use of UGC or social networks develops more interactivity than the traditional media but arouse the import of more subjectivity in the media coverage of events which consequences are already difficult to predict, but which will affect the collective processes of constitution of a common as well as a public reality.

REFERENCES

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discours, Bruxelles, Ina-de Boeck. DAVIDSON, D. (1980) Essays on actions and events, Oxford, Clarendon Press. LATOUR, BRUNO (1987)Science in action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through

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problèmes, dir. Jacques Le Goff et Pierre Nora, Gallimard, NRF. RICOEUR, PAUL (1983)Temps et récit, Paris, PUF. ROMANO, CLAUDE (1998) L’événement et le monde, Paris, PUF. ---------- (1999) L’événement et le temps, Paris, PUF. VENDLER, ZENO (1967) « Facts and events », Linguistics in Philosophy, Ithaca, New-York,

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Jocelyne Arquembourg, Institut Français de Presse. Université de Paris II. Laboratoire CARISM. 4, rue Blaise Desgoffes, 75006 Paris, France. Email: . [email protected]

Arquembourg - 2004 - Media Events as a Collective Process of the Constitution of Reality

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