Whose Pictures? Transcript Date: Tuesday, 8 April 2008 - 12:00AM VISUAL IMAGERY IN THE MASS MEDIA - WHOSE PICTURES? Christopher Cook Whose Pictures? is my subject this afternoon. And I'd like to begin where I intend to stay all afternoon, in America. First, back in the first week of this New Year and the start of this year's race for the White House when the Democratic going was already getting tough and rough. Senator Obama, you'll remember had just won in the Iowa caucuses and Senator Clinton the firm favourite for so long was on her back foot. CLIP ONE YOU TUBE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qgWH89qWks DUR: 1.58 Did the ladyweep? Was it a real lump in the throat that January day in New Hampshire? Here was one of the most memorable television images in the early stages of this year's presidential campaign in the United States. 'I had this incredible moment of connection with the voters of New Hampshire and they saw it and they heard it. And they gave me this incredible victory last night,' said Hillary Clinton during an interview with CBS after she'd won the New Hampshire Democratic Primary. The story in The Times online continued, 'Analysis of exit polls from New Hampshire showed that women voters, traditionally [Senator Clinton's] most loyal supporters, flooded back after deserting her for Barack Obama in last week's Iowa caucuses. Mr Obama narrowly edged Mrs Clinton for the female vote in Iowa primary last week but yesterday she enjoyed a clear 13-point lead.' The implication is clear. A discreetly moist eye, a beat in the voice all planned and perfectly performed for the camera. A perfectly judged political tactic and a great performance by the now leading lady. Before long the columnists were banging at the dressing room door. This is India Knight in The Times within a week of the alleged weeping. '...you wouldn't have to be the world's greatest cynic to think, cut it out, Miss Pants on Fire. You are crying for yourself, which you're perfectly entitled to do, and for your apparently doomed ambition. You are not crying for America. It was also noticeable that she inclined her head slightly towards the camera just before she welled up.' Sisterly solidarity was even less in evidence in the Guardian on January 10th, a day after the celebrated scene in a Coffee Shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire when Germaine Greer declared that, 'Watching Hillary Clinton pretending to get teary-eyed is enough to make me give up shedding tears altogether... Hillary's feeble display of emotion, while answering questions from voters... is supposed to have done her campaign the world of good. If it has, it's because people have wished a tear into her stony reptilian eye, not because there actually was one. What caused her to get all mooshy was her mention of her own love of her country. Patriotism has once more proved a valuable last refuge for a scoundrel.' But why shouldn't Senator Clinton's damp eyed patriotism have been genuine? And even if it was contrived is that such a crime? It clearly moved the women voters of New Hampshire, which I might remind you describes itself as the Granite State. So even the stones can weep in America? More seriously, what we have here is evidence of the fault line that seems to run through television news on both sides of the Atlantic. An educated minority decry it as at best a series of simplifications and at worst downright distortion, while the majority continue to enjoy it and when polled declare that television is their primary source of news about the world. (MORI, 1990). The minority complain that television news is led by pictures, that pictures are incapable of carrying an argument, that images are just that, an image of the truth not the thing itself. Yet this is precisely what seems to appeal to the rest of us. We want to see the news and we're willing to go along with those old tropes, that 'seeing is believing' and 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' But whose pictures are they? Who picks them? And how are they put together? These are my themes this afternoon. But back to the liberal intelligentsia's anxieties about television news, I am reminded of anecdote - it's possibly an newsroom urban myth - that the American Edwin Diamond recounts in his book The Tin Kazoo: Television, Politics and News [1975 - MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass - Pxi]. Diamond writes. 'I'm going to tell you a story and after I tell it, you will know all there is to know about television news - The executives of this station [in New York] were watching all three [network] news shows one night. There had been a fire in a Roman Catholic orphanage on Staten Island. One executive complained that a rival station had better film coverage. 'Their flames are higher than ours', he said. But another countered: 'Yes, but our nuns are crying harder that theirs.' And there you have the case for the prosecution. The Australian John Langer elegantly summarises it under six heads in his book Tabloid Television: Popular Journalism and Other News [Routledge 1998 - ISBN 0-415-06637-9 (Pbk) - P1]. Television news is primarily a commodity enterprise run by market-oriented managers who place outflanking the 'competition' above journalistic responsibility and integrity Television news is in the business of entertainment, like any other television product, attempting to pull audiences for commercial not journalistic reasons Television news has set aside the values of professional journalism in order to indulge in the presentation of gratuitous spectacles Television news is overly dependent on filmed images which create superficiality and lack information content Television news traffics in trivialities and deals in dubious emotionalism Television news is exploitative Here, as John Langer notes, is the lament of those who distrust the mass media and popular culture. This is the cry of the English intellectual so elegantly skewered in Professor John Carey's book Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1800-1939[Faber - Paperback, 1992]. Carey always a rapier sharp polemicist in print and whom one of his ex-students described as 'Oscar Wilde with Jackboots on' maps out the contempt the makers of modern literature had for mass culture. But was it the culture or the mass they feared? As Kevin Williams writes in Get me a Murder a Day! - A History of Mass Communication in Britain [Arnold. 2003 - ISBN 0340614668 PB P2] 'The history of mass communication is in one sense a history of the fear of the masses.' In this version of the world the chief crime to be laid at the door of television news is that it panders to popular taste. And for popular read uneducated and so ignorant. Television news has failed to inform us about the inner workings of liberal democracy, has abdicated its responsibility to educate us into citizenship and simply sought to entertain us. And even worse, it has pursued gratuitous spectacle rather than espousing the 'values of professional journalism'. It 'traffics in trivialities and deals in dubious emotionalism'. And above all, says Williams, 'Television news is overly dependent on filmed images which create superficiality and lack information content'. This is not the place to replay that ancient argument that British high culture prizes the word over the image, that Jane Austen is valued more than Turner, that T.S.Eliot is held in greater esteem than David Bomberg or Wyndham Lewis. But a medium that depends on images rather than words for its appeal and often its effect too is perhaps unlikely to appeal to the British intellectual. And it doesn't help that television news has its roots in the popular newspapers of the nineteenth century. Both the radical papers of the early part of the century and Lord Northcliffe's popular press at the other end as the Victorian shades into Edwardian, the phenomenally successful Daily Mail in particular, which had learnt its lessons well from the penny newspapers with their tales if murder, mayhem and revenge. So in the 1830s Henry Hetherington, the editor of the Poor Man's Guardian could write that 'It is the cause of the rabble that we advocate, the poor, the suffering, the industrious, the productive classes - we will teach this rabble their power - we will each them that they are your master instead of being your slave.' [Kevin Williams - Get me a Murder a Day! - A History of Mass Communication in Britain- Arnold. 2003 - ISBN 0340614668 PB P37] While sixty years later Northcliffe was supposed to have coined the Mail's motto 'Get me a murder a day'. If popular newspapers are one of the godparents to television news, the other is clearly the cinema newsreels, just as suspect in the eyes of British intellectuals and as much, perhaps, for their politics as the strident way in which they crowed the news each week before the feature film. Pathe, Movietone and the rest of them established a very particular style of news reporting in which pictures led and the words tried not to tread on their feet. We know too that in the 1930s British film producers worked hand in glove with the British Board of Film Censors [Jeffrey Richards -The Age of the Dream Palace - Routledge 1984 ISBN:0710097646 P122-124] and that the censors were working with the government of the day. So Alfred Hitchcock's sharp little thriller The Lady Vanishes, scripted by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliatthad to make sure that the nasty politics that accompanied the Lady's disappearance in the film was located in a never-never land-Ruritania as far removed from Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy as was visually possible.