Media Events

Constituting a new television genre, live broadcasts of historic events have become world rituals - high holidays of mass communication. These media events, Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz argue, have the potential for transforming societies even as they transfix viewers around the globe. The authors apply their original thesis to public spectacles such as the Olympic Games, Anwar el-Sadat's journey to Jerusalem, the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, John F. Kennedy's funeral, the moon landing, and Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland. They offer an ethnography of how media events are scripted, negotiated, performed, celebrated, shamanized, and reviewed. Media events, they show, turn televison into an icon, but also give it real power - to declare holidays, to shape collective memory, to integrate and reorganize societies. The authors separate these events into three categories: contest, conquest and coronation. Astute borrowings froorm Max Weber and Emile Ddurkheim underscore their analysis. Into their anthropological framework Dayan and Katz integrate empirical studies of broadcasting and analysis of the aesthetics of television.
They explore the phenomenon of "not being there", claiming that the living room celebration of media events is a unique form of ceremonial experience, different from - but a powerful as - the experience of "being there". They look at the element of tension generated by the unpredictable live unfolding of an event. And they discuss the roles of braodcast narrative, interpretation, and commentary, as well as the preplanning of public and advertising. Students, scholars and practitioners in mass communication should find it required reading, and it should spark interest in anyone seeking to understand the role of televison in events such as the Gulf War or the Thomas confirmation hearings. Daniel Dayan is a Fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. Elihu Katz is Professor of Sociology and Communication at the Hebrew University of Director of the Guttman Institute of Applied Social Reserach. Both are also members of the faculty of the Annenberg School for communication at the Unversity of Southern California.