By Brigitte L. Nacos
One of the most over-used words of the media’s talking heads and writing hands is the term “historic.” Unlike many other events and developments that are labeled as such, Barack Obama’s victory last November and the inauguration of the 44th U.S. president this week calls for the term “historic”: the swearing in of the first Black president is truly a huge milestone in America’s history that many people (I among them) considered an impossible dream when Obama announced his candidacy two years ago. In the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and actual warfare and threats thereof around the world, most Americans want to believe in Barack Obama’s promise for meaningful change—and so do many people around the globe.
No doubt, then, the inauguration of the next president deserves to be celebrated and reported extensively. It deserves to be a media event as were earlier inaugurations here and coronations abroad. For communication scholars, media events have a particular meaning; they are, as Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz put it, “preplanned and televised live” and “co-produced by broadcasters and organizers.” The media event becomes what James Carey called a “sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and communality.”
I wonder, though, how long a true media event can last before it loses a highly engaged audience and thus the potential for positive effects. Recently, Bree Nordenson wrote about a study commissioned by the Associated Press which found that participants who were exposured to news overload “showed signs of news fatigue, that is, they appeared debilitated by information overload and unsatisfying news experiences.”
As much as I look forward to President Obama’s inauguration speech and his taking the helm in the White House, I suffer by now from inauguration news fatigue. I am tired of talking heads in television--particular cable--and their colleagues in the print press who talk and write, when they have nothing new or worthwhile to report or comment on. I am tired of television’s annoying count-downs to inauguration day and teasers for non-stop coverage long before the actual event. I am tired of the speculations about cooperation and friction in the president’s “team of rivals.” I am tired of stories by witnesses to history who are coming out of the woodwork because they once shook Barack Obama’s hand or sat next to him or talked to his wife. Speculations about future politics and policies in Washington are fine as are human interest stories. But not in ever more replays.
To be sure, besides television, radio, and the print press, the Internet in particular contributes to today’s information overload in general and news glut with respect to Tuesday’s changing of the guards in particular.
But whatever the most significant causes may be, news overload and fatigue threaten to water down the positive effects of media events. If anything, the news coverage of the event will increase over the next hours. Tuning out till Tuesday may be the only hope for the appetite to return in time for the inauguration speech.
The solution is for the media to get substantive with sober appraisals of where we are now and what next, and the challenges at home and abroad Obama must navigate in his first '100 days'.
More of this -http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/16/AR2009011603721.html:
The key to success in Iraq, insists Crocker, was the psychological impact of Bush's decision to add troops. "In the teeth of ferociously negative popular opinion, in the face of a lot of well-reasoned advice to the contrary, he said he was going forward, not backward."
Bush's decision rocked America's adversaries, says Crocker: "The lesson they had learned from Lebanon was, 'Stick it to the Americans, make them feel the pain, and they won't have the stomach to stick it out.' That assumption was challenged by the surge."
Soon, Iraq will be Barack Obama's problem. And I ask Crocker what mistakes the new administration could make. He answers that he thinks it will avoid these errors, but he lists them anyway: "Concluding that this was the Bush administration's war, that it's stable enough now, that we don't want to inherit it, so we're going to back away."
Most of all, says Crocker, policymakers need to understand that this is a long game. A lasting change in Iraq isn't an on-off switch: "Not this year, not in five years, maybe not in 10 years."
The overarching lesson, he says, not just of Iraq but of his entire career, is that events have consequences that cannot be predicted, or escaped: "When we are part of a sweeping and traumatic set of events, we've got to understand that currents are set in motion that will play themselves out for many years, in ways that we can't always understand."
Posted by: Eric Chen | January 18, 2009 at 05:50 PM