Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Ritual: The Dark Continent of Journalistic Ritual

115 Ritual The Da r k Cont inent of Jour na l ist ic Rit ua l Cat her ine A. W a r r en We have entered into a Conradian heart of darkness in Iraq. The dark continent of American journalism is darker than ever. The world seems on the verge of imploding. Indeed, it might, although as James W. Carey has pointed out, “the shadow of the Apocalypse is cast across all our sophisticated imaginings” (Carey 2002b, 196). At this moment in history, it seems particularly appropriate—and critical—to return to Carey’s formative insights about the role of ritual in media: “Media events are often exercises in social cruelty that teeter on the edge of legitimacy and bear dangers beyond purely ritual ones. They threaten civil society because they suture the audience into systematic cruelties and institutionalize civil discord” (218). Ritual is a particularly appropriate tool for examining the interstices where brutality, whether scripted or unscripted, and the excesses of empire intersect with media and journalistic practices. Moreover, while most news media outlets have been collaborating with an administration bent on silencing dissent and containing information, there are moments of surprising challenges to, and disruptions of, ritualized narratives of the United States and its citizens as exceptional, generous, and peace loving. 116 Catherine A. Warren A central thread in Carey’s work, ritual ties together a host of interrelated concepts and practices: media routines, media events, news as drama, conversation and community, the nation-state and the media, and sacrifice. Carey’s now elegiac lines about ritual came in a 1975piece entitled “A Cultural Approach to Communication”: “A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs” (Carey 1989, 18). In the years since, those lines have morphed and become increasingly multidimensional . They have been quoted countless times—often ritualistically. They have been occasionally critiqued as underdeveloped in that essay (although Carey went on to develop the concept in much greater detail, bringing more darkness to the concept), misused, and well-used in countless lectures and publications, expanded and expounded. They stand as a foundational moment for communication studies. They also age well. Despite the huge changes in journalism and its technologies, despite the disappearance of some forms of journalistic practice and the emergence of others, viewing certain kinds of news stories through the lens of ritual helps explicate the creation and consumption of journalism. At the heart of journalist practice, ritual thrives and butts against journalism’s claims of truth and objectivity. “Under a ritual view, then, news is not information but drama. It does not describe the world but portrays an arena of dramatic forces and action; it exists solely in historical time; and it invites our participation on the basis of our assuming, often vicariously, social roles within it” (Carey 1989, 21). Much changed—in Carey’s work, in the work of others influenced by him, and in the world—during the thirty-one years since Carey first published those words. The shared beliefs of those early lines, their seeming benevolence and integrative appeal, have given way to tensions and ruptures and cruelties. Nonetheless , those early terms continue to exert a gravitational pull: other media scholars have called them an “imaginative meditation” (Czitrom 1990, 679) and “some of the most elegant and influential lines ever written in our field” (Ettema 1990, 309). They have appeared as a foundational insight in numerous communication journal articles, as well as articles from Advertising Age to The Nation, from the Hastings Center Report (devoted to biomedical ethics) to the International Journal of Geographical Information Science, and even in weblogs, such as PressThink, dedicated to journalism and politics.1 The importance of that essay did not derive merely from applying to communication a term associated with anthropology and religion. The essay also shifted the emphasis from a view that Carey termed the “transmission view” of Rit ua l 11 7 communication, the only coin of the communication realm at the time, thereby opening a space for an interpretive approach that broke through the walls of empirical research then dominating and impoverishing the field. Nonetheless, three decades later, it can still be argued that, as Carey himself wrote in 1975in an excess of understatement, “The ritual view of communication has not...