Global Media Spectacle: News War over Hong Kong

Chapter 9. Media Event as Global Discursive Contestation

Chapter 9 Media Event as Global Discursive Contestation In some way echoes from China reverberate in every American county and town. —Dan Rather, CBS News anchor (Buerk, 1997) “Ceremonial politics” expresses the yearning for togetherness, for fusion. —Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992: viii) The global in the local, the local in the global. —Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi (1991: 122) By any yardstick, a world of 8,000 news hunters has created a big “media spectacle” in a faraway small island of Hong Kong, a ritualized media performance for the consumption of a global audience from Vermont to Sydney, from Shanghai to Liverpool, or from Hong Kong to Vancouver. Globalization touches our everyday lives in so many ways, yet it is also illusory to us. Although the media increasingly gain their global reach as part of the globalized economy, the discourse of a global event remains essentially processed through national-cum-local prisms. In this volume, we have tried to show that the global news event is staged, domesticated, and hyped to produce various media discourses that express different preferred national identities, values, and order as much as they disclose the real and imagined conditions of Hong Kong. In a metaphysical sense, is the whole of these discourses larger than the sum of its parts? These discourses may be juxtaposed to form a totality with a rather wide spectrum of conflicting perspectives that does not, however, necessarily reveal the whole story. International politics is in part an identity politics ; international journalism is in part a struggle over national identity. Each national media system may claim to have certain solid historical bases for constructing its identity discourse, but each discourse is bound to be partial, sketchy, and self-serving. Thus viewed, the media event is a key site and moment for staging global discursive contestation, which is nonetheless 169 grounded in unequal power and resources of the international political economy . Despite the glowing rhetoric of globalization, this is neither “the end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992) nor “the end of ideology” (Bell, 1962). In this closing chapter, we would like to summarize and extend our themes and arguments in the form of propositions. The Structure of International News Power and money make news. It has been said that in the contemporary age and today’s world, the global is the local, and the local is the global (Sreberny -Mohammadi, 1991). Global events have local consequences, and local events have global roots. But make no mistake about it: the global and the local are not created of equal power. If the handover of Hong Kong had not been billed as the first major clash of global systems and ideologies after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, it would not have attracted any world media attention and concern. Despite the absence of his network from Hong Kong for two decades and the declining audience interest in international news, Dan Rather of CBS imparts global significance to the handover of Hong Kong in an interview (Beurk, 1997): “We at CBS try to put it in the context of the ongoing story of China striving to be a world superpower… The world is an increasingly smaller place, and the echoes from China reverberate everywhere. In some way they reverberate in every American county and town.” His colleague and competitor, Jim Laurie, senior correspondent of ABC News, asks rhetorically: “Whither Hong Kong? In the minds of many Americans , so what!” (Knight and Nakano, 1999: 154). The answer, which he stops short of providing, seems quite simple and clear: whither China does matter. Structurally speaking, international communication takes place in the descending order of center-to-center, center-to-periphery, and periphery-to-periphery relationships (Galtung, 1971). This has at least six major implications for the international news structure. 1. The “media event” (Dayan and Katz, 1992) is staged at the global level for the global media to enact their cultural values in discursive contestation between nation-states. We shall return to elaborate on the nature, consequences, and limits of discursive contestation in the following sections. 2. Hong Kong is too peripheral to cross the threshold in the structure of foreign news (Galtung and Ruge, 1965). In the final analysis, Hong Kong only represents foreground skirmishes for the world media in their continuing, deep-seated background 170 Global Media Spectacle battles against China, the remaining Communist giant and a rising economic and military power on the world...