Narrative Horror and the Downfall of Leaders #1: Rupert Murdoch

You have devoted your life to creating a great empire, one that stretches around the world and wields influence over politics and culture in a number of countries. Decades of criticism and conspiracy about the pernicious effects of your empire only testify to your importance. You have groomed your successors and shaped the climate they will work within. Biographers will not be able to knock the magnitude of your achievements. Your story is written. You are legendary, a mythical figure in your lifetime, hated, loved, known. So imagine the agony of losing this reputation in a single act and finding that all you built can be swept swiftly away. Instead of being remembered as a great empire builder you’ll be remembered for a single, tawdry episode. The horror!

International relations is full of leaders and legends who achieved much but will be remembered for a totally different and humiliating reason. The Spanish novelist Javier Marias calls this narrative horror:

Its what we call “vergüenza torera”, literally, “a bullfighter’s sense of shame” … Because bullfighters, of course, have loads of witnesses, a whole arena full, plus sometimes a TV audience of millions, so it’s perfectly understandable that they should think: “I’d rather leave here with a ruptured femoral artery or dead than be thought a coward in the presence of all these people who will go on to talk about it endlessly and for ever.” Bullfighters fear narrative horror like the plague, that final defining wrong move, they really care about how their lives end.

And ‘it’s the same with … almost any other public figure’ – the retired pop star whose paedophilia is suddenly and definitively public, the movie star whose career is eclipsed by a racist outburst or car chase, the president whose eight years in office will be remembered for a misplaced cigar, the international office holder for whom a graphic accusation of rape is never exorcised from the public mind.

It is these single tawdry episodes that Marias writes of, but I wonder if narrative horror is looming for Rupert Murdoch. There are many hoping that we are at the beginning of a chain reaction episode that will bring the downfall of his News International business and potentially his wider News Corps empire in the US, Australia and Asia. It seems the editors and journalists of his UK newspapers operated an institutionalized practice of bribing police and hacking into the voicemails of anyone newsworthy, including murdered schoolchildren and dead soldiers, not to say the sitting Prime Minister’s bank account and the medical records of his ill children. The ingenious practices that have made his UK newspapers so successful became – inside a week – the disgusting practices that force him to start shutting those newspapers down. His bid to take over the pay-TV operator BSkyB is now opposed by all parties. Such a twist in the larger tale of his empire-building can only be a blow to Murdoch’s pride.

If this has happened in other countries, a new mythology will quickly form, especially as these practices have long been suspected. The troubling links in the UK between News International and the current Prime Minister’s choice of press officers raises questions about a new iron triangle of press, police and political leaders that exerts control of public information that could be replicated anywhere institutional arrangements allow. Murdoch failed to contain the crisis in the UK, now he must fear contagion. The sense of narrative horror must be setting in.

Under this pressure, will Murdoch say or do something that will obliterate his life story so far? We might think this unlikely – he’s too smooth an operator, too experienced, and his reporters know where everyone’s bodies are buried. But Marias’ point is that you cannot know your own face tomorrow – what you are capable of, and how you will look to others. We have a parallel, private or theoretical self who could break through any moment and ruin all our hard work and public reputation. How far will this go and how will he react? Parliament has called for him to give evidence next week.  

One of the most enjoyable aspects of politics is that the decisions leaders make aren’t fully explained by their rational reading of structural forces or immediate conditions. Life intervenes: character and psychology, personal glory and horror, boldness and panic. So I’ll call this Narrative Horror #1 and invite contributions about other leaders who lost it all – or who found a way out. 

Special issue out: Remembering the 2005 London bombings: Media, memory, commemoration

The Miriam Hyman Memorial Trust website - a living memorialA special issue of Memory Studies has been published, Remembering the 2005 London bombings: Media, memory, commemoration. It presents research from a three-year (2008–2010) project, ‘Conflicts of Memory: Mediating and Commemorating the 2005 London Bombings’, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).There are articles by established scholars – Anna Reading and Andrew Hoskins from media studies, linguist Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, psychologist Steve Brown – as well as rising stars Annie Bryan and Matt Allen, and short commentary pieces from Stefanie Petschick and myself.

Click here for access.

Stereotypes and suspicion: Nicer words won’t change anything

A new report was released yesterday, ‘Suspect Communities’, comparing how UK media and government have framed Irish and Muslim communities since the 1970s. The authors find that the ideas underpinning counter-terrorism measures and the way politicians, policymakers and the media discuss who might be responsible for bombings have not changed over four decades. The key finding is that ambiguity surrounding who is an ‘extremist’ or a ‘terrorist’ has led to hostile responses in everyday life - at work, in shops, on the street  - from members of the public who think they are under threat from Irish-sounding or Muslim-looking people whom they associate with that threat. Hence, the report implies that government and media language is impacting on the everyday lives of communities judged suspect and everyone else who must live with them. In a debate in Parliament yesterday, the solution put forward by many was greater sensitivity of language by elites and more dialogue between the stigmatized, the elites, and the majority society.

While useful, the debate needs to go further. The crux with such reports is their method. This research team first analysed thousands of media texts and government documents, and found these to consistently frame these communities as suspect (and as communities, not individuals). They then did focus groups with members of those suspect communities to hear about living under suspicion. What the team did not do is try to explain why journalists or policymakers would consistently produce stigmatizing material. The consistency of the stigmatization suggests its nothing to do with any individuals, but a function of the institutional practices and professional imperatives of the fields of journalism and security policy. Most journalists don’t want to be racist. They think that by allowing a ‘moderate’ and ‘militant’ Muslim to debate they are providing balance – journalists don’t usually understand that they are reducing threatening and non-threatening minorities to equivalents in the eye of the non-Muslim audience. And policymakers know full well that homogenizing a community to tell it to ‘stop harbouring terrorists’ is not going to please everyone, but they really don’t want another bomb going off and will try any means to stop it. These are the pressures they face, and criticizing their language choices isn’t going to remove those pressures. So, if we are to move towards societies in which entire groups are not routinely lumped together as dangerous and disloyal, we need to begin to unravel these institutional and professional logics. A truly critical project would address these power relations and daily trade-offs instead of simply decrying the consequences.

This is an important topic. The Suspect Communities report supports a longstanding research finding (UK here, US here) that those who feel stigmatized tend either to retreat from public spaces (‘keep your head down’, ‘keep your mouth shut’) or become angry and try to resist slurs by turning them on their heads (reclaiming ‘queer’ in the 1970s, jihadi chic in the 2000s). Either way, the result is fear and alienation, which reduces trust on all ‘sides’ and makes reconciling interests and grievances through democratic institutions much more difficult.

New Deal for BBC World Service Weakens Britain’s Soft Power?

The reputation of the BBC World Service around the world reflects that of Britain generally. It’s an institution tied to colonial history. It aspires to global reach. Through its journalism it tries to uphold values of impartiality and objectivity, and therein lies the attractive, soft power dimension. As an institution, however, it cannot escape appearing partial – it is funded by the British state, and that state wouldn’t continue to fund it unless it was serving Britain’s interests. Therein lies the appearance of hypocrisy that taints Britain’s soft power. But this week the British government announced a new funding mechanism, and yesterday Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC World Service, spoke about the changes to an audience in London.

Una Marson, George Orwell, T.S. Eliot and others at the World Service during WW2The BBC World Service is currently funded by a direct grant from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Britain’s State Department. While a Royal Charter prevents the FCO interfering in the editorial content of World Service programming, the FCO can decide which foreign language services are strengthened or cut. In the last decade, Arabic and other strategically important language services have tended to do quite well, others less so.  Last year the government announced the World Service would be funded through the annual licence fee people in Britain must pay in order to receive BBC content legally. The World Service will be just another part of the BBC per se, its tie to the FCO less obvious. This week the World Service was granted extra funding not least because of its performance through the Arab Spring and supportive comments from Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader.

The problem for the World Service now is that it is just another BBC service, funded by taxpayers. In the current economic malaise, taxpayers might feel extra hospitals are more important than Hindi radio. Horrocks suggested that the World Service is highly regarded by British citizens. But historically, the value of World Service programming is to those in conflict zones and diasporic publics who consumed its cultural output. People in Britain gets a more parochial, national BBC news and are probably unaware of the range and impact of World Service programming.

As the World Service becomes increasingly integrated into the general BBC – sharing technology, content, staff, and buildings – and as it has to justify itself to a home audience, so its distinctiveness would seem under threat. Horrocks seemed optimistic. For example, the fragmentation of media across devices, formats and languages and creation of innumerable niche micro-audiences is not a problem because the World Service has the tools and expertise to repackage the same news for all possible outlets.  While China, Russia and others may be investing huge resources on rival global broadcasting organisations, the World Service retains the credibility borne of its professional, impartial journalistic ethos (note that Al-Jazeera has been criticised for treating different Arab Spring uprisings in very different ways, prompting a prickly reaction). 

Horrocks finally turned to the question of soft power. He argued that the World Service does not aim to project soft power, but that paradoxically it does create soft power for Britain because the objectivity of World Service journalism becomes associated with Britain. A moment later, however, he said the World Service aims to project and change people’s perspectives, to “impart impartiality”. Imparting sounds very much like changing minds. Changing minds is an instrumental goal for the FCO, who want the world to “do business with Britain”. Does this make the World Service an unwitting instrument of the FCO? This ambivalence is exactly why the World Service is open to charges of hypocrisy.

Horrocks must be thanked for speaking openly and taking questions, and it is important that the World Service continues to engage in critical discussion about its role and purpose. I would be interested to know whether the chiefs of CCTV or Russia Today hold free flowing public debates.

New article: Trust, Confidence and Credibility - Twitter and the 2010 UK Election

The peer-reviewed journal Information, Communication & Society has published a new article by Lawrence Ampofo, Nick Anstead and Ben O'Loughlin, entitled 'Trust, Confidence, and Credibility: Citizen responses on Twitter to opinion polls during the 2010 UK General Election'. Download it here.

For those without an institutional subscription, please email me on Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk for a copy.

Abstract

This paper explores how citizen-users think and communicate about public opinion polling through an analysis of tweets published during and just after the 2010 UK General Election leaders' debate broadcast on Sky News on 22 April 2010, the second of three debates. For those who comment on events in real time through social media such as Twitter, a category we call the 'viewertariat', this event was notable for Sky News's immediate coverage of a YouGov poll that seemed discrepant. Indeed, within an hour of the end of the debate, various mainstream media published a number of polls apparently at odds with each other. Such discrepancies opened a space for lay theories to emerge about relationships between political parties, media, polling firms, and the wider public itself. Individuals were pushed to find explanations and quick to publish them in a public assembly of views. Analysis of these data illuminates not just what people think, but how they think about long-term concerns of scholars and practitioners of politics and political communication, such as credibility, trust and power, and how citizens manage expectations during events where the outcome is uncertain. Accounting for viewertariat behaviour develops recent research on mediatized politics in important ways. First, we find some viewertariat members performing a lay tutelage role, providing information and explanations about polling and elections to fellow citizens who express confusion. This indicates the continued importance of informed public discussion to some citizens. Second, we find a blurring of elite/non-elite interactions alongside persistent theories about elite conspiracies.

 

New Working Paper: Representation and Communication: The Internet and Communication Architectures in Local Governance by Michael J. Jensen

We are pleased to announce a new working paper by Dr Michael J. Jensen.

Representation and Communication: The Internet and Communication Architectures in Local Governance

Abstract

This paper outlines the concept of a communication architecture and applies it to the study of policy communication flows between stakeholders and American elected local government officials. The paper begins by elaborating the relationship between communication technologies and architectures of communication. The first section outlines the concept of a communication architecture and the signatures of different architectures. The second section details the data, methods of analysis, and operationalization of the contrasting communication architectures. The third section empirically examines the impact of internet and email use on shaping the architecture of communication from the vantage point of local government elected officials. Finally, the paper concludes with some observations regarding the significance of the internet for empirical democratic practice. The key findings are that communication flows do not singularly follow a liberal interest aggregation communication architecture and that communication flows correspond more to an informational logic.

Download pdf

For previous working papers, click here.

 

Call: Journal of Communication Special Issue on Social Media and the "Arab Spring"

Phil Howard and Malcolm Parks are putting together a special issue of the Journal of Communication on communication technologies and political resistance in the Middle East and North Africa. The email from Malcolm Parks and the full call are below.

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Email from Malcolm Parks:

Over the past several months events in the Middle East and elsewhere in the developing world have placed an international spotlight on the role of social media in facilitating and resisting social change. Communication researchers should be at the center of efforts to understand these events.  I am pleased to announce that a special issue of the Journal of Communication will be devoted to this exciting and important topic.  Prof. Philip Howard, whose recent book, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the “Arab Spring,” has agreed to serve as Guest Co-editor of this special issue planned for early 2012.  Deadline for submission is August 15, 2011.
 
Please feel free to contact Prof. Howard (pnhoward@uw.edu) or me (macp@uw.edu) should you have further questions.
 
Malcolm (Mac) Parks
Editor, Journal of Communication
Professor of Communication
Department of Communication Box 353740
University of Washington
Seattle, WA  98195

Social Media and Political Change: Journal of Communication Special Issue

The “Arab Spring” as well as recent events in other parts of the world have demonstrated that new communication technologies, such as mobile phones and the internet, are simultaneously new tools for social movement organizing and new tools for surveillance by authoritarian regimes. Though communication theory necessarily transcends particular technologies, software, and websites, digital media have clearly become an important part of the toolkit available to political actors. These technologies are also becoming part of the research toolkit for scholars interested in studying the changing patterns in interpersonal, political, and global communication.

How have changing patterns of interpersonal, political, and global communication created new opportunities for social movements, or new means of social control by political elites? The role of social media in new patterns of communication is especially dramatic across North Africa and the Middle East, where decades of authoritarian rule have been challenged—with varying degrees of success. Social media—broadly understood as a range of communication technologies that allow individuals to manage the flow of content across their own networks of family, friends and other social contacts—seem to have had a crucial role in the political upheaval and social protest in several countries. Mass communication has not ceased to be important, but is now joined with a variety of other media with very different properties that may reinforce, displace, counteract, or create fresh new phenomena.

This Special Issue seeks original qualitative, comparative, and quantitative research on social media and political change, particularly as related to events in North Africa and the Middle East, but we are also receptive to work on political change in other parts of the developing world. We would welcome manuscripts from a diverse range of methodologies, and covering diverse communities and cultures. Methodological innovations or mixed method approaches are particularly encouraged, and manuscripts on the interpersonal and intergroup aspects of social movement organizing are central interest. Whatever the approach, our goal is to select manuscripts that are grounded in the actual use of social media in promoting or resisting political change in developing countries and regions.

If you have questions regarding the appropriateness of a potential submission, please contact Prof. Philip N. Howard (pnhoward@uw.edu).

Deadline for Submission is August 15th, 2011, through http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jcom. Manuscripts must confirm to all JOC guidelines, including the use of APA 6th edition format and a limit of 30 pages total manuscript length. Please indicate your desire to be considered for the special issue in your cover letter.

A Good Storyline Won’t Win a War – Did the Taliban out-communicate our Generals?

(Written with Alister Miskimmon) Following the death of Osama bin Laden, political pressure is mounting for an early scaling down of British military troops presence in Afghanistan ahead of David Cameron’s deadline of 2014 for the end of Britain’s combat mission. With this in mind the British defence establishment is trying to understand their role in Afghanistan since 2001. Much of this soul-searching has focused on trying to explain why British forces have not been able to pacify sections of the Afghan population. Their explanation is that they have not been able to project the right storyline to Afghanis. They feel that they are being out-communicated by the Taliban, losing out to a more effective strategic narrative. This is presented as one reason Britain and NATO have failed to win hearts and minds. 

An example of such thinking was witnessed in Westminster this week in a session of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee.  General Sir Nicholas Houghton, Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, identified a critical moment as Britain’s efforts at "poppy eradication at the time of the deployment". "In the minds of some local Helmandis, and within the narrative of the Taliban," he said, this created the "idea that these [British] forces are coming here to eradicate your poppy and take your living away." Ultimately, "that worked against us in terms of strategic narrative." The incredulity of our most senior military officers that they could not convince Afghanis in Helmand of their good intentions suggests that they think of communication as an easy solution; as if finding the right strategic narrative would solve their operational problems.

Such a stance exposes the lack of clear goals in the first place. Failure to convince Afghanis stems more from a lack of clear British strategy than the ability of Taliban forces to present a more convincing counter narrative.

In our fast moving media ecology, projecting a coherent message is a challenge. However, there are some instances when governments are able to deliver a clear narrative. For example, the killing of Osama bin Laden was so clear it did not need to be explained – least of all to the United States’ citizens seen celebrating on the streets of American cities after the President announced the mission. President Obama did not even engage in the ensuing debate about the legal status of such an action. He let his actions speak for themselves.

Once war has begun, strategic narratives are about keeping domestic audiences on side, not about convincing those who you are invading. When hostilities begin it is too late to convince them. Trying to tell a reassuring or uplifting story to Afghanis that is contradicted by what they see and hear on the ground only opens up space for Britain to be accused of hypocrisy – a narrative with a long precedent in Central Asia and the Middle East.

2011-05-10 Ben O'Loughlin to speak at KCL on strategic communications

On May 9-10, 2011 King's College London will host a conference, 'Strategic Communications: The Cutting Edge' organised by David Betz and colleagues in partnership with CIWAG, US Naval War College. Ben O'Loughlin has been invited to speak about 'Harnessing the Media Ecology: Power and Decision-making in Diffused War'. 

Conference background: After an era of apparent stability during the Cold War, strategic communications faces a dilemma; some venture to call it a crisis. Gone are the certainties of a government’s ability to rely on a stable audience, clear-cut enemy, and reliable home support. A new media ecology has seen traditional outlets of press, radio and television interact with new, digital technologies of internet, mobile telephony and computers. These communications networks connect diverse and fragmented populations enabling vast amounts of data and images to cross the globe instantly whereby a local event can become an international news-story within minutes. As traditional barriers between home and foreign audiences disappear, the effect has been to undermine states’ attempts to project consistent and coherent strategic narratives into geopolitics. In recent months the release of hundreds of thousands of raw data files by the online whistleblower WikiLeaks has highlighted the degree to which states are vulnerable to fast-moving, high-volume communications. Wrong-footed by the latest potentially damaging revelation, state communicators appear defensive and their policy statements increasingly disjointed. More recently the events across the Middle East have served to underline the problems even authoritarian governments face when challenged by populations exploring a dynamic and porous media environment. This conference asks: is there a constructive way forward or is strategic communications dead?