by JackRiddler » Tue Jul 07, 2009 8:54 am
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I'd like to call attention to two milestone TV productions, both of which I consider transformative moments in US society and culture: "America Held Hostage" and the O.J. Simpson case. Though the intensity of both faded long ago, these were gargantuan media frenzies and public moral panics in their respective eras. We can argue about the extent to which the original triggering events - the taking in 1979 of the US embassy in Tehran and the murder in 1994 of Nicole Simpson and Ron Brown - involved covert parapolitical planning, as opposed to shit just happening. We can also debate to what degree the moral panics set off by these two events were then conducted centrally as psychological operations on the American psyche. But there is little doubt our aliens would find them important out of proportion to other historic events, based on the sheer TV time devoted to each over several years. So let's take a closer look.
"America Held Hostage" ran as the primary US daily news coverage in both TV and print for almost all of the 444 days from the taking of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 until the release from Iran of the last 52 American hostages on January 20, 1981, in the hour after Ronald Reagan's inauguration. Those of you old enough to have watched it should recall that each night's US network news shows actually opened with a variant on ABC's title for the program, "America Held Hostage: Day XXX," so the name is not something I made up, but a universal referrent for it at the time. I don't think the original storming of the embassy was the result of a prior covert operations plan by any non-Iranian actors (though it was predicted as a likely consequence of Carter's allowing the Shah into the United States for medical treatment). But the media productions in the aftermath paralleled traditional top-down propaganda campaigns and provided the moral banner for rallying that year's "Reagan Revolution." And the affair's denouement was scripted in the "October Surprise" deal Casey and Bush cut with the Iranian government to delay the hostages' release until after Reagan's election victory.
The duration and prominence of the show and its staging as a televised national emergency were unprecedented. The late 1970s and early 1980s coincided roughly with the advent of VHS, the wider dissemination of cable and pay TV with consequent advent of 24-hour broadcasts -- farewell to the National Anthem and the Test Signal -- and the launch of MTV and CNN. We can see it as the transitional period between two ages of television, a time of revolution in the form and style of the medium. In the first decades of broadcast TV, sponsored programs ran according to set times within just a few forms, and news/documentary was distinguished from entertainment, even if both were corrupt. By the late 80s, TV knocked down these distinctions, as well as the pretense of a difference between reality and stage, or the program and its commercials, and started tending to 24-hour infotainment in increasingly fast and chaotic cross-promoting fragments.*
The O.J. Simpson frenzy ran roughly from the time of the murder of his estranged wife and her boyfriend in June 1994 until the announcement of a verdict in his second, civil trial on February 4, 1997, at the same time that Clinton was delivering that year's State of the Union speech. The networks had seriously floated the idea of having Clinton delay his speech until the verdict came in, an idea the White House naturally refused. So the TV ran a scroll announcing the O.J. verdict as it came, while Clinton was still speaking live. As soon as he was done, they skipped the usual pundit testimonials regarding his speech, and cut instead to O.J. courthouse coverage.
For most of the preceding three years, nearly every broadcast day featured hours of series programming devoted to the O.J. case on the cable news networks and talk radio (in addition to countless spot-news reports, there were full hours of "analysis" each night on programs hosted by John Gibson, Geraldo Rivera and Greta von Susteren, among others). It seemed to be the normal social assumption among Americans that each of them should have a passionately held opinion on the case and a thorough knowledge of every single development in it. Everyone was talking about it, and what one thought about O.J. was conflated with and considered indicative of every political issue on the planet, above all of race as the not-so deep psychological driver for the obsession. Much of white America was in a semi-permanent rage over the murder of a white woman by a big dominant black man who was seen somehow as the product of modern laxity and the beneficiary of a liberal justice system that rewards the perpetrators of crime and punishes the victims. Black Americans in turn felt themselves compelled into a defensive rejection of the majority view. The O.J. hysteria was also roughly associated with the Clinton and the polit-sex farce of the impeachment, which took center stage as the next over-produced media hysteria.
For the record, if forced to express an opinion at gunpoint, I'd lay down a certain bet that Simpson killed the couple, though it appears the LAPD blew the case and so had to frame him, which is hardly atypical for them. And I don't give the proverbial two hoots about it. I don't care and I never cared. While tragic, I consider the double murder to be about as important as any other one of several thousand individual homicides in the US at the time. The coverage was a million times out of proportion to the case's significance, and therefore a sociopolitical engineering event that happened to have this case as its ostensible prompt. While "America Held Hostage" had helped to hijack the political agenda on behalf of the "Reagan Revolution," the O.J. hysteria helped to hijack the concept of reality itself.
"Million," by the way, is not a turn of speech meaning "exaggerated," but mynumerical stab at the literal relative proportion of coverage the case got as opposed to what it deserved based on pre-O.J. standards of "news" (distorted as they were). Even compared to prior tabloid puff-ups of celebrity murder cases, we're still talking about a factor in the hundreds. After this success, anything went in terms of TV being able to present Whatever as significant and worthy of preempting all else, and to practically enforce attention to any Whatever they chose, thanks to the near-universal interest in TV and the near-blanket videoscreen coverage in public as well as private spaces. That the highest rated show on television during the same period was tag-lined as the "show about nothing" fits right in (although Seinfeld was quite good for a TV sitcom that uses a laugh-track).
In terms of the TV time, there has probably never been as big a single moral panic/psyop in the general dumb-down of the populace. It may not be a false guess to say that a short, limited nuclear exchange among Asian nations would have knocked down attention to the O.J. machine for about a week and then receded as a story without further affecting the O.J. machine's continued reception.
Odds are our aliens probably won't get the joke.**
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NOTES
* The counteracting trend as the number of channels has grown into the hundreds and thousands has been to viewer choice in demanding content, allowing halfway intelligent long-form shows and even documentaries for niche markets who can afford HBO/SHO; but by now everyone's got too many cell phones buzzing and websites running simultaneously to notice. And if I just wrote that, why am I expecting anyone's going to get through this text in one sitting and write a response?)
** Or as an intercepted alien transmission put it: "Oh shit, they all seem to be either gangsters or corrupt cops with big thermonuclear bombs and an even bigger death-drive! They worship dead men and hate live women! Their god is called O.J. Simpson! Activate security plan 1945-C! Launch the Peace Armada!"
Last edited by
JackRiddler on Wed Nov 04, 2009 5:07 pm, edited 4 times in total.
