Marriage, beatitude and pageantry

Given their narrow focus, media events provide ample opportunities for the political elite to bury their ‘dead bodies’.

Carmen Sammut 1 May 2011, 12:00am

2 min read

These days the mass audience no longer exists and media consumers are highly segmented and fragmented. People nibble at news from various sources and within one household individuals may follow different sources of information.

There are indeed fewer occasions for a common public sphere, where we all stop to follow and discuss the same thing.

The Beatification and the Royal Wedding constitute what scholars Dayan and Katz term as “Media Events”. On such occasions television schedules are disrupted and global networks broadcast the same thing; most media sources focus on one issue. In the meantime, other important events are sidelined or they do not receive full coverage.

Given their narrow focus, media events provide ample opportunities for the political elite to bury their ‘dead bodies’ as they release damaging news when journalists and their publics are caught looking the other way.

Attracting a global audience to these media events entails elaborate public relations efforts and we are swept by a tsunami of hype. One can easily remember what it was like when President Obama was inaugurated or even the rescue of the Chilean miners. We were all stuck to our sofa watching for hours and hours. The emotions stirred by these carefully choreographed events had a lasting effect on our memory and our perceptions.

The events of this week are not merely about love and sainthood. The Royal Wedding will boost the nation brand of England. Italian columnists were also quick to point out that the Roman Catholic Church is currently basking in the shadow of Pope Wojtyla’s tremendous stature.

Those individuals who may wish to resist the temptations laid out by the hype-makers will be left out of the loop and so whoever affords the time will probably sit back and try to enjoy it.

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I read somewhere that up to 2 billion people worldwide watched the wedding of William and Kate (I expect they’ll now replace Janet and John in reading books). . I’m fascinated that such a huge mass of viewers should have been interested in something as trivial and irrelevant to their lives as this particular non-event. It was not a second moon landing, an international disaster, or even a football World Cup final. No, it was just the wedding of the grandson of a Head of State. Every country has a Head of State; in the UK it happens to be the Queen and her grandson got married. So? Nobody’s life changed one little bit and yet everybody (almost) wanted to watch. . Ultimately it shows the real power of the media and those who run them. They managed to persuade so many people, of different ages, cultures and religions, that they absolutely needed to see what was happening in London, irrespective of whether this was going to have any impact on their lives.