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Mediating Time
The temporal mix of television
Andrew Hoskins
ABSTRACT. Television is the medium of time. Television news
continually recontextualizes times as it remediates the past in the
present. What has yet to be more fully implicated, however, is the
modulation – the variance in pace – of the temporal features of
the televisual environment. I consider some of the sites of the
temporization of war by television news through the interplay of
sound and vision, temporal references in television news talk, and in
the recombination of previously ‘used’ news fragments into new
(immediate) contexts. In this way, television can be said to intersect
with the event it is purportedly covering, as it tracks it in time and
across time. I draw on data predominantly from the beginning of the
1991 Gulf War – perhaps the most mediated television news events
of modern times – when CNN was already geared to consume and
celebrate these, the ‘most live’, moments of the war in different
times and spaces. KEY WORDS • Cable News Network (CNN) •
1991 Gulf War • modulation • television • temporality • time
Losing Time – An Introduction
One thing that is modern, Marx and Baudelaire both recognised in their own ways,
is a new sense of time, a new velocity of experience, a new vertigo. When
T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘We had the experience but we missed the meaning’, he was
speaking partly of the loss of traditional concepts of time and, conjointly, the mass
availability of synthetic meanings. (Todd Gitlin, 1980: 233)
In The Whole World is Watching Gitlin examines the relationship between the
1960s peace movements, the development of the American New Left, and
the media of the day. It was these ‘movement events’ that conditioned the
experience of time as reconstructed by the media. He describes an ‘experience
TIME & SOCIETY copyright © 2001 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), VOL.
10(2/3): 213–233
[0961-463X; 2001/09;10:2/3;213–233; 019363]
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of discontinuity and loss of a sense of political reality, a loss of context’ (1980:
233). The consequences for the New Left was a dissociation from reality comparable, Gitlin argues, with the situation of the key character in ‘Roadrunner’
cartoons who in his fervour and ignorance keeps running until he finds himself
over the cliff and so running on air. Hence he crashes. The inexorable speed and
purpose of the determination to escape being caught (or perhaps, ‘caught out’)
eventually subsumes the ‘runner’, who misses the point totally.
This idea of speed and the pace of mediated news events have even greater
application today. The contemporary media environment has created a whole
new breed of ‘runners’ whose political and/or celebrity presence is mediated
and demystified to such an extent that they have become exposed to the drama
of temporally-shortened horizons of the news event. Under these saturated
conditions of mediation, public figures’ performances become increasingly
‘front stage’. The blurring of the public and private domains become part of this
‘loss of context’. Commentators have described just such a sense of a loss of
reality engulfing political and other news events of recent times including, for
example, the 1991 Gulf War, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and the
President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair.
The popular and almost conventional academic view is that television trivializes the present and creates, if anything, an ephemeral and ultimately simulated
instant history that disappears and is forgotten in the ever-succeeding moments
of still more television images (Boden and Hoskins, 1995: 11). Shandler, for
example, argues that many regard television in general as having a destructive
presence that diminishes or distorts the quality of modern life (1999: xv).
Instead, as Boden and I argue, present history is made and made to work in late
modernity through television and through the repetition television uses to fill its
schedules and frame its ongoing presentation of entertainment and events
(Boden and Hoskins, 1995: 11). The analytical shift I am advocating here is that
television, rather than causing a loss of context in mediated events, significantly
affords a new context. That is to say that television is a primary mediator of
temporality, a constant resource in the present that continually shapes our sense
of being-in-the-world. This is both ‘history in the making’ and also that which is
later embedded and re-embedded into histories of longer determination.
The ‘traces’ of human activities are increasingly televisual traces which
present something of a problem of a ‘double-bind’ for historians. These are
temporary and artificial in one way, similar to the medium of their production,
but also explicit and lasting in another. For example, as a form of ‘global
memory bank’,1 will the electronic archives of television hold apparently more
complete and verifiable histories of the emerging new century, not to mention
the previous one, than the traditional resources of historians: physical archives,
personal testimony and official records, for example?2
The new global collective is unified through the simultaneous witnessing of
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the world’s events via the electronic media. At the same time the ‘time lag’3
between the occurrence of an event, its televisual broadcast and social dissemination, has reduced markedly. The move from electronic to satellite news
gathering and the now very mobile nature of the latter has promoted liveness as
a dominant feature of television news today. That is the time lag being erased
altogether, i.e. instantaneous action, mediation and reception, or at least the
impression of instantaneity. So, for Bourdon (2000: 665), for example, liveness
is not defined as a ‘technical’ phenomenon but, rather, as ‘the viewer’s belief in
live broadcasting’.
‘Camcorder vigilantism’, where individuals intercept emergency calls in
order to attend and film incidents first to sell to the local television networks, for
example, is a product of the demand for near or actual instantaneous coverage.
There are many consequences of these developments, evident in the content and
presentation of the news itself, but also in changes in the relationship between
the military, the media, political leaders and their audiences. News in ‘real-time’
demands instant responses from governments who 20 years ago had a great deal
more time to pause and reflect upon possible courses of action.4
The message of the medium is increasingly constructed from elements
temporally and spatially fragmented and then, later, remediated. So, television
presents a complex site for any analysis of the relationship between the apparatus of mediation, and the matter being mediated. One way of gaining greater
insight into the (re)workings of this relationship is by analysing this implication
of temporality in and the connectivity of television news between its different
forms and layers: in vision, in sound, and in language. In this way I agree with
Adam, who argues,
The traditional conceptual tools need to be supplemented and to some extent
displaced by simultaneity, instantaneity, uncertainty and implication, all key
features of global time, if social science is to become adequate to its contemporary
subject matter. (1995: 9)
For the purposes of this paper I mostly confine my analysis to the time-span of
the ‘extended present’5 that is the new temporal (and global) context in which
television news operates. The ‘belief’ in liveness (in Bourdon’s terms) is one
dependent upon the perpetual promise (in visual and/or aural form) of what
might or could happen and so continually feeding, although never fulfilling,
expectations. This is a key characteristic of the extended present: time is not
afforded to the viewer to dwell on the moment, without being drawn into the
next. Even in terms of television’s obsession with repetition and re-enactment,
the replay is often promoted in the context of a future time.6
I employ data in the form of coverage by Cable News Network (CNN) as
pre-eminent in its field in terms of the rich lexical use of time in broadcasts, in
addition to the temporal layering of the televisual news environment within
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which news talk is embedded. As my focus, I take one of the most electronically
mediated conflicts in history – the 1991 Gulf War. Coverage of this event has
been credited with the ‘making’ of CNN and bringing new global temporal
complexities to the dissemination of war via the televisual environment.
The liveness of this form of war coverage has contributed to what has been
termed the ‘CNN effect’ or ‘CNN phenomenon’ (Boden and Hoskins, 1995;
Livingston, 1997; Volkmer, 1999) and there is little doubt that this event
brought new recognition to the network. Indeed, the extent of this success is not
lost on CNN who even a decade later still re-runs and re-consumes its ‘role’ in
the war. This frequent televisual revisiting of an ‘old’ news story has consequences for the collective memory of audiences and ultimately for the view
of history.7 Here, though, my focus is on the more synchronous functioning of
television and time during, or soon after, the occurrence of events themselves.
New and Old Times: the Clinton–Lewinsky Affair
Television, as a fragmentary ‘patchwork’ of texts and times, was usefully
characterized by McLuhan as a ‘mosaic’ (1962 [1987]: 286; 1964: 347, 358).
The two-dimensional ‘mosaic’ of television to which McLuhan referred, today
possesses any number of textual and temporal, visual and aural dimensions.
Caldwell, for example, argues, ‘Television has always been textually messy –
that is, textural rather than transparent’ (1995: 23, emphasis in original).
Significantly, however, television is also temporally messy. So, despite the
neatly segmented news chunks in consistent schedules (especially news
bulletins or genres of news in the case of 24–hour news networks), there is
actually quite a degree of temporal disorder in the televisual domain. Events that
are news intervene even into continuous schedules – and in big events, like the
Gulf War, the death of Diana, or major sporting events, television schedules are
constructed around the event rather than vice versa.
When an event or series of events comes to dominate our media-saturated
environment, we often later measure our lives against the defining moment of
the day – the ‘where were you when . . .’, question, for example, serves to
map our own lives against history. At the time, however, an initial reaction to
startling events is often one of disbelief. Gitlin, for example, characterizes this
kind of experience as one of disorientation:
Life came to seem a sequence of tenuously linked exclamation points. But what
were the sentences in between? This ‘event time’ . . . entailed an experience of
discontinuity and loss of a sense of political reality, a loss of context. In this late60’s rush, the mythic and real decontextualized violence . . . could flourish.
(Gitlin, 1980: 234)
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Television can be characterized as thriving in and on these ‘exclamation points’
of events that seem to ‘punctuate’ history because of their extraordinary and/or
catastrophic nature. Doane, for example, argues that a crisis involves a ‘condensation of temporality’, a compression of time because it ‘demands resolution
within a limited period of time’ (1990: 223).
One can draw a relatively recent parallel to Gitlin’s characterization of event
time in the 1960s in terms of the loss of political reality which appeared to
engulf the White House during the rumour and eventual revelations of President
Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. It is the development of this story
of a scandal that was hijacked by its construction through the intensive and
extensive connections of the global electronic media.
Gitlin’s keen sense of the experience of the 1960s (as a participant himself)
provides an interesting device for assessing the situation today. This is the
extension of ‘event time’ to an extent where it has become a pervasive feature
of present time. ‘We had the experience but we missed the meaning’ perhaps
captures the level of engagement of the ‘audience’ of the ‘events or spectacles’
which has become a phenomenon of global communication. The mediated
‘experience’ of the Clinton–Lewinsky affair involved the intersection of the
public with the private, fantasy with reality, and fact with speculation, to the
extent that television became an incredibly reflexive stage.
One of the genuinely fictional framings of the Clinton–Lewinsky story
employed by the news media came in the form of the so-called ‘Wag the Dog
Scenario’ (referring to the movie Wag the Dog). This depicts a president of the
United States going to war with Albania in order to distract public and political
attention away from a domestic scandal. The blurring of fiction and reality
reached a new level, however, when this fictional account was employed by the
(real) US media to frame a televisual construction of a renewed crisis with Iraq,
particularly in respect of Clinton’s possible motives for adopting an aggressive
stance against Saddam Hussein.
CNN actually incorporated a comparison between the movie and real events
in Washington into a programme as part of a series entitled ‘Investigating
the President’,8 broadcast two days after President Clinton had gone live on network television to declare: ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman,
Miss Lewinsky.’ In the film report CNN even parodies itself. One form of text
(fictional CNN/TV news) is shown within another text (the movie) which is
shown within the ‘real’ text of CNN. This report self-consciously acknowledges
the role of CNN in ‘creating’ or at least mediating the White House scandal.
This relatively recent pattern of television reflexively affecting the events
it covers is well documented (Thompson, 1990; Boden and Hoskins, 1995;
Marriott, 2000, for example). The global reflexive loop of the electronic news
media, however, in addition to operating in ‘instantaneous time’ (Urry, 1994)
also functions over extended time-spans. There is a considerable time lag
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between, for example, the airing of the news (Clinton’s video testimony) and
the meaning (via the consequences) in terms of public opinion poll ratings and
then the impact on Clinton’s presidential career. Television increasingly affects
the longer-term view of events as it shapes and reshapes ‘collective memory’
through frequent repetition and reframing of key television images (Hoskins,
1999). The dominant visual framing of the 1998 White House scandal story
involved three images of Clinton and Lewinsky showing signs of affection at
different public gatherings that were coincidentally recorded. This footage was
shown repeatedly immediately before or after repeats of his emphatic denial of
having ‘sexual relations’ with Lewinsky and thus provided a powerful visual
contradiction. Through their repetition and global media dissemination these
images have become increasingly indexical of Clinton’s second term in the
White House and imprinted into the legacy of his presidency.
However, the (news) value of these images (to the media, audiences and
Clinton’s opponents) was at its height in the extended present of the unfolding
news event itself. The immediacy of television ensured that another two
Clinton–Lewinsky images were quickly fed into the intense reflexivity of this
story soon after the first had been broadcast. Despite the apparent unreality of
events at the time, the pace of events at least in part dictated by television, and
the loss of a sense of political reality, it is the images that endure over time to be
re-used in new contexts.
I suggest here that the key dynamic within television news in terms of the
function of both audio and visual images is the medium’s temporal mix. This
dynamic is a mixture of both liveness (the impression of, or actual, instantaneous coverage) and of simultaneity (the simultaneous or near-simultaneous
‘tracking’ by television of the multiple sites of a news story). Time has been
implicated in a number of analyses of television in terms of ‘speed’, ‘instantaneity’ and ‘liveness’ (Virilio [1989], Nowotny [1994] and Marriott [1995],
respectively). What is not clearly explicated in these accounts, however, is the
modulation – the variance in pace – of the temporal features of the televisual
environment. I propose that these are found in: firstly, the interplay or relationship between the audio and the visual; secondly, in the temporal references in
television news talk and in the modulation of the pace of the talk itself; and,
thirdly, in the recombination of previously ‘used’ news fragments into new
(immediate) contexts (as in the Clinton–Lewinsky case, for example). In this
way, television can be said to intersect with the event it is purportedly covering,
as it tracks it in time and across time.
I now consider some of the features of television’s temporal mix in relation
to a time of intense intersection between the global electronic media and the
mediated event – the 1991 Gulf War. I suggest that the medium’s capacity for
modulating the flow and combination of its temporal, spatial, visual and audio
elements (be this pre-determined by newsmakers or unintended) contribute to a
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phenomenon characterized by temporality (including liveness) that pervades
television news.
The Audio World of Television
Visual and audio pieces of news reports are now routinely cut and pasted into
completely new visual/aural narratives in different temporal and spatial contexts. The Clinton–Lewinsky images were certainly subject to a great deal of
televisual manipulation in this way. Often, however, the later (new) narrative
omits any reference to the original contexts from which it is constructed.
Indeed, key visual images and pieces of talk can be constructed as indexical of a
particular programme or channel in the form of a promotional trailer. In this
way often ‘accidental’ or ‘unintended’ effects in the audiovisual mix of live
news coverage are fed reflexively back into the televisual environment, reconsumed and appropriated by the medium.
The televising of the 1991 Gulf War provides a rich site for tracing the
modulation of a news event in this way. The prolonged and continuous nature of
this event provided an extended period of ‘event time’ in which the electronic
mediation of the event became increasingly reflexive. CNN and other television
networks played up their apparent role in mediating the flow of information of
aspects of the war.9
Perhaps the defining coverage in terms of CNN’s established global presence
during the Gulf War was unintended. Indeed, one of the ironies of CNN’s
coverage of the Gulf War (which was fed to other networks around the globe)
was that its most intensive instantaneous transmissions, in the opening of
‘Operation Desert Storm’ on 16 January 1991, were fed live in audio only. CNN
had three correspondents on the fourteenth floor of the Al Rashid Hotel,
Baghdad, namely, Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw and John Holliman.
There was no available film footage of the war over the city at this point, as
the war had only just broken out, nor was there any practical way of setting up a
visual satellite link. The live audio feed via satellite telephone was therefore not
matched in real-time on CNN by visual images but stills of maps of the region
and inset photographs of the reporters. This televisual framing of a live event
where live visuals are not available is not unique. What was unusual, however,
was the extended period of live audio-only coverage for a medium of high
visual dependence. Television, for a considerable time, became more like radio.
One way of considering the relationship between the visual and the audio is
with reference to the work of McLuhan, who claimed to identify a ‘basic principle’ in distinguishing between different kinds of media. He argued:
A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition’. High
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definition is the state of being well filled in with data . . . Hot media are, therefore,
low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the
audience. (1964: 22)
In this sense, radio is a hot medium and television is ‘cool’. If one accepts this
characterization, considering the prophetic nature of some of McLuhan’s work,
it provides at least a useful means of attempting an explanation of the success of
this predominantly audio-only live piece of initial reporting from Baghdad.
With the relatively redundant visual images during these often lengthy audio
reports, the ‘sensory balance’ of audiences can be said to have shifted away
from the usual visual dominance of the medium of television. Audiences, by
this time, were accustomed to live on-location visual reports as part of a highly
developed televisual news environment. The shift that took place in respect
of reports from Baghdad was, in McLuhan’s terms at least, a ‘closure’ of the
visual channel, which results in an intensification in perception of the aural
channel. To gather a ‘picture’ of comparable detail with that usually available to
the sense of sight one has to listen harder. Strangely, the Gulf War, heralded for
its visual (‘real’) coverage by the American news networks, contained perhaps
some of its most ‘intense’, ‘live’ moments during the audio reports from
Baghdad. So, as McLuhan argued:
If a technology . . . gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses,
the ratio amongst all our senses is altered. We no longer feel the same, nor do our
eyes and ears and other senses remain the same. The interplay among our senses is
perpetual save in conditions of anaesthesia. But any sense when stepped up to
high intensity can act as an anaesthetic for other senses . . . The result is a break in
the ratio among the senses, a kind of loss of identity. (1962: 24)
The framing of these effects (as Gitlin does, above) is in terms of a loss of
context, and, one might say, a slippage of time. Instead, I am suggesting that it
is precisely these moments recorded, preserved and replayed by the media that
represent a commodification of time by television. Not so much a loss of context, rather a new context. I now consider how the heightening of the audio
channel was appropriated by CNN and fed back into the network’s ongoing
presentation of the Gulf War, in a new, later context.
Remediating the War
One problem with McLuhan’s claims, and their application here to the coverage
of the Gulf War, is that they are very difficult to quantify or verify in terms of an
audience. What can be said, however, is that CNN itself recognized its role in
bringing the Gulf War onto the global stage and identified the Baghdad reports
as a significant part of this success. CNN appropriated the Baghdad audio and
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fed fragments (highlights) of it back into its continuing coverage by way of selfpromotion.
In addition to the repetition of excerpts from the first night of the war, a promotional trailer for CNN ‘World News’ mixed these with extracts with others
drawn from different times and places (see Table 1). What was significant about
this particular trailer was that it accentuated the effect of the visual closure
evident on the first night of the war by using a black screen with a limited
amount of text. The narration to this trailer is visual rather than aural, and reads:
‘The eyes The ears Of the World – CNN The World’s News Leader’
This text serves to reinforce CNN’s (by this point in the war) global role, to the
extent that it was being watched in the White House, not to mention the Iraqis
(who acknowledged this status by giving CNN reporters and camera crew
special privileges). The blackness dominating the screen indicates, in a kind of
minimalist way, the night (and therefore blindness) effect of the initial foundation of CNN’s war coverage – that of its three correspondents reporting live
from Baghdad.
TABLE 1
CNN ‘World News’ Gulf War promotional trailer, 19 January 1991
Original location of
recording
Visual texta
Audio
(None)
Bernard Shaw: Something is happening . . .
Al-Rashid Hotel,
Baghdad
The eyes
. . . outside. (Unknown): flash! . . . confirm!
. . . explosion!
Al-Rashid Hotel,
Baghdad
The ears
Charles Jaco: There are sounds of planes
overhead, we don’t know whose planes
they are, but . . .
Unidentified
airbase, Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia
Of the World
. . . air raid sirens!
Colleen Jackson: I’m scared.
Tom Mintier: They’re all waiting, for some
type of word.
Dhahran, as above
Outside a church,
Norfolk, Virginia
CNN
Shaw: It has been a long night for us . . .
Baghdad, as above
CNN The
World’s News
Leader
. . . a night some of us will never forget
Baghdad, as above
(None)
(None)
a
Centred on black full-screen background.
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In the absence of pictorial images, the white text against black comes into
sight, then fades out again, at a consistent pace. This consistency contrasts with
the pace and varying lengths of the instantaneous sound-bytes. The speed of
delivery in time differs considerably between the snippets of excited commentary (‘flash! . . . confirm! . . . explosion!’) and the much more considered,
reflective, and slower commentary of Bernard Shaw (‘Something is happening
outside’ and ‘it has been a long night for us, a night some of us will never
forget’). These, I am suggesting, constitute different degrees of immediacy.
All these fragments of talk were first broadcast instantaneously in real-time in
their original contexts. I have included here the original locations of the talk
(taken from different times on the night of 16 January 1991) to emphasize the
temporal, spatial and global complexities of the televisual news environment.
These fragments of talk and action are repeated here in the new narrative of the
trailer with their original tempo and thus varying degrees of immediacy preserved. One could also argue that their fragmentation heightens the sense of
immediacy in these snippets of liveness. It is the modulation of the pace of
speech, first in its original delivery, and thereafter in its re-inscription in new
aural and visual narratives in later times, that contributes to the temporally complex mosaic of television.
This fragmentary nature of television time is made up of what Adam
describes as a process of ‘innovation, repetition and discarding’ (1990: 140–1).
Material originally broadcast in real-time is constantly recycled, yet with a
sense of its instantaneity preserved. This is a particularly useful device on the
part of news networks in the coverage of an extended event, given the uneven
flow of action and subsequent information about that action, and especially in
respect of the televising of war. However, in the Baghdad live audio-only coverage outlined here, perhaps its very success could be attributed to its unevenness.
That is to say, at least in its instantaneous form, CNN reflected the modulation
of the war as it passed through moments of great intensity (some of which I
identify here) and (although to a lesser extent) times of relative inactivity.
Styling Time
The technological transformations in news gathering and dissemination in realtime have been acclaimed as affording new status to television. Virilio argues
that the power of communications media is ‘directly involved in the atypical
temporality of broadcasting technology’ (1989: 37). This temporality and
immediacy of television in particular has often been articulated with reference
to its liveness.
Television is often usefully contrasted with other media, in terms of its live
features. Feuer, for example, argues:
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Unlike film, which freezes events in frames, television in its very essence (that is
to say the essence of its technology) consists of process. The ontology of the
television image thus consists in movement, process, ‘liveness’ and presence.
(1983: 13)
Although, as both Marriott (1995) and Feuer (1983) suggest, liveness is ontologically part of the medium of television, it has also been appropriated and
become a constructed feature of the news environment. Whether television
news reporting is being broadcast instantaneously or not, the temporality of the
medium (and of the reporting) are not necessarily diminished. In this way ‘liveness’ as a concept does not adequately account for the multi-layered temporality
of television.
Liveness is ‘encoded’ into television news reporting whether an event is
broadcast simultaneously with its occurrence or not. This is reflected in television’s obsession with temporal fixation and context as deployed in the televisual apparatus and in language. In other words, this is part of the visual and
aural style of television. Caldwell, for example, argues that by the time of the
Gulf Conflict ‘television . . . had retheorized its aesthetic and presentational
task. With increasing frequency, style itself became the subject, the signified, if
you will, of television’ (1995: 5). CNN’s performance of style was (and is) a
very ‘self-conscious’ activity in Caldwell’s terms and ‘going live’ has in itself
become stylized through the aural and visual discourse of television news.
Similarly, the graphics, captions and logos displayed on screen visibly articulate the powerful immediacy of the televisual news environment. The coordination of these with the televised image of the news anchor, and/or other
talking heads, contributes to what Bolter and Grusin identify as the ‘CNN look’
(1999: 189). They compare the visual complexities of the ‘windowed’ style
of CNN, today, with the relatively ‘unified’ and ‘transparent’ screen of
the inauguration of CNN in 1980 (pp. 190–1). Furthermore, Caldwell argues
that
. . . programs intentionally engage the viewer with multiple and simultaneous
layers of perceptual and discursive information, many times overwhelming him or
her by combining visual, spatial, gestural, and iconic signals. Televisuality is, in
this sense, a phenomenon of communicative and semiotic over-abundance. (1995:
362, n. 35, emphasis in original)
Today the CNN look is often characterized not merely by the network’s own
visual layering devices but also by a mesh of the local, national and global, as
(particular) coverage supplied by ‘sister’ stations is fed through the dominant
(universal) frame.
On occasion, it is precisely the mix of the universal and the particular that
is visually evident. One need only to examine the CNNI (CNN International)
combination of local, national and global frames in the coverage of the
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Columbine High School shooting in May 1999, where a mix of live footage
from local ‘sister’ networks was fed through a number of visual and audio
frames. These local interpretations and instructions airing on Channel 9 were
filtered via the national CNN (domestic) frame, which was itself, simultaneously, carried by CNNI into the global realm. The national frame visually imposed
the CNN logos of ‘Breaking News’ and ‘CNN LIVE’ in addition to the constant
updating of the DOW and the Nasdaq financial markets also on screen. The
latter juxtaposes a specific national time frame (i.e. being within the trading
times of the US markets) with the actual local (Columbine) time. These are all
televisual signifiers of immediacy, mediating different time frames and zones,
all contributing to the sense that this story is unfolding in real-time. The audience of CNNI, meanwhile, is reminded of its own ongoing global frame through
an occasional audio interruption from the anchor in Atlanta.
The on-screen cues have a continuous quality in themselves and in the case of
the Columbine coverage there was only a limited amount of the screen that was
not obscured by textual and graphic overlays. In Caldwell’s terms (1995: 362,
above) this effect was one of ‘semiotic over-abundance’, visually powerful and
disorienting at the same time.
To return to the contrast I draw above, the visual signification of immediacy
in the audio-only live reports from Baghdad in the opening days of the Gulf War
was a very minimalist affair. The ‘CNN LIVE’ icon was the only visual indication of any ‘process’ in Feuer’s terms (1983: 13, above), during the initial
reporting from Baghdad, and there was a visual absence of ‘movement’ and
‘presence’. So, what was acclaimed as perhaps the most ‘successful’ of CNN’s
Gulf War coverage was in fact the network’s least visually stylistic. In the
absence of the visual mediation of process, movement and presence, the aural
channel becomes the dominant conveyor of immediacy.
I now return to a closer examination of the language of the Baghdad reports
to consider the temporal features of this talk in terms of the modulation of
immediacy.
Shifting Deixis
Frequently when a CNN anchor in Atlanta or Washington handed over to the
three correspondents on the fourteenth floor of the Al-Rashid Hotel, there was
very little happening. Sometimes, the audio link to Baghdad was made live on
the basis of a new raid (i.e. event-led), but for the most part as much coverage as
possible was used from Baghdad as a tangible site of the war. These reports
were often reflective in tone and substance and usually involved description of
their exclusive view of ‘downtown’ Baghdad from the hotel windows. This kind
of reporting can be characterized as ‘thick’ description in terms of the detail
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necessary to compensate for the absence of live matching pictures for what had
for the most part become characteristic of radio reporting.
Sound became the dominant live presence on the visual medium. It is this
effect (the closure of the visual) that is reconstructed in the promotional trailer
(Table 1, p. 221), where most of the screen is effectively blacked out with only
a very limited visual text.
Extract 1 is typical of the language of description used by Arnett, Holliman
and Shaw over the first few days of CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War. The
modulation of their mostly instantaneous talk was synchronous with the
Coalition bombing raids around their location. Their experience (fed globally
by CNN) was mapped precisely onto the unfolding military action in terms of
the waves of attacks and the anti-climatic periods in between. Never before had
the medium of television forged a global simultaneity on this scale with the
front line of a war.
EXTRACT 1
Live audio-only extract from CNN, 16 January 1991
Peter Arnett: And now we hear planes actually going overhead.
John Holliman: Yep, well I’ll see if I can see anything.
Arnett: Alright.
Bernard Shaw: Right! It’s broken out on either side of us here at the hotel and I’m going
to be quiet and let you listen.
((Sound of machine-gun fire, explosions and rumble of planes)).
Holliman: I’ll describe what we can see . . . we can hear jet planes flying overhead now
and anti-aircraft guns going up in an attempt to hit those . . . and we can see bright orange
flashes off in the distance here on the horizon in Baghdad and again the skies filled with
tracers from the anti-aircraft weapons as they go up . . .
Arnett: There’s all this anti-aircraft fire in our vicinity, but the explosions, this one a
huge red-rose explosion, probably ten miles away lighting up the sky.
Holliman: I’m going back to the window ’cause I see some bright lights off to just one
direction from our location and I see more and more air burst and it looks like a
hundred fire-flies off in the south-west of where we are now . . . The fire-flies are flashing brightly one after another, it’s like sparklers on the fourth of July at a great, great
distance many miles from where we are. The blast that came through this window a few
minutes ago was very much like the first blast you feel when you’re out at the countdown
clock at Cape Canaveral for a space shuttle launch. It was just a powerful wave of hot air
that came into our location here – and the sky is still alight . . . I’m going to look out of
the window and see where this bright light is coming from.
This passage involves commentary mostly occurring simultaneously with the
bombing raid. It revolves around mostly present-tense expressions, and so
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might be said to be fairly typical of live television narrative. Marriott, for
example, argues:
Live television commentary typically involves . . . an ‘experiential’ mode of
description, which is used to talk about events or processes that are occurring at or
around the moment of utterance (with events presented either as if they have just
occurred or as if they are occurring now). (1995: 351)
Marriott also claims that in such an environment there is relatively little ‘displacement’ (1995: 351), that is, reference to anything outside the immediate
situation. In respect to the Gulf War, however, the temporal frame of reference
was unusually continuous over an extended period in comparison with other
live broadcast television events (e.g. Live Aid, the State Opening of Parliament
or the World Cup).
In addition to the elements of the recent past and present being characteristic
of live television commentary, news talk often focuses on stories/events that
have yet to happen; television news trades on a perpetual promise of what it will
deliver if its audience keeps watching. The orientation to an extended present as
I have defined it, above, modulates in direct relation to the events being mediated. Extract 2 is from the same Baghdad location with the same participants
and audio-only live feed a few hours later than Extract 1.
EXTRACT 2
Live audio-only extract from CNN, 16 January 1991
Shaw: The deep glow of night becoming dawn is unfolding over the skies of Baghdad
and it is quiet an occasional vehicle is going by and we heard the first siren of a fire
engine going somewhere . . . Right now it’s eerily quiet here in Baghdad we have the
pleasure of being able to sit in a chair for a change. For the last few hours we have been
on our stomachs and on our knees and on our hands moving about as we sought to
observe and to report to you . . . all of us are of course exhausted our energy levels are
way off the register . . .
Holliman: . . . no sign of the conflagration in the skies that we reported to you on a few
hours back. Downtown Baghdad really looks pretty calm right now and the events of
three hours ago seem to fade into memory.
Waters (anchor): It’s near daylight now are you able to see any of the damage caused by
what the Pentagon are telling us were ‘strategic and pin-point bombings’?
Shaw: Well I can certainly vouch for that and Peter Arnett will be able to stitch together
some images in just a second. How does it feel to be at ground zero when that massive
aerial campaign unprecedented in military history is unfolding around you . . . comparable to being at Cape Kennedy and feeling the ground rumble and the thunder and
seeing that huge shuttle with its booster rockets taking off and hearing the thunder only
in this instance, in reality here in Baghdad, you heard it sporadically, bright lights . . .
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Extract 2 no longer involves commentary on events unfolding simultaneously with the talk, and occurs at a much slower pace. This narrative still refers to a
relatively recent time-span (a few hours). However, this is an altogether different construction from the earlier talk, using reflection on time, and the passage
of time, to set a reflective and historical context to events. The mediation is the
same, this is still ‘live from Baghdad’, but the sense of immediacy is tempered,
in this way, the talk ‘on the war’ intersects with the lull ‘in the war’.
Clock Time versus Natural Time
Time also enters into the ‘experiential’ mode of description of television talk in
other ways. The passage in Extract 1 is relatively unusual in terms of absence of
temporal references (there is only one ‘a few minutes ago’) compared with
much of the CNN talk during the Gulf War coverage and since. In this instance
there is no need (or indeed time) to reflect on times past or consider future times
as the commentary has to track the pace of unfolding action in the present. More
typical of CNN talk, however, is Extract 2, in terms of reflecting on events that
have just happened or speculation on the likely course of those to come.
TABLE 2
Time expressions relating to Figure 2
Clock time
Natural time
last few hours
a few hours back
three hours ago
deep glow of night
becoming dawn
near daylight now
In Table 2 I have distinguished between references to ‘clock’ or ‘calendar’ time
and those pertaining to what one might call ‘natural’ or ‘rhythmic’ time. The
continuity of the war as measured in clock time was paralleled by CNN’s continuous schedule. Adam, in her comprehensive analysis of clock time in Timewatch, argues that it is
. . . governed by the non-temporal principle of time, a time that tracks and
measures motion but is indifferent to change . . . It is finite because it excludes
becoming. It does not create time in the present but it is time: a time that is running
on and out. (1995: 52)
Throughout the western networks’ coverage of the Gulf War, clock time was the
consistent temporal point of reference in terms of the development of the war.
Events were measured against/in the linear progression of time (‘Day 17 of the
War’, ‘one hour before Bush’s address to the nation’, or ‘100 hours of the
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ground war’, for example). This construction of the passing of clock time
rooted the coverage into the real-world clock times of the temporally and
spatially distanciated global audiences. It created the effect of a worldwide
simultaneity.
Mapped out against/within this time, however, were references to the less
mechanical and less progressive form of time that I have tentatively labelled
natural time. These references tend to situate the unfolding talk in relation to a
more intimate sense of place, for example, than that of the uniformity of clock
time. I am suggesting that the former tends to connote time of a different value.
This is a time that owing to its cyclical nature resists clock time. It is a returning
and renewing form of time. In some ways it parallels the romantic visual
imagery of sunsets/sunrises employed as a key framing of a great deal of the
western television coverage from the Gulf.
Extract 3 is a short extract from the same sequence of reports as Extracts 1
and 2 and exemplifies this mix of temporal references as identified above. To
these I have applied a crude but marked differentiation of clock/calendar times
indicated by underscore. Times outside this category have been italicized. I
have defined the less clearly categorizable ‘morning’ according to the ‘naturalized’ or ‘clock/calendar’ context of the phrase in which it is placed.
EXTRACT 3
CNN, 16 January 1991
Lou Waters (anchor) in studio, CNN Centre, Atlanta: We’ve now re-established communication with Amman, Jordan where as we mentioned earlier, it’s almost daybreak.
CNN’s Tony Clark is out on the streets, Tony?
Tony Clark (reporting live from Amman, Jordan): It’s a little before six in the morning
. . . it has been three hours since Jordanian Radio and Television announced that the
attack on Baghdad was underway . . .
[Cuts back to anchors in Atlanta who then hand over to Baghdad]
Catherine Crier (anchor): . . . Live at the Al-Rashid Hotel, John Holliman is standing
by. John?
John Holliman: Catherine, hello to you. I’m going to go back over to the window
because dawn is broken here . . . We’re gonna look out and tell you if we can see any
signs of damage . . . in the hours preceding the sun’s coming up here this morning . . . and
there’s an acrid smell in the air that wasn’t here yesterday or the mornings before this
. . . As we look out you can see the early morning Baghdad fog – perhaps not as thick as
it has been in er was yesterday, the day before. You can still see the Baghdad ‘Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier’, their memorial to their war dead from previous battles.
The connotations of natural time I am suggesting relate to romanticized ‘authentic’ images of place. The use of these temporal references embodies a certain
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semblance of ‘reality’ which is a theme that has been much employed in relation
to analysis of the television coverage of the war. By virtue of the nature of
instantaneous reporting and the experience of reporting live from the ‘battlefield’, a sense of times was by no means neatly comprehended and smoothly repackaged for the benefit of the viewer’s orientation throughout. Bernard Shaw
in Baghdad (CNN, 16 January 1991), for example, reflects on his experience of
the previous (first) night of the war: ‘There is one sound I will never get out of
my mind of this experience . . . that was hearing . . . that rooster crowing yet still
pitch black and the bombs are falling.’ Shaw’s surprise here is with the sound of
the rooster as a symbol of dawn breaking set against the inherently unnatural
war continuing and made and fought in clock time, as if man-made linear time
had obliterated or at least tampered with this rhythmic timing of nature.
Holliman et al. weave their commentary to natural images of/in time. In
recreating this mosaic of other times they embed the formal progression of time
and events. This alters and extends what might appear as a kind of ‘flat’
abstracted clock time into a more complex multi-layered durée of time; and so
provides a temporal context in which real events occur in real-time.
Conclusion
In many ways Extract 1 is typical of those which have attracted much analysis
and commentary since, not least perhaps because of the remarkable and exclusive vantage point the CNN correspondents had secured and the intensity of
their audio-only reporting. For example, Gerbner argues in ‘Persian Gulf War,
The Movie’
. . . past, present, and future can now be packaged, witnessed, and frozen into
memorable moving imagery of instant history . . . Instant history is when access to
video-satellite-computer systems blankets the world in real-time with selected
images that provoke immediate reactions, influence the outcome, and then quickfreeze into received history. (1992: 244)
The media, the military, and historians of the conflict have something of an
obsession with the televisual images of the Gulf War, so much so that the
characterization of the opening hours provided here is possibly unfamiliar to
many, given the predominance of the dissemination of the visual images from
the war (e.g. Scud missiles, bruised captive Coalition pilots, nose-cam imagery).
Indeed, the televisation (and consequently even the collective memory) of these
opening hours of the Gulf War has since been revised to compensate for the lack
of visual immediacy, with the addition of the initially unavailable ‘live’ visual
images.
Within a few days of the live audio-only coverage being transmitted, ABC
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and ITV footage of Baghdad being lit up with tracer fire and nearby explosions
from night bombing was being broadcast with Arnett’s CNN voice dubbed onto
it (Boden and Hoskins, 1995: 2). To paraphrase Shaw’s reporting of 16 January
1991, CNN had successfully ‘stitched together’ visual and audio images recorded in different locations in Baghdad, by different networks, to ‘produce’
what has become the dominant televisual version. The visual had reasserted
itself.
To characterize the effect of real-time television coverage as ‘instant history’
only, therefore, accounts for a limited temporal frame, and tends to exaggerate
the effects of instantaneity. This is certainly a seductive feature of the global
electronic media, but does not extend to consider the fact that what becomes
remembered as ‘instant history’ is actually the highly edited and most repeated
‘version’.
The construction of any news broadcast, be it a 20-minute bulletin or socalled ‘rolling’ 24-hour news, is in fact highly ordered. However, the Baghdad
broadcasts in the first few days of the war existed in a ‘time out of time’. That is
a time that was stripped bare of the temporal constructions and compartmentalizations of the televisual environment typical of the surrounding CNN coverage.
In perhaps the least constructed time(s) of the coverage, then, there is the most
palpable sense of time – that ‘running on and out’ in the Al-Rashid hotel room.
Not, however, in terms of the universal and eternal expanse of clock time, but,
rather, in terms of the particular, of place. Indeed, the recombination of the
universal and the particular, in numerous ways, is perhaps a key aspect of the
success of CNN (cf. Volkmer, 1999) and more generally of the temporality of
television.
The CNN–Baghdad audio link, in terms of its simultaneity with the bombing
raids, and equally, with the lull in between each raid, was one way in which the
modulation of war was fed instantaneously into the electronic media. The realtime globally produced and distributed narrative on the war became a continuous feature of the intersection of war and the media (Dillon, 2000). Under
conditions of continuous interconnectivity, the modulating stream of times of
the war, the media and the places these inhabited, became one.
In order to grasp the complex temporalities of the medium of television it is
necessary to look beyond the recent vogue of the conceptualization of liveness
in order to implicate time as transcendent in the mediation of a news event.
Television served to extend the multiple presents and presence of the 1991 Gulf
War at the time, and it continues to do so, in new times, today.
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Notes
Original videotape data of CNN footage of the Gulf Crisis and War 1990–1 are drawn
from the collection belonging to Deirdre Boden. Other original videotape data of CNN
and CNNI are from the author’s own collection. I wish to thank John Urry for his insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Mike Crang and two
anonymous referees for their helpful feedback.
1. A concept used by Deirdre Boden in conversation, Lancaster, 1994.
2. These are central concerns related to the emergence of what I propose is a phenomenon of ‘new memory’ (Hoskins, 2000).
3. I develop this concept from Douglas Kahn’s examination of the impact of the interval
between injury or death, its capture on film and later mediation. He suggests, ‘The
time between the moment a body drops or is mangled in war and is photographed and
the moment that class of photographs reaches dissemination on a social scale, is the
body lag’ (1992: 43).
4. For a detailed discussion of the effects of ‘real-time’ television coverage on political
decision-making see Gowing (1994).
5. See Nowotny (1994). Barbara Adam draws on Nowotny’s use of this term to argue,
‘This suggests a porosity and permeability of the boundary between the present and
the future, a blurring that makes it impossible to establish which time dimension we
are dealing with’ (1990: 141).
6. One of the more transparent uses of the extended present on television is by the continuous music video channels (e.g. MTV). A small window frame is opened over a
music video being shown which plays in miniature (and without sound) an excerpt of
the video that follows. Although this is a (future) temporal context that is delivered
visually, in terms of television news, talk, as I propose here, contributes as much to
constructing and maintaining the context of the extended present.
7. Furthermore, as a news event, the Gulf War lives on in an extended present of its own.
The undermining of the acclaimed finality of Desert Storm since 1991 lends much to
the nature of the new global media through which it was initially reported and since
‘re-run’. The political irresolution of the region, the non-inconclusions of UNSCOM,
Saddam’s continued presidency, and Gulf War Syndrome, combine to effect the
extended present of this war. In all these respects, television has assisted in lending
an increasing indeterminacy to the initial western-acclaimed outcome (Coalition-led
‘victory’) of the Gulf War. See also Hoskins (1999) and Boden and Hoskins (working
paper, forthcoming).
8. CNN, 28 January 1998.
9. From the very first breaking CNN reports from Baghdad of the attacks having begun,
CNN reported Whitehouse personnel and other networks’ correspondents watching
CNN.
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ANDREW HOSKINS is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Communication and
Culture in the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University.
He completed his PhD in Sociology at Lancaster University on ‘Time,
Television and Memory – The Multiple Presents and Presence of the 1991
Gulf War’ in 1999. His research interests include the media and collective
memory, the televisual construction of war, and visual methodologies. He
is currently working on a book entitled Televising War: The Collective
Memory of Conflict and various articles on the conceptualization of ‘new
memory’. ADDRESS: School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan
University, Calverley Street, Leeds LS1 3HE, UK.
[email: [email protected]]
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