One of my projects for Uni.

I'm being given grades for this one as we speak. I cut it some parts of it otherwise would be too long.

“… [The] television screen today becomes a sort of mirror for Narcissus, a space for narcissistic exhibitionism” (Bourdieu, 1996:14).
Nowadays the obsession for being the most talked personality at the moment has brought celebrities, high profile people, royal family and government to use “…television as an instrument that offers, theoretically, the possibility of reaching everybody.’ (Bourdieu, 1996:14). Television has been an essential tool for media and society. It helps to bring up opinions, warnings or community issues that need to be revised. Television can help the Labour party win an election or it can damage your public image for a long period of time. So, the more you want to raise your public image with television, the higher the risks of a negative result. As Berkeley said ‘to be is to be perceived.’(Bourdieu, 1996:14).

In the case of Jacqui Janes and Gordon Brown, the fact that her son died in a War in Afghanistan, it was in this case almost terribly omitted. The newspapers and websites went crazy and ballistic because the Prime Minister had misspelt her son’s name. As Bourdieu says: “Journalists have special “glasses” through which they see things and not others, and through which they see the things they see in the special way they see them. (Bourdieu, 1996:19). Journalists see things in different ways and a lot of times distort societies view of things. They do this mostly for their audience, in which they know would be more interested in ordinary things such as a misspelling in a letter of condolence, rather than an actual fact. Turning the focus on banal things to please the not - so - sophisticated general audience, as well as, their employer. For example, in a headline in The Times Online, journalist Robert Crampton wrote: “Gordon Brown screwed up by not screwing it up.” It’s not acceptable to some journalists, that in a letter of condolence, written by someone that has millions of extremely important things to do during the day, he is the prime minister after all, manage to misspell some words. In The Sun newspaper, splashed out “Bloody shameful” and “PM couldn’t even get our name right.”

The media focuses on things that are irrelevant to our cultural growth just to show us how society is heading for a slump related to culture and education. A good example of this kind of media focus is the saga of Katie Price and Peter Andre. In this case it is a bit different since they both live in the public eye and are used to using the media. Although, a lot of what is shown from their life together as a couple was completely ‘made up’ for television. “Television calls for dramatization” (Bourdieu, 1996:19). Living their lives in constant worry of what society would think of them and what really would change society’s view of them as a couple. Once that didn’t work out anymore they got divorced. “…images have the peculiar capacity to produce what literary critics call a reality effect” (Bourdieu, 1996:21).

In conclusion we have to end up by agreeing with Bourdieu statements about press and television. It’s a world of drama and conflicts. Some will lose and some will win. A lot of good journalists get caught up in this world and are drawn to this orbit without realizing it. The embarrassment that the prime minister had to carry for a couple of months, for misspelling Jacqui Janes son’s name and the disgraceful story of Katie Price and Peter Andre, just shows us again that journalists, producers and artists see things differently and some of them will suffer to keep up with the demands of commercial television where is based on numbers of viewers and ratings. A lot of what is on television today is there for a reason and the main goal is to reach as many people as they can. So, if the population is keen on knowing of ‘What Katie Did Next’ or what Jacqui Janes thinks about Gordon Brown that’s exactly what is going to be the headlines of tabloids and talk shows of Britain.


Tell me what do you think?

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