North American cable TV news is obscene.
That is ti say, the ob-scene, for media theorist Jean Baudrillard is not an ethically-loaded term of judgement over the morality of particular images. Rather, the prefix ob refers to the idea of hindering or being against.
The ob-scene, therefore expresses the collapse of distance in our social experience.
Today, there is no longer any social scene or stage of action that we view from a distance. Indeed, hyper-closeness is the very promise of TV, and particularly for news.
This collapse of distance has occurred across society to the extent that sexual pornography is but only one extreme example of a wider atmosphere of social explicitness -- social pornography -- which I define as the widespread cultural manifestation of excessively explicit images... not necessarily of a sexual nature.
‘Scenes’ that were traditionally viewed upon a ‘stage’ necessitated a gap between the viewer and the actor (for instance, the proscenium arch). But now all distance has imploded. Aura is lost.
Thus, the primary task of all media and information today is to produce the real... the extra real... ever closer... and to wider audiences.
Television production today promotes too much of the real. As it does, we along with our representations fall ever deeper into obscenity and pornography. That is to say our visual explicitness demands a kind of zoom-in technique, taking us too near the real, pornographying realities which previously only came into view at a certain distance.
North American cable TV news propagates today’s excessively explicit desire to see everything in close-up, under the formal surfaces of cultural forms. These visual close-ups transgress our social much too pruriently, reproducing it pornographically, obliterating Barthes’ studium, and leaving surreal totalities of punctum in their wake.
The above video is intellectual (Eisenstein) montage. It is explicit closeness of pornography layered over (collided with) the obscene lack of distance in newscasting. Porn and News - Cameras and Guns.
And in this case, the telescope (vaginal close-ups, earnest newscaster lies into the zoom) on the rifle (photo camera, TV image) kills (objectifies obscenely) as surely as any bullet (message, content). Whichever TV broadcaster or brand of pathetic righteousness you prefer; the ideology and method of Close-Ups conflate both the surreal and obscene, as exaggerated above. And also here. Aura is gained.
And here is a reversed version: Abhort
This video attempts to ”shock” into view the equivalency of
angry-news-close-up to the collapse of social distance found in pornography... both are unacceptable practices for public information dissemination.
Taylor, P. A., & Harris, J. LI. (2008). Critical theories of mass media: Then and now. New York: Open University Press (p:169).
FOX Nation 2009 (1:45)
