In reading Raymond Williams’ seminal writing on the role of television in a developing culture — and culture’s role in such a developing medium — in Television: Technology + Cultural Form (1974), paired with Marshall McLuhan’s work on the great changes that television is bringing to the consumption and spread of information in contemporary society in the comically titled The Medium is the Massage (1967), I immediately began contemplating, from a 21st century perspective, how befitting certain theories are in today’s television. I am specifically interested here in the way US — and subsequently global — news presentation styles would be altered by the First Gulf War, especially the broadcasting of Operation Desert Storm (1990–91). Contrary to McLuhan’s notion that, “Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies,” (138) the First Gulf War has been nicknamed the “video game war” for the US military’s advanced drone technology, which would come to resemble the alienated view of contemporary early digital war games and foreshadowed the near future of the war game genre’s aesthetics. Williams claims that American bulletins lack visualization (Williams, 41), though in the decades since, technological developments have paved way for live, on-the-ground reporting, and with it, expectations around (and pleasure in) disaster imagery. Continuously televised from the comfort of living rooms, in the wake of Kuwait’s invasion and the decimation of an entire generation of Iraqi men, American celebrity emerged. While O.J. Simpson’s trial is often credited for CNN’s entrance into TV staple status with its 24-hour news cycle, it was four years prior that CNN International created a standard for dramatic live disaster coverage with on-the-ground reporting, elevating the role of news anchors from those of trustworthy information-providers reporting from studios (Williams, 39) to the status of the celebrity.
Anderson Cooper, as an example of one of today’s most celebrated journalists, began his career independently (presumably bankrolled by mama Vanderbilt) traversing through war-torn countries in the early 90s, photographing atrocities from the ground. This perceived merit earned through such grueling labor conditions, one seemingly in pursuit of a superior form of one’s craft, paved the way for the popularization of this form of reporting in major American news outlets, a standardization that would elevate reporters to the mythological status of an artist. Such journalists’ popularity rises evermore due to their charisma and relatability, with the arms of their coverage extending into comedy-news (e.g. Cooper’s CNN comedy segment The RidicuList and CNN’s comedic and formerly drunken New Year’s Eve coverage of anchor-celebrity duos), delivering them incomes comparable to Hollywood actors. On occasion, journalists transcend from the byline to the headline. A news presenter’s name being a household name is no 21st-century concept — these presenters were at the very least a nightly visitor to one's living room, after all. CBS journalist Walter Cronkite, for example, had a similar career trajectory to Cooper and exhibited a popular persona. As Williams refers to contemporary anchors, a certain informality in American broadcast lends trustworthiness (Williams, 39). Supporting this theory would require research beyond the scope of this response, but it appears that in the age of social media bringing the private lives of celebrities to the public, so too celebrity journalists are expected to share intimate details of their lives and appeal to emotion in ways perhaps unimaginable in Cronkite’s — and Williams’ — time. As technology enabling the live coverage of global events progressed far beyond the scope of broadcast that Raymond Williams wrote of in Technology + Cultural Form in 1974, expectations that global crises should be covered by beloved journalists have become standard in American news. Perhaps the rise of the celebrity journalist and the demand for disaster imagery is a symbiotic development in TV history.
But more importantly, Couscous:
Such a beauty!
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