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MEDIA EVENTS AS A COLLECTIVE PROCESS OF THE
CONSTITUTION OF REALITY


Jocelyne Arquembourg



What is the part of the media in the constitution of public events? This question
usually puts the emphasis on the activities and the practices of the media
themselves, but it rarely questions the definition of the concept of event and how the
media take part in a collective process of comprehension of what is happening as
far as a collectivity is concerned. My purpose would be to apply to such concern a
phenomenological approach which makes a distinction between facts and events
based on experience. I will also illustrate my analysis with the study of two different
media coverage of the same event, because my concern is both theoretical and
empirical. The comparison between the coverage of the tsunami which happened
in December 2004, mainly in Asia, in a French and in an Indian newspaper will lead
to a reflection on how the media link together the descriptions of the facts and the
stories of the reactions to the facts in the story of an event. This comparison
stresses the different sorts of publics which arise from the event as collective
subjects,


KEYWORDS event; media events; phenomenology; public events



Facts and events in the process of the constitution of reality

Media events as a construction

The media are criticized by a great number of researchers in social sciences or
history for a certain number of reasons. The main argument is usually that the media
misrepresent reality whether because media events are pseudo events created by the
media themselves (Boorstin, 1961), or because they overdevelop some facts of small
importance in reality in order to target wide audiences (Champagne, 1991, Nora, 1974). In
the field of discourse analysis, researchers also say that media events are a discursive
construction and put the emphasis on the discourse analysis of the different media as a
mean to deconstruct the events themselves (Charaudeau, 2005, Veron, 1981).

A reflection of reality

On the other hand, the professionals of the media tend to consider that media
events are simply an exact representation of the events which happen in reality. They
stress their efforts to cover the events with a maximum of objectivity. Objectivity being
often considered as an equivalent of transparency, the journalists, apart from editorialists,
step back as subjects of discourse and image. According to journalists, reality would exist
en soi without any human agency to organize it and shape it at least through language.
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Events would exist in reality and the journalists would only have to tell what happened in
the most neutral and transparent way. In that sense, they are supposed to tell the facts to
their public.In the present state of affair we can observe the divorce between a
professional and practical approach which keeps its own agency in the background as
much as possible, and a scientific and critical approach which on the contrary, puts the
emphasis on the role of the media. But this role is generally criticized and supposed to be
motivated by financial or economical considerations.In both cases one can notice that
facts are considered as existing en soi, not as the result of human agency and events are
considered as something rather disturbing and disruptive but the concept of event itself is
never specified as if everybody knew what is an event. Actually, the term is currently used
to designate anything that occurs from a football match to a war, the declaration of a prime
minister or the concert of a famous group. But what do we mean exactly when we are
talking about facts and events? It seems that it is necessary to work on the definition of
both terms in order to cast a new light on this debate.

The phenomenological definitions

The difference between facts and events is not consensual depending on the
theoretical framework which rules over their definition. Different theories draw different
limits. On the one hand, for the analytic philosophy the definition of facts and events is
ontological. For Davidson or Vendler, the question is: what kind of objects of the world are
facts and events?I would rather follow a different perspective elaborated in France by
Claude Romano, who develops a different viewpoint on the concept of event based on the
philosophy of Heidegger. According to the phenomenological standpoint an occurrence is
a fact or an event depending on how what is occurring appears, which means, depending
on the experience of a subject. An apple which falls from a tree is a fact that can be
observed but does not change the course of the life of anybody. An earthquake is an event
in the sense that it affects a lot of people, has several types of consequences, human,
physical, environmental, economical etc. We can say that it breaks an order of things.
Events have this capacity of disorder when facts are only noticed, recorded or certified.
This distinction which draws new borders between facts and events calls different remarks:
Claude Romano notices that an event is not a change in a substance. Rain, flashes of
lightening do not exist out of the fact of raining or lightening. In these particular cases the
verb does not affect a subject that would exist before, it is the verb that gives birth to the
subject and creates it somehow. The change happens in an order of things, let!s say, a
landscape, a garden, a field or a mountain, the sky, generally speaking what we would call
an environment and the people and things which belong to or are concerned with this
environment, it does not properly happen in a substance. We can generalize this
observation and consider that some events have this capacity to create their subject.
Claude Romano calls such a rising subject, an advenant.While we can say that facts
simply happen, events happen to subjects, breaking the course of their lives, reorienting
their stories, bringing new opportunities, ending others, casting a new light on the past,
opening new futures. The distinction between facts and events could lie in the distinction
between the expressions to happen and to happen to somebody or something. The fall
of a stone for instance, is only a fact if it does not affect anybody but is an event if it
causes an avalanche in a mountain that destroys houses and kills several people. Such
distinction is not ontological, it is based on our experience, because facts and events are
often interwoven depending on who is concerned by what is occurring. The same
occurrence can be a fact as well as an event depending on who is affected. The death of
Michael Jackson for instance, is a fact that can be certified by a doctor or the police of L.A,
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but for the Jakson family it is an event which means suffering, a change in their life which
has affective and practical (financial?) consequences. According to these definitions, the
media are hardly able to cover an event, its capacity of disorder as well as producing
novelty for a subject, whether individual or collective. The media cover the facts in the
sense that the news coverage are oriented toward the production of explanations of what
has happened. Pre-existing frames of interpretation are raised to determine the causes of
an occurrence which can be therefore explained through a context or an environment.
Following C. Romano, the factual objectivity of the media is not able to give account of a
deep social experience, because facts do not happen to anybody in particular.
Consequently, the public is defined as a collection of individuals watching what is occurring
in the world as a show without being concerned.Although I shall keep Romano!s definitions
of what is a fact and what is an event, I shall make some objections to his different
conclusions. I would like to underline that, most of the time, facts and events are
intertwined in the coverage of what is called media events. Then, I shall demonstrate that
the reactions to the facts are part of the coverage of an event. These reactions, which are
not the reactions of the people who are directly affected by what has occurred, arise as far
as norms, believes, rules are concerned and reveal the figure of an advenant. Therefore,
we will be able to observe the rising of collective subjects in the terms of Romano, who are
the real subjects of the event, those to who it happens. I shall give an example with the
study of the tsunami coverage of 2004 in a French and in an Indian newspaper. Then one
question will come out of this example which regards the future of journalism: how do the
NTC change the role of the media in this collective process?

Facts and events in the coverage of the tsunami (2004) in Le Monde and The
Hindu

The following considerations result from a comparative study of the French and
Indian coverage of the tsunami which happened in Asia in December 2004. Both
newspapers appear as a reference regarding the reporting of international events and are
supposed to be reliable in terms of objectivity, let!s say, factuality. The comparison is
based on the observation of a lack of information about India in the French newspaper,
although the consequences of the tsunami in India were disastrous. This observation was
rather puzzling and one could wonder why the French newspaper paid so little attention to
India. Concerning our theoretical framework the question would be: Can we say that the
newspapers only reported the facts? Did they report the same facts in the same way?
What does it mean to say that they also reported an event? Did they report an event of the
same kind? And last but not least if we ask: who did the event happen to? in both cases,
we will observe that it did not happen to the same subjects.

The reports of the facts in the first articles of the Hindu

In the Indian newspaper, the tsunami appears first as a huge wave:Huge seismic
sea waves, triggered by a massive undersea earthquake off Sumatra in Indonesia, left
over 9,300 people dead and tens of thousands homeless in India, Sri Lanka and South-
East Asia on Sunday.To a certain extent we can say that the article gives a description of
the facts, and provides an explanation of the causes of the big waves. It yields
geographical localization and quantitative human consequences. More scientific
explanations are to come in the rest of the article concerning the epicenter, the shifting of
the geological plates, the measure of the quake on the Richter scale etc. Most of the
scientific news comes from the United States Geological Survey. The toll of the dead
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people, country by country comes from official sources.The style of the article is neutral
using lots of passive structures like:the toll is expected to rise or thousands of people
were reported missing. But the facts are not reported as the story of an observed
phenomenon with a beginning, and an end. The news is dispatched without any order
whether chronological or geographical. For instance, the news from Sri Lanka comes after
the news from India, and Malaysia after the Maldives, and this order does not follow the
succession of the different phases of the earthquake which started in Indonesia. There is
little news from Thailand and it gives poor information. Yet, different comments of
survivors appear at the end of the article. Verbs at the first person expressing emotions,
feelings of surprise and horror, find place in this first article which, in that sense,
intertwines the story of the facts as they could have been observed by experts or official
sources and the personal reactions of those who suffered from the event, the people who
are directly affected by the wave. The fact that the news are given without order reflects
the image of a world which is literally falling apart. Although, this article seems neutral from
a stylistic point of view, it is not the report written from a distance by an expert or a
detached spectator of a natural phenomenon. In an implicit way, the article expresses the
rising of an important event. But, at this stage of the coverage, the extension, the measure
of the event, are uncertain. The newspaper report of the event is concerning what
happened to the victims and will concern a wider public later.

The reports of the facts in the first articles of Le Monde

This first article reads like a neutral account of the facts. It gives precisions in terms
of time, local and universal, space, localizations and distances, chronology, magnitude etc.
It is the description of a natural phenomenon observed through the eyes! of at least two
centres of observation located in Djakarta and Hawa. From that point of view we can say
that the tsunami is not described as a total breakdown in an order of things because it can
be still explained through preexisting frames of interpretation. The phenomenon has been
clearly identified, and its different phases are described as a quake first, then a wave, then
a second seism a few hours later. There is no wondering, no inquiry about what
happened.If the distinction between facts and event lies on the distinction between to
happen and to happen to, we find a very clear illustration of this distinction in the first
article. There is no mention of those to whom the tsunami happened, of the people being
affected by the disaster. The quake and the wave, strike the coasts of different countries,
tremors are to be felt in Singapour, but the article does not mention by whom and gives
few information about the victims.We can easily qualify this article as purely factual. But if
we analyze how this factuality is produced we can notice that it is not the simple recording
of the facts, nor the observation of the facts as they simply happened. There is more
human agency in the production of this sort of factuality than it seems. First of all, the
observation of a tsunami as a single phenomenon which develops itself from a beginning
to an end is a pure fiction. Actually, the narration of the phenomenon is the result of a vast
amount of observations and data recorded by several observers dispatched through the
world which then can be organized in a story of the facts. It means that factuality is the
result of a system of socio-scientific observation and transmission, as Bruno Latour
demonstrated in his study of Science in action. Then, it is also the result of a discursive
manner of accounting what happened in an impersonal and neutral way. Against Bourdieu
or Champagne, one can notice that there is more human agency, more construction of
reality in establishing the facts than in reporting an event. But a great deal of this
construction lies on socio-technical agents rather than on the media themselves.

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The forms of narrative understanding of events

We have to pay some attention to the narrative forms of the reporting of events.
Most of the newspapers productions are narratives and we have to consider what
narratives generally achieve. According to Paul Ricoeur, narratives should be considered
as models of connections and of attributions.

Models of connections: intentions and aims

But what does it mean to say that a narrative is a model of connections?The
semantics of action which underpin the emplotment of the event draw on networks of
relationships linking intentions, motives and aims to subjects, circumstances etc. In Le
Monde!s accounts, these subjects are often collective, designating international
organizations, nations or States and non-governmental organizations. These collective
entities are often endowed with intentions, aims and motives and with a capacity for action
in the same way as any individual agent. Paris, The White House, The United Nations are
personifications which enable multiple agents to be gathered under one designation to
which behavior, actions and reactions can be attributed just as to single agents. They take
part into a plot as if they were a single character.The emplotment of the event then
consists of the act of linking these agents and causing them to interact in narratives. Two
plots are developed by Le Monde. The first one is the story of a competition between the
United Nations and The United States for the leadership of the international aid. The
second one suggests that someAsian countries are driven by a similar desire to exploit
their role in the international solidarity effort in order to exercise regional domination and to
become members of the Security Council. This emplotment of the narrative appears as a
kind of reading between the lines which attempts to discern rivalries and conflicts of
interest behind the apparent global solidarity. Across the links woven between the hopes
of some and the ulterior motives of others the emplotment of a narrative and its model of
connections become apparent. This is also how it appears for what it is: a way of
understanding reality. In this case we are able to grasp, across the relationships and
interactions described as a power struggle between nations and veiled by the solidarity
efforts, the complexity of international relations challenged by the demands of this
event.The articles published inThe Hindu present a different picture of a succession of
facts, statements and micro-narratives unrelated one to another. But it would not be
appropriate to conclude that this juxtaposition of unrelated news items stems from some
kind of fragmentation of narratives. The general impression given by the paper!s news
pages is rather that of an accumulation or build-up of gestures towards a single aim: the
raise of money to help the devastated areas and their reconstruction. Day after day, the
newspaper reports the gift of money by people from every single level of the society:
employees, churches, trade unions, political parties, enterprises, banks etc. It gives
account of a massive organization built up to organize the collect of money and
information. The comparison with a flood of money is frequently used by the journalists
as if the flood of solidarity would defeat the destructive power of the wave. The
juxtaposition of news items across all the articles creates a "pile-up! effect. Without making
any explicit links, they are nonetheless mutually reinforcing and converge on a single
point: the national mobilization to face the catastrophe.

Models of attribution: the ways in which collective "advenants! appear

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Although very different from classical narratives, journalistic accounts of the tsunami
are nonetheless models of attribution which tell us the who of the event, that is to say, who
it happened to. In the French case, there is no doubt that the international community is a
collective advenant which arises from the event. Despite its blurred outlines and internal
divisions, it still appears to have had an, at least virtual, existence before the event. The
headline in Le Monde declaring that international aid is mobilizing, by its personalization of
the subject and the way it employs a designation with which the reader is assumed to be
familiar, is referring to an entity which existed before its appearance in the emplotment of
the present event. But does "international aid! exist in the public domain outside its current
mobilization? Of course, the UN then takes on a central role in this organizational effort,
but it also includes a number of other agents who do not necessarily have links of
solidarity outside the present event. The international community here becomes the who of
the event, both in the register of suffering and in the register of action. Equally, the daily
paper does not make this collective agent into a united figure. On the contrary, it
continually plots divisions within the collective entity and the two main stages of the
narrative deal with the competition between the UN and the US to lead the international aid
effort and then the supposed ulterior motives of some Asian countries who may be angling
for regional dominance. The event also, however, brings to light these more or less veiled
intentions. The figure of this "advenant!, in the phenomenological sense, is in reality a
dispersed figure which includes a significant number of agents. These same agents may
also form part, or may have formed part, of other collective advenants on other occasions.
The significant fact is that the event provokes the establishment of networks of
relationships which organize the emergence of a collective figure endowed with a form
specific to these particular circumstances. We shall note that those who suffered and
those who acted in the event are also linked together in a single figure. The narrative, as a
model of attribution, thus reveals the way in which the event brings together subjects in the
two-fold register of suffering and action by means of links, the most effective of which in
this instance is solidarity or giving. But, as a collective figure, the advenant is not only
composed of those who have been affected by the event, it is a wider as well as a more
abstract figure in the sense that it includes also those who are concerned by the event in
the name of some human or moral values.If we apply the same kind of analysis to the
Indian newspaper, the figure that arises appears to be that of the Nation, or more precisely
the union of Nation and State. The fact that the event is described as a national disaster
has provided a decisive framework for the structuring of rescue and reconstruction
activities. The narrative curve, which starts with the disaster and finishes at the moment
when India, not content with having put into operation an enormous emergency structure,
offers aid to other countries like Indonesia, clearly shows the meaning of the narrative. The
processes of accumulation, by which the efforts of all the authorities are piled up anyhow,
reinforce this aspect of the picture. The accumulation of donations, from the humblest to
the most extravagant, actively constructs the political figure of a self-sufficient Nation
demonstrating its ability to take its place among the donors. Here the Nation is neither an
imaginary community nor a nationalist ideal, even if both these dimensions are present in
the Indian political and media context. It emerges much more as an "advenant! of the event
which mobilizes it and causes it to appear.

The figure of collective "advenants!

What is it that enables us to characterize the Indian Nation or the international
community as a collective advenant? First of all, there is the fact that they are collective
subjects, entities endowed with a real unity, consisting of a plurality of agents organized
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around a shared commitment. On this occasion, the shared commitment depends on
actions of giving. Individuals, because, confronted with the event in question, they come
together in giving or give something to one another, together form these units of the Indian
Nation or the international community. Of course we can observe that these units take
different forms. The Indian Nation is a pre-existing historical entity structured by a
particular political framework, while the international community is quite different and
appears to have a much less defined shape. In reality, selfless action does not have the
same meaning in both cases. In the first, actions of giving among members of the same
nation constitute a response by means of which the Nation confronts what has happened
to it. As soon as the event is described as "national!, the disaster affecting fishermen on
the coast of Bengal is a matter for the whole Nation. In the second case, the international
community exists on both sides of the frontier between donors and recipients. In reality,
Both the Nation and the international community are also what comes into being [advient]
at the end of this process of circulating money and information. There is therefore also a
temporal dimension to the construction of these collective subjects, which are never
completely given in advance but are born precisely out of their shared commitment and are
shaped as entities through the media narratives. Thus, on the one hand we see a
community of donors appear and on the other hand we witness the phenomenon of
reversal which moves a Nation from the domain of suffering to that of action. This means
that reporting the facts and the reactions to the facts are part of the coverage of the event
and that the subject, the advenant is not only composed by the individuals which are
directly affected by an occurrence, it also arises from distance as far as values are
concerned.At the end of this analysis we can no longer say that the media are producing
by themselves a distorted image of events (Champagne, Nora) nor that the publics are a
collection of individuals watching what is happening in reality without being concerned
(Romano). We could rather say that the media take part in vast collective processes of
understanding a common reality in which different sort of agents and publics are
committed. Traditionally, the positions of agents, media and publics in the process were
clearly defined. The question that I would like to ask in my conclusion is whether these
positions have been affected or not, or may be affected or not in the future, by the rising of
NTC and the development of UGC or social networks on Internet such as Twitter.

Conclusion: how does the rising of NTC change the role of the media in these
collective processes?

The coverage of the tsunami has been the first big international coverage using
UGC. Most of the images of the wave as well as of the devastated areas have been
produced by amateurs. Tourists had been able to shoot the wave before any professional
camera and the circulation of these pictures on Internet before being published by the
media has been a mean to share such a dreadful experience, and to search for missing
persons. The comments following the photographs or the videos were usually highly
subjective expressing fear, sorrow and anxiety as well as the nostalgia of a lost paradise.
But, when used by the media, extracts of videos and amateur photographs were often
presented as factual representations of a physical phenomenon. They could show what
the professional cameras had not been able to shoot, show what the wave was looking
like. The pictures were detached from their subjective comments and imported into
objective reports of the facts which were hardly (or vaguely) prcising who had filmed the
wave, in what circumstances etc. But the views had been taken by somebody who was
threatened by the wave and, as a spectator I could face the wave through his own eyes,
be at his place. In spite of the factuality of the journalistic comment the amateur
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photographs or videos extracts create a link from one subject to another one and this
subjectivity cannot be erased.Nowadays, Twitter plays an important part in the coverage of
events such as the crash of a plane in Holland and in New York, gunfire in Germany or
terrorist attacks in Pakistan. In these different cases non professionals have been able to
testify what was happening, to produce data and pictures, and to comment and analyze
the media coverage. The boundaries between the different positions structuring the
constitution of media events, that is to say, actors, media and publics have faded. The
circulation of the news goes in every direction, from actors to publics, from publics to
actors, from actors to the media and from publics to the media. Meanwhile, the classical
transfer of information from the actors to the media and from the media to the public has
fallen apart. In that sense, we can say that the consequence of the use of social networks
is that anybody has the capacity of being alternatively in any of these three positions. But
another consequence seems to go deeper. In the collective processes analyzed above,
the media transform a particular event suffered by some individuals into factual reports
which can generate reactions as far as norms, values or believes are concerned into an
event giving birth to an advenant. The media are involved in a process of transformation of
an event which affects some individuals into a more general event which concerns a wider
and probably more abstract community such as a Nation or an international community in
our examples. Though artificial it may be, the production of objectivity is a mean to operate
this sort of transformation. The use of UGC or social networks develops more interactivity
than the traditional media but arouse the import of more subjectivity in the media coverage
of events which consequences are already difficult to predict, but which will affect the
collective processes of constitution of a common as well as a public reality.


REFERENCES

ARQUEMBOURG, JOCELYNE (Forthcoming 2009) Who did the tsunami happen to?, Global
Media and Communication.
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CHAMPAGNE, PATRICK (1991) La construction mdiatique des malaises sociaux , Actes
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CHARAUDEAU, PATRICK (2005)Les mdias et l!information, l!impossible transparence du
discours, Bruxelles, Ina-de Boeck.
DAVIDSON, D. (1980) Essays on actions and events, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
LATOUR, BRUNO (1987)Science in action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through
Society, Harvard University Press.
NORA, PIERRE (1974) Le retour de l!vnement in Faire de l!histoire, nouveaux
problmes, dir. Jacques Le Goff et Pierre Nora, Gallimard, NRF.
RICOEUR, PAUL (1983)Temps et rcit, Paris, PUF.
ROMANO, CLAUDE (1998) L!vnement et le monde, Paris, PUF.
---------- (1999) L!vnement et le temps, Paris, PUF.
VENDLER, ZENO (1967) Facts and events , Linguistics in Philosophy, Ithaca, New-York,
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VERON, ELISEO (1981) Construire l!vnement, les mdia et l!accident de Three Miles
Island, Paris, Minuit.


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Jocelyne Arquembourg, Institut Franais de Presse. Universit de Paris II. Laboratoire
CARISM. 4, rue Blaise Desgoffes, 75006 Paris, France. Email: .
jocelyne.arquembourg@orange.fr