The News as a Post-Literary Spectacle

Abstract

Totalitarian-like, the news culture dominates thought during crucial times in our nation. Purposely neither scholarly nor spontanous, this article examines the news of the Persian Gulf war from a critical reader/viewer perspective. It proposes that video news works like an intriguing alphabet, the forms and meanings of which are pronounced by a monopoly of interpreter reporters, anchors and media guests. During a crisis traditional ABC’s in print second the immediate electronic coverage. Normally the viewer and the reader can go separate ways, but a crisis calls for speed and singularity of attention. In the ignorant absoluteness of the singular entertainment of the Persian Gulf war, the difference between being literate in print and being literate in video hardly mattered. What did matter was the facility with which rhetorical strategies governed the principles and actions of people at war. To think otherwise was rendered irrelevant and impolitic.