(12:00)

     Theodor Adorno writes:  “Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. 

     Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they resist. 

     Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touched them as familiar. 

     Few things contribute so much to the demoralization of intellectuals.  Those who would escape it must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate.”

                                   from:  Minima Moralia  1951  p.101

     The PVR set-top box I purchased from my satellite TV provider screwed up some how.  I simply could not stop it from recording ABC World News with Diane Sawyer.  Every week night --religiously-- it archived this newscast until the entire 80GB hard drive was completely full.  And still it continued, automatically deleting the oldest episode in order to fit in the most recent recording.  This mechanical reproduction continued for months on end.  I tried to ignore it.

     While I do watch most every kind of newscast available on a daily basis, I focus mainly on three U.S. 24hour cable TV news providers.  But here in my PVR sat a valuable archival data base.  So during the holidays I decided to ‘critically’ watch every recording.  It was a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the vaguely solipsistic and fatalistic “journalism” of Diane Sawyer.

   Disturbing climate change data mounts every day, yet viewers exhibit little behavioral change.  Why?  It is because necessary information is too often nullified through repetitive forms of contemporary TV production.  News making machinations immediately render every topic into “vague expression”.  This daily data-drip of horrors, in turn, invokes little but the “suspension of all received opinions” -- irrespective of topic.  It’s the tactic of selling whatever is easiest to consume.  And endless pictures always trump intellectual rigor.

    But of course it should be no surprise that TV news no longer intends to inform.  Purposefully, network news is only to (for) show, and it must do so through rituals of emotive performance.  A news anchor’s presence is impeccably crafted, honed (styled and lit) to emit empathetic delivery necessary for continuous reception.  Sawyer’s sole purpose is to continuously glow with impassioned resignation.  It is recognizable “commerce”.

     And so, one begins to understand why Diane Sawyer can regularly pronounce dire updates of global catastrophe and still so few of us bother to understand or care...including Diane herself.  For it matters not whether the actual end of world is or isn’t near.  Diane will never communicate any understanding inherent in the meanings of “end” or “world” or “near”.  She will only show and sigh...again and again.  We viewers insist upon this, upon seeing everything in abbreviated, explicit, suspended resignation.  Classic hegemony.

     We watch Diane’s repetitious images and agreeably yawn.  We disregard all consequence and await the commercial.  We shrug off every lullaby of shock.  Indeed, we eagerly fear the future on every TV channel, while snapping “selfies” of our own impending doom.  It is the TV recipe of abstracted denial.  (That is unless you are the one victimized, then you wonder why your disaster isn’t everyone’s top priority.) 

     While I might find personal enlightenment through Adorno’s critical theory of negative dialectics, it is clear few others do...or care.  For as Adorno reminds, “unequivocal comprehension” is long gone.  It has been systematically “deliberately disencouraged”.

    This is the very purpose, I suppose, of employing combinations of ethnography and critical theory to research media.  They are tools --my tactical methods-- for identifying media exploitation directly from my home TV.  But here I’m not parodically invoking the usual three B’s (blood, breasts, beasts) found throughout most corporatized media.  (I neglect these staples).  Instead this video attempts to condense and amplify the monotonous mechanical drumbeat inside so much climatic disaster newscasting.

     Over a two week period, I chronologically examined some seventy five episodes (40 hours) of ABC News --back-to-back-- decontextualized from their daily broadcast environment.  This is not the optimal approach to critical media ethnography, but it finally cleaned out my PVR hard drive.  From this 15 week news cycle, I gleaned over 500 individual “apocalyptic” clips from ABC News containing climate destruction imagery.  Do the math, this video could have easily been triple-length, just from one network news program alone.  But 12 minutes is enough here to state my case.  We viewers resist “conceptual effort” anyway.  We require endless unrequited dénouement. 

     News providers do indeed show us important news every day.  This video proves as much.  But newsmakers are “traitors to what they communicate” -- doomed inside their own perfect media storm.  Diane showed me so.  And it is critical ethnography that reveals to me why.

Walter Benjamin  (1936)   “Self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can  experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”   

Diane Sawyer  (8Jan13)    “2012 was the hottest year in the United States...and hotter not by a little but by a landslide.”         

Brian Williams  (8Jan13)    “About the last thing we needed to hear, but it’s news because of that.”       

Scott Pelley  (8Jane13)   “They’ve never seen anything like it.”

Chad Meyers  (9Jan13)   “Right now it just seems overwhelming.”

       For more weather mediaturgy...click HERE... or HERE.