(1:45)

     Would Jean Baudrillard find North American cable TV news obscene?  Of course, and we should as well.  For the ‘ob-scene’ here is not an ethically-loaded term of moral judgement over particular images.  Rather, the prefix ‘ob’ refers to the notion of hindering or being against.

     Ob-scene therefore expresses the collapse of distance (aura) in socio-cultural experience.  For as we find today, there is no longer any social scene or stage of action that we view from a reasoned distance.  Indeed, it is the growing immediacy and intimacy of hyper-closeness that maintains TV’s allure.  This is true particularly for news making.

     This collapse of distance now occurs across society to the point of saturation.  With it we find social pornography --the widespread production of excessively explicit media images-- even trumps the prurient seduction of purely sexual imagery.  

                       All seeing: All seen = All scene

     Scenes of the sacred (spiritual, private, intimate) that were once traditionally distanced upon a stage or alter --or by the limits of human vision itself-- necessitated a ‘reverent’ gap between the viewer and the actor (for instance, the proscenium arch).  But now that all distance has imploded, as Walter Benjamin reminds, aura is lost. 

     Today our media are both microscope and telescope.  They zoom into and beyond any historical notion of real, creating ‘hyper-real’.  This is the primary task of all informational media today: to telescope the real into extra real...ever closer...and over ever wider fields-of-vision.  All must be exposed.  Distance must die.  We must see everything.  Pornography.

     From anthropological film to FOX News, our visual media now produce too much of this new real.  As they do, we along with our representations spiral ever deeper into the realm of the obscene and thus into social pornography.  Still we demand more zoom-in technique.  Rubber-necking, we insist to be taken toonear the actual.  We beg our media to prick ever deeper through reality’s surface.  Because it fulfills the promise of our ever higher-resolution technology.

     Under the guise of cultural form (news making), visual close-ups transgress pruriently, reproduce the social obscenely, and obliterate Barthes’ studium, leaving surreal totalities of punctum in their wake.

                                Aura can be regained.                                         

     My video, above, is simple intellectual montage (Eisenstein).  In it I layer (collide) the explicit closeness of female genitalia over the crassness of too-close promotion from FOX News.  I do it here to call out the lie, to exaggerate, to shame and counter the construction of media’s obscene distancing (newscasting). 

       The telescope on the rifle kills as surely as any bullet.

     I state my case again: The telescope (from vaginal close-ups to earnest newscaster lies into the zoom) on the rifle (photo camera, TV image) kills (objectifies obscenely) as surely as any bullet (message, content).  Regardless of the TV broadcaster or brand of righteousness you prefer, the ideology and method of close-ups conflate both the surreal and obscene.  You can see more here.  

                   News = Porn.  Cameras = Guns.

     Here is yet a another illustration, a reversed version: Abhort.  This video again ”shocks” into view the equivalency of the  news-close-up and the collapse of social distance too often found in explicit (pornographic) media.  For both forms of news making are unacceptable practices for public information production.

     Taylor, P. A., & Harris, J. LI. (2008). Critical theories of mass media: Then and now. New York: Open University Press (p:169).