The Irresolution of Television

Abstract

Television news discourse is in crisis. The technological and textual transformations in twenty-first century television are inseparable from the post-9/11 environment of insecurity. Television’s economy of liveness and visually intensive interaction order is at the centre of new media and security ecologies that have marked the new century. The relationship between television and terror in this period is subject to a process we label ‘media renewal’. This is the process in which television in particular appropriates ‘news content’ and constructs the existence of news as if contingent upon the medium itself. This is not just to say that television news is reflexive in shaping the stories upon which it reports and that the medium remediates (refashions) other media (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) but that it also ‘renews’ itself through its constant discursive self-attention and verbal and graphic self-consciousness. In this way, renewal functions to promote television’s constative (authenticating and validating) presence in the interaction order, continually seeking new parts for itself in the script of the moment. And it is these scripts which are increasingly more adventurous as television seeks to function as author, historian, and prophet, simultaneously transcending and filling time (and place).