The ever growing similarities between fact and fiction, news and Hollywood, is the issue of this week’s reading. The author Geoff King uses a very sensitive event as an example of his argument. However the example of the September 11th terrorist attacks and the resulting documentaries/special news reports is a great example of how the news is unfortunately using Hollywood tactics to draw an audience.
It is extremely depressing that the news is increasingly trying “to be more like a movie” (King 2005, pg 50) and this fact is evident each time you turn on the news and even easier to spot when watching 60 minutes, Sunday Night or A Current Affair (not that I would consider the last two news programmes). “A Current Affair” is a particularly bad offender; it seems to borrow many qualities that King talked about that once were exclusively for Hollywood. Sound bridging is a technique A Current Affair uses almost every episode; also the use of ominous/suspenseful music is present in every episode. Every “exclusive” seems to be a classical narrative (bad guy causes disequilibrium, A current Affair solves the problem and creates a renewed equilibrium).
Cloverfield (2008) is a film I watched recently that felt realistic. The shaky footage of a hand-held video camera made it feel like a “home movie”. Cloverfield (2008) is also a movie that gave me something to relate to when I was considering Geoff King’s argument about Hollywood becoming more realistic. When watching the film and seeing the city of New York being destroyed I did think about the September 11 terrorist attacks.
King uses a variety of examples to support his argument that news is becoming more like Hollywood and vice versa. However the example I am very surprised that King did not use (which is not a contemporary one) is that of the broadcast of War of the Worlds (1938). This is where people hearing the radio programme actually thought what was being said over the radio was a real alien invasion.
Bibliography:
King, G., 2005, ‘”Just Like a Movie”?: 9/11 and Hollywood Spectacle’ in The Spectacle of the Real, Geoff King, Intellect Books, Bristol, pp. 47-56.
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