Television’s Quagmire: The Misremembered and the Unforgotten

Abstract

Television relies upon history and the past in reporting the present. Thanks to growing archives of footage, television can mix together images and stories from the past to instantly frame the present and indeed the future. In fact, stories from the past are increasingly stories from television’s past. The history of the medium itself can be mapped onto the events that television news has reported. Such appropriation becomes constitutive of television’s own ‘memory’. As television announces, ‘remember when we brought you this’, it claims authorship as if to enhance its own credibility and legitimacy as an actor in those events. Critical to these operations are ‘media templates’, the principal mechanism of instant comparison and contrast that television news employs to reinforce or reshape past events as well as to interpret and direct those unfolding. In this chapter, we examine how some of the most powerful media narratives of the modern age are composed through a multimodal layering and fusing of an array of textual stimulants within the televisual environment. In this way, television news imposes sequential and serial connections on disparate terror events and lends legitimacy to political discourses surrounding the War on Terror. This chapter analyses news texts from 9/11, the 7/7 London bombings, and concludes by exploring the relevance and the endurance of the Vietnam War template in the context of the ‘quagmire’ of the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war.