All-news TV has changed the rules In Oka, television transformed a real situation into a surreal scene
In Oka, television transformed a real situation into a surreal scene. The Mohawk Warriors monitored the army through TV sets set up on tree trunks. The army monitored the Mohawks on televisions set up in command posts. The Prime Minister, the premier, the police - all monitoring a situation of their own creation. Entire front page stories were assembled by newspapers watching television, next-day readers ending up with news twice filtered, news now very stale to those who were themselves tuned in to a bizarre soap opera that happened to be in large part real.
By this past weekend, Oka had become a War by Scrum. Both soldiers and Warriors seemed as concerned with their television image as with their supposed enemy. With television begging more, ever more, a Warrior who had walked to the barricades finally told the nagging camera that he had gone to stare into the soldiers eyes "before I kill him" - an inflammatory statement that seemed to come far more from the required image than the heart. The immediate worry was: Now that it was publicly stated, did it become a firm commitment. The immediate thought was, would he have felt the necessity to say such a thing if the camera had not been there insisting on an appropriate closer to the scene?
The thing is, no one knows what the role of all-news television is, only that its presence is acutely felt by all. The important questions are only now forming. Is it, for example, too caught up with "developments" to examine properly events that it has already recorded as factual and moved on from? Take last Tuesday's double slam of the Mohawks in a Department of National Defence video and a later press conference by the Prime Minister. Canadians were left with the impression that there were 200 Mohawk Warriors behind the barricades, that many were Viet Nam veterans and that they were so heavily armed only a nuclear bomb would suffice. This "news" severely escalated the tensions and did much to turn public opinion against the Mohawks, yet there was never any visual evidence presented by Newsworld of such Mohawk manpower or extreme firepower. Nor was much made of the Mohawk charge that both army and Prime Minister were fiddling the truth in order to fiddle public opinion.
In Oka, television transformed a real situation into a surreal scene. The Mohawk Warriors monitored the army through TV sets set up on tree trunks. The army monitored the Mohawks on televisions set up in command posts. The Prime Minister, the premier, the police - all monitoring a situation of their own creation. Entire front page stories were assembled by newspapers watching television, next-day readers ending up with news twice filtered, news now very stale to those who were themselves tuned in to a bizarre soap opera that happened to be in large part real.
By this past weekend, Oka had become a War by Scrum. Both soldiers and Warriors seemed as concerned with their television image as with their supposed enemy. With television begging more, ever more, a Warrior who had walked to the barricades finally told the nagging camera that he had gone to stare into the soldiers eyes "before I kill him" - an inflammatory statement that seemed to come far more from the required image than the heart. The immediate worry was: Now that it was publicly stated, did it become a firm commitment. The immediate thought was, would he have felt the necessity to say such a thing if the camera had not been there insisting on an appropriate closer to the scene?
The thing is, no one knows what the role of all-news television is, only that its presence is acutely felt by all. The important questions are only now forming. Is it, for example, too caught up with "developments" to examine properly events that it has already recorded as factual and moved on from? Take last Tuesday's double slam of the Mohawks in a Department of National Defence video and a later press conference by the Prime Minister. Canadians were left with the impression that there were 200 Mohawk Warriors behind the barricades, that many were Viet Nam veterans and that they were so heavily armed only a nuclear bomb would suffice. This "news" severely escalated the tensions and did much to turn public opinion against the Mohawks, yet there was never any visual evidence presented by Newsworld of such Mohawk manpower or extreme firepower. Nor was much made of the Mohawk charge that both army and Prime Minister were fiddling the truth in order to fiddle public opinion.
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