Public Lecture Notes | The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization

In our latest public lecture on April 6, 2023, Dr. Francis Cody, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, visited NLSIU to discuss his new book, The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization. The venue was fitting, he said, because the book responds to multiple aspects of the law that had roots at NLSIU.

Dr. Cody began by reading from the introduction to his book, discussing the dramatic ‘midnight arrest’ of the elderly DMK chief, M. Karunanidhi by the then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalitha in 2001 over allegations of corruption. The arrest was covered by a cameraman from Sun TV News who was present at the scene, and the televised broadcast, played on loop, shocked spectators across the country. It triggered widespread criticism, an effective ‘boomerang’ on the newly elected Chief Minister’s intentions who had earlier herself been jailed on similar allegations under Karunanidhi’s rule. The broadcasts led to Jayalalitha losing political clout.

Drawing on this news event, the book argues that “news media represent events happening in the world, but, in the very act of representation they can also provoke a change in the situation.” Important examples of such news events include the Washington Post’s report of the Watergate scandal and The Hindu’s uncovering of the Bofors scandal by which the media caused a turn in events. Dr. Cody went further to argue that media coverage is not simply revelatory in character, but the power of its disclosure can “obscure crucial aspects of how media produce news events in the public sphere.” Here, he called attention to the relationship between disclosure and performativity (that events can also be ‘staged’ for news cameras). In such cases, it becomes difficult to disengage news representation from the event being represented in the news.

To frame the argument, the book relies on the insights of media theorists like Ravi Sundaram, whose concept of the circulation engine describes the proliferation of digital media that effectively erases the distinction between politics and news production; philosopher of tech Bernard Stiegler, who argues that technics be studied to understand social life; and Jodi Dean, whose work on “communicative capitalism” highlights the valuation of texts and images based on their reproduction and repeated citation.

Dr. Cody noted that in our age of deep mediatization, “law emerges in this study as a particularly explosive site for the production of news events precisely because its foundations are more firmly rooted in a set of principles that cannot be reduced to the economic rationalities of commodification”. His talk explored how the dividing line between law and that which it seeks to regulate is constantly breached. Finally, he discussed the method employed in the study and usefulness of Prof. Veena Das’ work on critical events whose momentum cannot be “captured completely by either the structuring forces…or the contexts within which they are experienced.”

NLS faculty member, Dr. Karthik Ram Manoharan, opened the discussion by probing the theoretical underpinnings of the term ‘Event’, citing philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s use of the concept to describe events of world-historical significance. “Do news events have a permanent character, then, or are they transitory?”, he wondered. He also spoke of the 1968 ‘Keezhvenmani massacre’ in Tamil Nadu, where the killing of 44 Dalit agricultural labourers did not receive coverage in its day, even as Mythili Sivaraman—feminist trade union activist and co-founder of AIDWA—worked to keep the memory of its violence alive. He also called attention to the proliferation of news and asked whether it dilutes the news event.

Dr. Cody responded to these insights to assert that his use of event was distinct from the politico-theoretical tradition, and that the events he was discussing were not meant to be ruptures but were embedded in a situation where society is understood as spectacle. He referred to Mythili Sivaraman’s work as creating an archive to enable the reconstruction of events that stood outside the logic of the news event. Plurality of news need not be an amplification, he said, but could generate noise. In this sense, YouTube is hardly more radical than older forms of media.

In a lively public discussion, the audience raised several questions: about the contradiction between the barrage of quickly forgotten breaking news and the fact that ‘the internet never forgets’, whether the mediatized event is different from the spectacle, and the role of advertisements in media following Robin Jeffrey’s book The Newspaper Revolution. Further discussion emerged on the circulation of images after natural disasters which blur the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘created’, and implications of the live-streaming of court proceedings in Constitutional law cases.

Dr. Cody responded sportively to the enthusiastic and thoughtful questions. He spoke of media’s capacity to transform memory, and the fragile nature of the digital archive in storing memory. He noted that the economic model of maximum circulation meant that digital infrastructure is primed for circulation and not for preservation. While news-loops can often become rhetorical devices, he reflected on the Chennai tsunami where media brought visibility to the fishing community, and forced residents to reconsider the city in geographical terms. He also remarked that advertisements play a role in imagining the news, where political campaigns are often seen as advertising campaigns.

Dr. Francis Cody’s book can be accessed here.

To know more about our upcoming public lectures, please visit our NLS Public Lectures page on the website.