Jérôme Bourdon

Unhappy Engineers of the European Soul The EBU and the Woes of Pan-European Television

This article recounts the history of the numerous attempts to create or promote a European identity through television and explores the reasons for their failure. From the 1950s, engineers of the European soul, with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) playing a central part, resorted to a variety of technologies and genres: simultaneous live broadcasts in Eurovision, news exchange, later satellite television, highbrow drama and popular entertainment notably with the Eurovision song contest. Even when they reached an audience, these attempts failed with respect to their main aim, as they were based on a false, deterministic view of television as a medium and on a dated, communicative view of the nation where media have the power to shape collective identities.

Together, nevertheless? Television memories in mainstream Jewish Israel

Drawing on 40 life-stories of Jewish-Israeli television viewers collected over the years 2004—6, this article makes three claims. First, it suggests that the formation of memory is tightly intertwined with television viewing, both at the individual level and the collective levels of the family and the nation. It elaborates on a typology of television memories, differentiating between wallpaper memories, flashbulb memories, media events and close encounters. Second, it asserts that in Israel, the nation remains a major framework for apprehending collective memory. Nevertheless, fragmentation can be felt: immigration and ethnicity play a role, as does commercialization. Finally, it makes a methodological claim about the ways collective memory can best be studied. Examining the reception of audiences, in addition to the common focus on memory texts, reveals that even with commercialized, fragmentized television, Jewish-Israeli viewers share a strong sense of common memories and a collective past.

Detextualizing: : How to write a history of audiences

This article discusses the specific epistemological and methodological difficulties which historians of audience face while taking stock of recent developments in the field. It starts with a definition of the audience as an entity with both objective and subjective dimensions. It refutes the textualist claim according to which audiences are pure discursive entities. Put into historical perspective, textualism appears as less postmodern than romantic. This article then warns historians against another form of less conscious, ‘rampant textualism’: being influenced by ‘grand narratives’ based on axiologies of hopes and fears triggered by the media. They may provide interesting ideal-types but should not be considered as directly relevant to history. The main part of this article is devoted to a typology of sources, following four categories: from above (coming from media, political, administrative elites), from the side (references to audiences in other media, including art and literature), from below (written and more recently oral expressions of audience members) and from the media themselves (both physical artefacts and media messages). It shows the advantages and drawbacks of each and explains the danger of pitching one against the other (e.g. ‘good’ ethnography, against ‘bad’ statistics).

Alone in the Desert of 50 Million Viewers: Audience Ratings in French Television

On 26 August 1987, a public dispute broke out, originating several days before in the realms of French television. The daily newspaper Libbrution devoted its front page to the problems surrounding audience ratings, with the headline ‘The battle over MtdiamCtrie, the Audience Rating Organization: TELEVISIONSAYS DOWN WITHTHEREFEREE’.’T~~ limited company which deals with the collection of television viewing figures, set up in 1985 when the French government relinquished its control of this administrative service, was strongly criticized by the television channel TF1, which had also been privatized a year previously. TF1 had accused the company of providing a rival channel, La Cinq, with a part of the list of homes used in the calculation of viewing figures. The weekly publication Le Canard Enchafnb, which had made a specialization out of (amongst other things) condemning opinion polls, was the first to unearth this information. As is often the case in television, there was a hint of scandal in the air. The viewing figures, quoted religiously every day, were said to be inaccurate or, more seriously, rigged, and served neither the public interest nor the aims of objective measurement. Within a few months, the dispute had begun to die down. In September 1987, MCdiamCtrie was taken to task again, this time by the AACP (Association des agences conseils en publicitb), an organization which represents advertising agencies in France. In December, the CESP (Centre d’btudes des supports de publicitb), a body which represents advertising professionals as a whole, decided to finance a system for recording viewing figures. In February 1988 it withdrew its backing, since certain advertising executives had decided to become shareholders in M&diam&trie, in common with the three French national channels and various other companies.*

Controversial Cartoons in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Cries of Outrage and Dialogue of the Deaf

This article analyzes the controversies triggered by sixteen cartoons about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, published in nine western countries between 2001 and 2014. For this, we use E.D. Hirsch’s distinction between the meaning of a text—which refers to the author’s intentions—and its significance—which emphasizes the contexts of production and reception. Critics focused mostly on significance, defenders on meaning. Using this distinction, we first examine the rhetoric of cartoons: stereotypes linked to antisemitism (accusations of deicide and blood libel), use of the Star of David as metonym of Israel, disputed historical analogies (between Israeli policy and Nazism or Apartheid). Second, we analyze four levels of contextual interpretations that have framed the debates: the cartoon as genre, the ethotic arguments about the cartoonist and/or newspaper’s track record, the cartoons’ historical and transnational intertextuality (especially with the Arab press), and the issue of audiences’ sensitivities. We analyze the complex exchanges of arguments that led mostly to a dialogue of the deaf, but also, in some cases, to partial agreement on the offensive character of the cartoons. We conclude that this methodology can be applied to other controversies around popular political texts, which offer similar characteristics.

Transnational activism, new and old media: The case of Israeli adoptees from Brazil

This is a case study of transnational activism across media genres and platforms, focusing on young Israeli adoptees from Brazil, struggling to trace their biological origins, recover (to some extent) their culture of birth and make their plight known. Theoretically speaking, this study is based on the notion of hybridity, understood as a strategy used by individuals to elaborate new social identities (Israeli adoptees organized as online support group, moving to activism, recovering their culture of origin through media and travelling), by media producers to elaborate texts relevant to complex audiences (dramatized documentary, transnational ‘docu-telenovela’, Brazilian prime-time entertainment programme used to expose social problems), and more generally, as a characteristic of the media system that constantly (re)combines technologies, genres and actors. Hybridity, however, should not be confused with equality. Relations between system components are mostly asymmetrical, but are constantly evolving, often unpredictably, offering some manoeuvrability even for weaker actors.

Doing audience history: Questions, sources, methods

Audience history poses a methodological as well as an intellectual challenge. Everyday practices of readers, viewers and listeners are typically beyond the remit of sources found in institutional archival collections, and the researcher is often left with a plethora of sources that only marginally address the object of study, and rarely amount to a clear-cut, homogeneous understanding of audiences and their historical practices. Contemporary audience surveys, documents produced by governmental, administrative and legal bureaucracies, professional testimonies, oral history interviews and other sources each offer their own vision of the audience. How does one move beyond these multiple, often contradictory visions, to a reasonably coherent history of the actual everyday practices and thoughts of media users? Given the overwhelming variety, yet in some sense also paucity of relevant sources, it is of no surprise that media historiography has often given preference to safer fields: the history of institutions and media content. Recent years have of course seen some notable advances in the field of audience historiography – most prominently Richard Butsch’s (2000) path-breaking study of American audiences in the 19th and the 20th century, Butsch and Livingstone’s (2013) the edited collection exploring the variegated meanings of audiences historically and globally, as well as the fast growing body of historical studies of film reception and movie-going (e.g. Staiger 1992, Stacey 1994, Maltby et al. 2007, Kuhn 2004). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that historical research on media audiences is still in its infancy. There have been only very few attempts to systematically address its key concerns and methodological principles (see Biltereyst et al. 2012 for an exception), and the empirical focus of existing work has been somewhat uneven, with most research focusing on film and cinema-going and much less on broadcasting, for instance. Furthermore, despite the growth of single country case studies from beyond the western world, we have yet to develop a more synthetic and explanatory account of the differences and similarities between audience histories globally.

Outrageous, inescapable? Debating historical analogies in the coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

This article explores the debate that has surrounded the use of analogies in coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, analyzing in depth two ‘analogy affairs’ on the basis of a LexisNexis corpus: the 2002 Auschwitz-Saramago affair (64 items) and the 2006–2007 Apartheid-Carter affair (154 items). Using the classic Aristotelian tripartition of logos, ethos, and pathos, the article unfolds the argumentative structure of the controversies. Carter and Saramago used the combination of their own personal status and the controversial nature of their analogies to trigger a debate. Commentators focused very much on the ethos (arguments around the authority and the character of the authors) and the pathos, and tended to ignore the logos (the factual relevance of the analogy). Opponents, who made up the majority of commentators, considered analogies as a way of passing judgment on and mobilizing against one of the actors in the conflict (Israel in our cases). This analysis suggests that despite the call for a more cautious use of (or even a prohibition of) the analogies discussed, participants in the debate on the Israeli–Palestinian conflicts are bound to resort to them – even if only to condemn them.

« Qui a tué mohammed el-dura ? » De la mise en doute informatique d'un fait journalistique : Paroles publiques: Communiquer dans la cité

Cet article s’attache a analyser la violente controverse qui s’est developpee, sur plusieurs annees, autour de la diffusion d’images de la mort d’un enfant palestinien par la deuxieme chaine francaise en septembre 2000. Originale de par ses publics (le monde juif francais, et marginalement des Etats-Unis) et les vecteurs de mobilisation (l’internet, mais avec le but avoue d’obtenir la mise en cause du journaliste et de la chaine par les grands medias et par la justice), cette controverse revele une forme de debat public complexe, ou l’identite sociale et professionnelle des acteurs en cause est redessinee par la circulation des representations et des arguments.

Ratings, the state and globalization: the politics of television audience measurement in Israel

This is a study of the introduction to Israel of a technology for measuring television audiences, the ‘People Meter’ (PM), focusing on its political aspects. It links the new practice to the history of the state, precisely to the emergence of the neo-liberal state, which brought about a new relation to numbers, using an increased quantity of statistics for the regulation of economic sectors. In Israel, the state, in both its old (government ministers, administrators, state-owned/public channels) and new (regulatory bodies) guises, has been deeply involved in audience measurement. Next, the study situates the history of audience measurement in a global context, examining the ways in which both public actors, and private actors associated with international marketing groups have domesticated a new mode of regulation for audience measurement – the Joint Industry Committee (JIC), and the new ‘state-of-the-art’ technology – the PM. Third, it considers the political role played by audience figures in the fight over the representation of the public and of specific minorities in the public sphere: the Arab minority in Israel, the Palestinians and the settlers in the occupied territories, the Jewish minorities from the former Soviet Union (FSU) and from Ethiopia.