monarchy enjoys almost universal recognition in this capacity, and it is
therefore enabled to heighten the moral and civic sensibility of the society
and to permeate it with symbols of those values to which the sensitivity
responds. Intermittent rituals bring the society or var ying sectors of it repeat-
edly into contact with this vessel of the sacred values. The Coronation pro-
vided, at one time and for practically the entire society, such an intensive
contact with the sacred that we believe we are justified in interpreting it as ...
a great act of national communion.’ (cited in Mullan, 1997: 4)Television, and, we could add, the press and radio are able to extend this
communion to so many more than is possible in mutual spectatorship:On 2 June 1953 much of Britain came to a standstill as millions watched
the regal ceremony from Westminster Abbey. In the weeks before the event
500,000 sets were sold as ‘Coronation fever’ swept the land. Despite the
fact that there were only two million or so sets in existence somehow 20
million managed actually to watch the occasion. At the time the Coronation
became the ‘biggest event in television histor y’ and was broadcast in
France, Holland, Germany. It is estimated that ultimately the world audience
measured some 277 million. (5–6)But, as we saw with Carey’s discussion of ritual in the previous chap-
ter, celebrative communion is only one variant of ritual display. Carey
(1998) also discusses rituals of shame, degradation and excommunication.
In media past and present there are a plethora of examples to demon-
strate how the depiction of ‘acts of cruelty can promote, however dis-
tastefully, states of social integration’ (43). Drawing on Dayan and Katz
(1992), he lists the McCarthy, Watergate and Iran–Contra hearings, and his
own case study of the Robert Bork Senate hearing as a ‘media event’. To
these political rituals must be added the confessional forms of TV talk
shows, and the tribal cruelty of excommunication that occurs on reality
survivor shows.
Like the ceremonial appropriation of ritual, the ritual of shaming and
exclusion also has historical antecedents that operated prior to electronic
media. However, unlike the restitutive and deliberative ‘ordeals’ of modern
democracy, the older regimes of ritual were punitive and violent. The most
common occasion for display in pre-media societies was for torture,
execution and ‘punishment’. As John B. Thompson (1995) demonstrates
(see also Chapter 2), in societies of the ancient world, the organization of
power was based on the visibility of the few by the many. This could take
the form of the visibility of nobility via the royal progression, the corona-
tion or funeral, but also the careful management of public punishment in
towns and cities throughout a nation.^27
However, there are three major differences which Thompson outlines
between the mediation of visibility by broadcasting technology, and the
spectacle of old. Firstly, there is the range and scope, which we have
already illustrated with the coronation example. Secondly, there is the208 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 208