Symbolic Uses of Decisive Events: Tiananmen as a news icon in the editorials of the elite U.S. press (original) (raw)
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Symbolic Use of Decisive Events: Tiananmen as a News Icon in the editorials of the elite U.S. press
The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2011
The Tiananmen crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1989 was a decisive event that has provided an enduring prism for the world media to interpret China. This article examines how two of the most preeminent U.S. newspapers— New York Times and Washington Post—editorially invoked Tiananmen as a “news icon” in the past twenty years. We contend that the meanings of Tiananmen were reconstructed over twenty years partly but not completely in line with the changes in the United States’ policy toward China. Specifically, Tiananmen symbolized Communist dictatorship in the initial years after 1989 and then became an example of China’s human rights abuse in the late 1990s. Into the 2000s, the significance of Tiananmen faded away. But it remained as part of United States’ ritualistic memory of China’s repression that invokes the moral bottom line of U.S. foreign policy. In theoretical terms, this study shows how a news icon, in the course of an extended life cycle, may exhibit both continuities and changes in its meanings, and there can also be subtle variations in the relationships between a news icon and the dominant power structure over time.
The Tiananmen crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1989 was a decisive event that has provided an enduring prism for the world media to interpret China. This article examines how two of the most preeminent U.S. newspapers-New York Times and Washington Post-editorially invoked Tiananmen as a "news icon" in the past twenty years. We contend that the meanings of Tiananmen were reconstructed over twenty years partly but not completely in line with the changes in the United States' policy toward China. Specifically, Tiananmen symbolized Communist dictatorship in the initial years after 1989 and then became an example of China's human rights abuse in the late 1990s. Into the 2000s, the significance of Tiananmen faded away. But it remained as part of United States' ritualistic memory of China's repression that invokes the moral bottom line of U.S. foreign policy. In theoretical terms, this study shows how a news icon, in the course of an extended life cycle, may exhibit both continuities and changes in its meanings, and there can also be subtle variations in the relationships between a news icon and the dominant power structure over time.
Remembering Tiananmen and the Berlin Wall: The elite U.S. press’s anniversary journalism, 1990–2009
This article examines how the New York Times and the Washington Post have in the past two decades presented discourses of anniversary journalism to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both of which occurred in 1989 and had global implications. These two events ideologically signified the failure of Communism and the victory of the West. However, they posed different challenges to the U.S.-orchestrated "new world order." Insofar as the Tiananmen crackdown was remembered as an "unfinished revolution" and fell within the "sphere of legitimated controversy," the elite U.S. press had greater leeway in presenting the views of elite factions, albeit all within the orbit of "established pluralism." In contrast, since European integration after the fall of the Berlin Wall was an issue of broad elite consensus, the press constructed its perspectives more closely aligned with those of official foreign policy. Anniversary journalism connects personal reminiscences of distinguished journalists to the dominant narratives. The ideological structure of the elite U.S. press has been highly stable, even though the narratives may appear to shift periodically. The legacy of the anti-Communist frame remains an important constituent of the elite U.S. press's prisms for viewing and interpreting the post-Communist world.
This article examines how the New York Times and the Washington Post have in the past two decades presented discourses of anniversary journalism to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both of which occurred in 1989 and had global implications. These two events ideologically signified the failure of Communism and the victory of the West. However, they posed different challenges to the U.S.-orchestrated "new world order." Insofar as the Tiananmen crackdown was remembered as an "unfinished revolution" and fell within the "sphere of legitimated controversy," the elite U.S. press had greater leeway in presenting the views of elite factions, albeit all within the orbit of "established pluralism." In contrast, since European integration after the fall of the Berlin Wall was an issue of broad elite consensus, the press constructed its perspectives more closely aligned with those of official foreign policy. Anniversary journalism connects personal reminiscences of distinguished journalists to the dominant narratives. The ideological structure of the elite U.S. press has been highly stable, even though the narratives may appear to shift periodically. The legacy of the anti-Communist frame remains an important constituent of the elite U.S. press's prisms for viewing and interpreting the post-Communist world.
Anniversary coverage of Tiananmen and the Berlin Wall in UK and U.S. press, 1990-2013
Media, Culture & Society, 2015
This article examines how the New York Times and the Washington Post have in the past two decades presented discourses of anniversary journalism to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both of which occurred in 1989 and had global implications. These two events ideologically signified the failure of Communism and the victory of the West. However, they posed different challenges to the U.S.-orchestrated “new world order.” Insofar as the Tiananmen crackdown was remembered as an “unfinished revolution” and fell within the “sphere of legitimated controversy,” the elite U.S. press had greater leeway in presenting the views of elite factions, albeit all within the orbit of “established pluralism.” In contrast, since European integration after the fall of the Berlin Wall was an issue of broad elite consensus, the press constructed its perspectives more closely aligned with those of official foreign policy. Anniversary journalism connects personal reminiscences of distinguished journalists to the dominant narratives. The ideological structure of the elite U.S. press has been highly stable, even though the narratives may appear to shift periodically. The legacy of the anti-Communist frame remains an important constituent of the elite U.S. press’s prisms for viewing and interpreting the post-Communist world.
Journalism
This study applies a most similar systems design to examine ‘anniversary journalism’ of two epic global events in the year 1989 – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen crackdown – as reported by the elite press in the United States and Britain from 1990 to 2014, through the combined methods of computerized network-based text analysis and critical historical discourse analysis. Findings suggest that the elite press in both countries continued to view these two events through the lenses of the lingering anti-Communist ideology in the post–Cold War era and shared an increasingly converged cosmopolitan vocabulary primarily in terms of the universal rights of global citizens. Most commemorative anniversary coverage drew on the memory of correspondents who had covered the events. We argue that both US and British representations have become central political-cultural icons facilitating the emergence of a memory transcending national boundaries. Meanwhile, results indicate that elite press discourses in the United States and United Kingdom still varied significantly with their respective national concerns and global position.
Tiananmen: The Politics of US-China
2005
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Inspired by Tuchman's concept of the 'strategic ritual of objectivity', we argue that journalists employ what can be called the 'strategic ritual of irony' in their accounts to convey moral stance toward morally 'tainted' stories, often under the façade of objectivity. Systematic reading of American journalists' memoirs and writings reveals that their portrayals of post-1989 China, against the tragic background of the Tiananmen crackdown, habitually resorted to two genres of irony – situational irony and verbal irony – to express their disdain for an emerging moral vacuum in contemporary China. The injection of irony, in the form of objectivity, distances journalists from the 'tainted' targets they cover and hence protects their own professional reputation.
Rhetorical Trajectories of Tiananmen Square
Diplomatic History, 2010
In April and May of 1989, the protest movement that began in Tiananmen Square, in the center of Beijing, became one of the most dramatic and defining episodes in the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush. Bush indicated that had he not kept the lines of communication open, it would have taken significantly longer for China-U.S. relations to heal. But understanding of the Tiananmen movement, and its diplomatic consequences, does not come easily. In the West, there is still a widespread incomprehension about why the Chinese government reacted the way it did and condemnation over the lengths it took to maintain its grasp on power. Moreover, in spite of the rapid economic gains of the almost two decades since the events, and the accompanying social and cultural changes that have radically altered so many aspects of Chinese society, the Tiananmen movement remains largely undiscussed in China. Younger generations of students across China know almost nothing of the events, beyond that a “counter-revolutionary group” sought to “overthrow the government.” This essay seeks to illustrate the vast gulf between rhetorical constructions of the event, and the impact of those constructions on subsequent foreign policy.
Public Culture, 1989
The day after the Tiananmen massacre of June 3-4 my friends and I began to feel an acute deprivation of news.' We talked to everyone we could, especially anyone adventurous enough to have ridden into the center of Beijing to see the army deployments and the remnants of struggle. We tried to sort through the many rumors. But we suffered for lack of television and newspapers; we huddled around radios trying to hear the BBC or Voice of America above the static and squeals of the jamming. Only two weeks before we had enjoyed the freest press in the history of the People's Republic of China, Now it was almost impossible to find out anything. Television played irrelevant soap operas and Kung Fu movies; there were no news broadcasts, not even lies. Even telephone service from our university to different parts of Beijing was interrupted. Finally two expatriate friends and I recognized the solution. We rented a room in the Shangri-La Hotel, a fancy Hong KongPRC joint venture a mile down the Xisanhuan road. There we enjoyed the benefits of Cable News Network reports every half-hour around the clock. There we found the CBS crew ensconced on the fifth floor, though Dan Rather had already departed. Fang Lizhi and his American friend, Perry Link, passed through as the former struggled with whether to seek asylum in the US embassy. My Chinese students came and watched the television reports. They used the phone to call friends around town and nearby, checking and cross-checking various reports. We sent and received FAXes. We cabled in reports to London newspapers and held interviews with American television stations by longdistance. We were, according to these reports, 'eyewitnesses', voices from the center of things. Our words became the stuff of television reports. Yet, in order to gain some perspective beyond what our own immediate observations gave us, we were dependent on those same television reports, especially CNN, beamed to Beijing by satellite (which someone had, temporarily, forgotten to shut down at the Shangri-La). What we could see on the Though it is organized in terms of different themes, this essay overlaps somewhat with two longer ones. No attempt is made to give a narrative account of the protest movement here as this is done in "Democracy and Science, 1989: A Report from Beijing" (Society, 1989); 'The Beijing Spring, 1989: Notes on the Making of a Protest" (Dissent, forthcoming), which addresses especially questions of leadership, organization and tactics in the student movement.