Media Events

Media events are incidents or processes with high news value and strong public resonance that have been turned into spectacles by the media and have a sustained effect on public communications. The first manned moon landing in 1969, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the death of Pope John Paul II in 2006, and the Olympic Games in any year are examples of media events that are offered to the public as outstanding incidents of general interest. On the basis of this conceptual understanding, originally developed largely by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, media events may be characterized in the object, time, and social dimensions as follows:

In the object dimension, the media event is presented as a kind of exceptional media situation. Existing program routines are interrupted. Live or special reports underline the character of the event as standing outside everyday affairs. Whereas the program flow consisting of daily news, daily talks, and daily soap operas represents the media's normal fare, it is complemented by media events that focus on special issues and distinguish themselves sharply from routine reporting.

In the time dimension, media events are staged as follow-up stories with spectacular highlights presented in dramatic detail. As far as possible, the media try to present these highlights before, during, and for a long time after the event in a manner that impacts public interest. Thus the dying of Pope John Paul II was already accompanied by the public, and his death was highlighted as a media spectacle that generated great public interest with as much symbolic and aesthetic resonance as the subsequent election of a new pontiff.

In the social dimension, media events are characterized by intensive follow-up communications in the media system as in society as a whole. A large part of the representative media at both national and international levels is involved in the reporting. Other spheres of activity such as politics, economics, and science then take up the resonance and turn their attention to the topic, if they were not already involved in initiating the event in the first place. And finally, viewer ratings and circulation figures rise steeply, that is, the public shows an above average degree of receptiveness.

Other approaches, especially in Europe, do not center their definition so much on the aspect of “outside the daily routine.” Media events are not simply reduced to “major events,” but are defined in a general way as units of “media meaning” whose thematic core refers to specific events, processes, or abstract problem complexes in the form of narrative figures continuously processed by the media. Questions of impact, that is, of the intensity of resonance and reception, are examined only in secondary fashion—they do not yet form the decisive criterion in advance that identifies media events as such. The same approaches also suggest that the expression “media event” be replaced by the more general term of “communications event.” This is due to an understanding of the public sphere or public communications that cannot simply be reduced to the “media.” Instead, the public sphere is described, [Page 443]with reference to Jürgen Habermas, as a network that links various communication spheres such as politics, the economy, science, and the media. High-impact communications events are then characterized by the fact that they form an important part of the agenda not only of the media but also in other communication spheres and that the discourses about the communications event are mutually influenced and intensified in the various communications spheres.

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