Michael Mario Albrecht

"The 'Tea Party Movement' as Media Event"

In Media Matters, John Fiske begins by posing the question:  “Can we separate media events from nonmedia events, or are all events today, or at least the ones that matter, media events” (1)?  Fiske published his book just before the notion of a media event became increasingly complicated with the rise of the Internet and the ability of traditional media to interact with the Internet.  In this paper, I bring Fiske’s notion of a “media event” to bear on the contemporary phenomenon known as the “Tea Party Movement.”  Further, I look for the ways in which Fiske’s theoretical framework is useful for conceiving political media events in the contemporary media landscape, as well as examining the ways in which Fiske’s theory might be expanded or revised in light of the drastic changes to media that have occurred since Media Matters was published.   

I maintain that the Tea Party Movement is useful to interrogate as a media event because it elides components of a media event with traditional components of a social movement, and demonstrates the “real” consequences of media events.  Fiske works to destabilize any easy division between the reality behind a media event and the event itself.  For him, “no piece of reality contains its own essential existence; equally it cannot dictate the discourse into which it will be put” (5).  The fluid ways in which traditional distinctions between the reality and the coverage of reality manifest in the media event surrounding the Tea Party Movement provides an intriguing case study for Fiske’s theoretical framework.   

Fiske’s framework is further useful for examining the Tea Party Movement because of the complicated ways in which race and class are manifested within the movement’s discourses.  Fiske demonstrates the ways in which voices that were traditionally marginalized come to be seen as part of the mainstream.  Fiske was perhaps overly optimistic when he identified Rush Limbaugh as being a part of residual culture and representing “yesterday’s man” (12).  Frighteningly, Limbaugh has moved to become part of mainstream culture, and is one of the media figures most idolized by members of the tea party movement.  In fact, the movement has taken up discourses and tactics that were traditionally employed by oppressed minorities; in an ironic turn, the traditional mainstream has come to see itself as a marginalized group whose voice is only now emerging as mainstream.  In this paper, I ask whether the notions of emergent, mainstream, and residual culture, which Fiske borrows from Raymond Williams, still make sense in conceptualizing culture in the contemporary media landscape.   

While Media Matters has been taken up less often by contemporary studies of culture than Fiske’s other books, I want to follow the trains of thought that Fiske outlines in this study and map the terrain of contemporary media culture in relation to those theoretical assumptions laid out by Fiske.