Analysis of non-professional film about death

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract

This article examines some non-professional death videos on some Western news sites and it is an attempt to answer the following questions: What does the tendency to stage real death to get attention tell us about the place, the unprofessional war movie in the news? What truths do the dying bodies convey in these videos, and how do their truths shape the ways in which death-in-battle is seen in the news? This article discusses the framing of this news by studying three examples of non-professional films: The death of Gaddafi (2011), the beheading of ISIS (2014) and the Syrian civilian victims (2013). These three cases constitute a brief typology of the observation of the flesh and blood of death in the British press, and show how the news bases of these bodies are set up in order to create an emerging combination of rituals of originality. Digital forensics (technical confirmation of death event or narrative framing), and the revitalization of bodies and their truth. The results show that through these two mechanisms, news of death from war is less relevant to the institutional authenticity of the journalist involved and are more related to technical accuracy and emotional intensification. "Taste and decency" as a function of "normalization" adjusts the aggressive images to the cultural sensitivities of the West. Narrative framing validates dead or dying bodies from battle, not only by its informational value but also by its emotional value. While this preserves the ability to see the sanctifier for some deaths and destroys for others denies the universal right to dignity in death for non-Western victims and helps to reproduce the geopolitical relations of power between Western and non-Western peoples.

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