| Abstract |
""Bias" is a term that circulates frequently in the contemporary landscape of political media, a term intended to diagnose a failure when media outlets fail to maintain journalistic objectivity. Beyond Bias interrogates what would seem, at first glance, to be cases of utterly biased examples of political media-contemporary conservative documentary films. However, rather than dismiss such examples of political representation as exemplars of ideological nonsense, reactionary propaganda, etc., Beyond Bias locates in such examples of conservative media a mode of discourse central to contemporary democratic debate in the US. Specifically, this book identifies conservative media as a mode of hysterical discourse. As the book makes clear, hysterical political discourse occurs when debate is simulated as a means to avoid a more substantive exchange; when appeals to compromise function as a screen to blur the distinctions between opposing sides or viewpoints; as recourse to any and all opinions or "alternative facts" conducive to conservatism's ideological priorities, no matter how divorced from reality; through the reduction of complex issues into moral binaries; through the depoliticizing emphasis on form over content; and, ultimately, as a sustained means to "police" the political with excess nonsense and noise that drowns out any alternative voices. Drawing from psychoanalytic theories of hysteria (Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell, Teresa Brennan, Christopher Bollas, and others) and Jacques Rancière's aesthetic politics, and likewise by placing conservative documentaries in the context of many concerns central to Documentary Studies (participation, observation, representation, the archive, etc.), Beyond Bias views conservative documentary, and conservative media and politics more generally, not as the biased excesses of the contemporary political landscape but rather as texts central to understanding the implicit, though sometimes affectively traumatic, antagonisms inevitable in democracy and constitutive of democratic debate"-- Provided by publisher. |
