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Iver B. Neumann, Tabloid Terror, International Studies Review, Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2008, Pages 306–307, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2486.2008.00776.x
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This book aims to trace tabloidization in the United States over the last decade or so, and to analyze its preconditions and effects, particularly where war is concerned. Debrix's point of departure is that “[t]he tabloidization of everyday culture takes place when the media and their programming and fictional realities become the all-encompassing dimension of a vast majority of people's daily life” (p. 6). We are in the realm of media analysis: how the increasingly mediatized character of war shapes war as a social fact, and particularly how mediatized war changes state-society relations. These are questions that have been at the forefront of general debate for two decades. International relations (IR) researchers like Michael Shapiro and James Der Derian have said important things about it, but as a discipline, we have come up a bit short so far.
To Debrix, in the United States, and increasingly throughout the world, geopolitics is so media-infested as to be inevitably tabloid. Jean Baudrillard already made the point, years ago. The Gulf War, he said, had already happened before it broke out, and indeed it never really happened. Baudrillard's was a typically French (provocative) way of making the point that so many simulations of the war had already been run, so many media frames of how to report it were already in place, so many representations of war had been consumed by the public, that the event of the Gulf War did not really stand out from all that. People died, but all that was somehow drowned out by all the other images. After Belgrade, Afghanistan and Iraq, this is not so controversial a view anymore. There is a confluence between statecraft and the media.
