Within the past week, a story
showed in my Facebook feed in which the author argued that we should all give
up ‘mainstream news’ entirely. Without it, the author claimed to feel more
positive and creative, and liberated from the weight of a barrage of other
people’s ideas and negative reporting. It instantly struck me as inexcusable –
certainly any reasonable person should be informed about what is happening in
the rest of the world, and in their surroundings? This week, Imagined Communities
and Citizen Kane offer insight into what effect the news has on the public. How
symbiotic are the news and the nation?
Anderson argues that the nation has
been made possible from the news, but is the news equally indebted to the
nation? When Kane mimics the mode of other news sources, such as the beginning
reel in production after Kane’s death, signs of ambiguous nationhood are
employed to lend gravitas. For example, the background on the “News on the
March” title card is a row of flags, indeterminate in allegiance, yet lending
grandness to the news at hand nonetheless. Would the news seem as successful or
compelling without appropriating the icons of nationhood?
Citizen Kane, in its depiction of
the newsman and the production of news, appropriates icons of greatness into a
potpourri of antique greatness. Not only was Kane himself a modern-day Kublai
Khan, but his home was likened to any and all palaces from antiquity and
borrows the architectural style of as many eras. Is there an inherent
attractiveness or necessity to aligning modern events or those who report them
to past imagined greatness?
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