A look into
the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s ideas about ‘simulacra’ and the
hyper-real. Baudrillard seems to be portraying that the media is a reflection
of basic reality and that it masks and perverts a basic reality, he also
believes that it masks the absence of basic reality. It bares no relation to
reality whatever: its own pure simulacrum.
“In the first case,
the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of
sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice.
In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery.
In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of
simulation.” (1)
You can find this in lots of modern media, a main case being
the Mark Duggan police shooting in 2011 “Mr Duggan,
29, was shot by officers last Thursday in Tottenham. His death sparked the
initial riots in London which were followed by disorder in other English
cities. The Independent Police Complaints Commission later released a statement
to make it clear that Mr Duggan did not fire a gun at police. Ballistic tests
found that a bullet which lodged itself in one officer's radio was police
issue. It was reported by many media outlets at the time that a police officer
had been shot before Mr Duggan was killed.” (2)
Police have supposedly lied to the media to
cover up this shooting which may have been unlawful. Even to this day the whole
story has two sides from witnesses and the police themselves. Quite a famous
aspect of this story is the image used of Mark Duggan, which was an image of
him holding a plaque at his daughter’s funeral, which has been cropped to make
him look to be a violent man. This backs up Baudrillard’s point he is making
about the media masking and perverting basic reality very strongly.
I think peoples main problem with media at the
minute is weather to trust it or not and stories like this bring mixed opinions
to everyone’s minds, weather that be about the media or in turn the information
which is brought forward to the media.
1. Jean Baudrillard, ed. Mark Poster, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’,
Selected writings (Cambridge : Polity, 1988), pp.166-172
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