Conclusion.
I feel that it is valuable to couch news media in terms of mythology rather than modernity or virtuality because mythology is an enduring concept with clear cultural relevance. The word mythology connotes both artifice and traditional narrative. Both these terms reflect the distortion patterns of war reporting. By comparing some of the obviously constructed stories from the most recent war in Iraq with mythic narratives, both narratives are allowed to remediate one another. The immediacy of the current situation is fused with familiar mythic stories. While these are major examples of distorted war narratives, it is reasonable to expect some degree of corruption between the “real” and “mythic” experience of war in every account of war. Even if day-to-day reports are less epic than these breaking stories, a similar myth-inspired template could very well apply, if only loosely.
One obviously problem with this model lies in the situation that Eagleton described, in which a dominant power uses an existing discourse to naturalize its decisions and oppress the legitimacy of opposition. Another problem, which may have a cyclical rather than causal relationship with mythic stories, is the unprogressive nature of myths. It seems like at this day in age our culture should have made enough progress to adopt a more Odysseus-type ideal hero than an Achilles. Ideally we should be able to idealize women in a more flattering role than the damsel in distress. Myths affix glory and legitimacy to what might otherwise be understood as a barbaric activity. Myth in news media is decidedly lacking in hypermediacy. Shakespeare and Homer included satire within their epics, commenting on the banality of violence even as they glorified it, and in doing so provided a hypermediated frame. The news does not select these frames, pulling the epic out of context and presenting it as reality.
Finally, myth-making is an historically elite process, a means of associating the decisions of those in power with the values of those without power. The myths that American news have recently chosen to relate are supportive of both war and the administration. As far as the mythic image of war is necessary to distort the real brutality and futility of violence, these narratives create an “unreality” for the public behind which the powers that be can act without opposition. If the news absolutely must adhere to templated narratives, there are numerous traditions of subversive mythology that can act as a foil to the narratives presented by those in power. As we saw in the case of Alexander the Great, any war narrative can be packaged at least two different ways. Peeling back the truisms of good and evil represented in the news reveals a series of calculated choices to present information in a form that not only connotes an artificial context but also presupposes a culturally subjective value judgment.