Forming a relatively coherent television “genre,” these ceremonial events share semantic features. They celebrate consensus, “history in the making,” acts of will, and charismatic leaders. Formally, they disrupt television syntax. They cancel the rule of “schedules,” interrupt the flows of programming, and monopolize many (if not all) channels while they themselves are broadcast “live” from remote locations. In terms of their pragmatics, they are viewed by festive communities. Audiences prepare themselves for the event, gather, dress up, and display their emotions.

Like all “genres” but more explicitly than most, media events can be considered contracts. Thus, each particular event results from negotiations among three major partners. First, organizers propose that a given situation be given ceremonial treatment. Second, broadcasters will transmit but also restructure the event. Third, audiences will validate the event’s ceremonial ambition or denounce it as a joke. In order for a media event to trigger a collective experience, each of these partners must actively endorse it. No broadcasting organization can unilaterally decide to mount a ceremonial event. This decision is generally that of national, supranational, or religious institutions. The authority invested in such institutions is what turns events that are essentially gestures into more than gesticulations. It is what makes them media events and not, as Daniel Boorstin would put it, “pseudoevents.”

Yet television is not utterly subservient to these institutions. In the ceremonial politics of modern democracies, it stands as a powerful partner whose mediation is necessary, given the scale of audiences. Television is also a partner whose performance is controlled by professional standards. As opposed to earlier “information ceremonies,” media events can hardly dispense with the presence of journalists. They cannot be confined to what Jürgen Habermas calls a “public sphere of representation.” Thus, negotiations on the pertinence of an event, discussions on the nature of the script, and the option of mocking or ignoring it all distinguish democratic ceremonies from those of regimes where organizers control broadcasters and audiences.

Beyond the generic features they all share, media events vary in terms of (1) the institutionalization or improvisation of the ceremonial event, (2) the temporal orientation of the ceremony, and (3) the nature of the chosen script. This last point is essential, given the organizational complexity of media events and the multiplicity of simultaneous performance involved. Coordination is facilitated by the existence of major dramaturgical models or scripts. Three such scripts can be identified: coronations, contests, and conquests.

The script of coronations is by no means exclusive to monarchic contexts. It characterizes all the rites of passage of the great: inaugurations, funerals, and acceptance (or resignation) speeches. Coronations are celebrations of norms, reiterations of founding myths. They invite ceremonial audiences to manifest their loyalty to these norms and to the institutions that uphold them.

Contests stress the turning points of the democratic curriculum. They celebrate the very existence of a forum open to public debate. Whether they are regularly scheduled (e.g., presidential debates) or mounted in response to political crises, contests are characterized by their dialogic structure, by their focus on argumentation, and by their insistence on procedure. They point to the necessity of interpreting and debating the norms. They are celebrations of pluralism, of the diversity of legitimate positions. Contests call for reflexivity. They invite their audiences to an attitude of deliberation.

Conquests are probably the most consequential of media events. They are also the rarest. They take the form of political or diplomatic initiatives aiming at a swift change in public opinion on a given subject. Rendered possible by the very stature of their protagonists—Egypt’s Anwar Sadat going to Jerusalem or Pope John Paul II visiting Poland—conquests reactivate forgotten aspirations. They are attempts at rephrasing a society’s history, at redefining the identity of its members. They call on their audiences to be “conquered” by the paradigm change that the ceremonial actor is trying to implement, to suspend skepticism. Conquests celebrate the redefinition of norms.

All three major ceremonial scripts address the question of authority and of its legitimating principle. In the case of coronations, this principle is “traditional.” In the case of contests, it belongs to the “rational-legal” order. As for conquests, they stress “charismatic” authority. This helps us understand the political distribution of media events. Coronations are to be found everywhere, for there are no societies without traditions. Unless they are faked (and they often are), contests can emerge only in pluralistic societies. The charismatic dynamics of conquests is always subversive, making them hardly affordable to those societies that are afraid of change.

Compared to the types of public events that were prevalent before the emergence of media events, the latter introduce at least two major transformations. These transformations affect both the nature of the events and that of ceremonial participation. Televised ceremonies are examples of events that exist but do not need to “take place.” These events have been remodeled in order not to need a territorial inscription any longer. The scenography of former public events was characterized by the actual encounter, on a specifiable site, of ceremonial actors and their audiences. That scenography has been replaced by a new mode of “publicness” inspired by cinema and based on the potential separation (1) between actors (2) of actors and audiences.

A second transformation affects ceremonial participation. This transformation turns the effervescent crowds of mass ceremonies into domestic audiences. Instead of mobilizing expressive publics, the media event is celebrated by small groups. A monumental but distant celebration triggers a multitude of microcelebrations. Leading to a typically “diasporic ceremoniality,” the immensity of television audiences translates collective events into intimate occasions.

Television ceremonies or media events are necessary inasmuch as they are among the few means available to individuals that assist and enable them to imagine the societies in which they live. Dismissing them as “political spectacles” would lead to two errors: on the one hand, that of presupposing that the mediation they offer is superfluous; on the other, that of believing that the absence of political spectacle is an ideal and a distinctive sign of modern democracies.

Democracies are distinct from authoritarian or totalitarian regimes but not in terms of the presence or absence of a political ceremoniality. Democracies differ from other regimes by the nature—not the existence— of the ceremonies staged in their midst. Democratic media events should therefore be differentiated from other television events that are undoubtedly endowed with a ceremonial dimension but are neither consensual nor contractually derived. For example, the events of terrorism are expressive events, enacted statements, and forms of discourse. Their reception by some of their audiences often involves celebration. However, these forms of discourse receive no validation from the institutions of the center or from those of civil society. They differ form other ceremonial statements by not being submitted to a process of legitimation that transforms them into full-size events. Violence is what distinguishes terroristic events from milder exercises in public relations, from other types of “pseudoevents.” In a word, there are many repertoires of media events, and the study of consensual, democratically inspired, negotiated media events must be set in the context of other, rougher media events that are dissentious, imposed, and deliberately antagonistic.