Michael Jackson's 1992 concert in Bucharest: transforming a star into a saint

Abstract

This study is based on the conceptual framework created by Dayan and Katz (1992 Dayan, D. and Katz, E. 1992. Media events, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) focusing on what they called media events, and it proposes a step forward by applying an anthropological framework to such media phenomena. My analysis is focused on the symbolic mechanism through which the Romanian media produced a media event out of an ‘ordinary’ Michael Jackson concert, ritualised journalists’ behaviour and conferred religious-like meanings, ceremonial and mythological in nature, not only to the gestures and reactions of the star-idol performing his show, but also to its political and social echoes. The media events’ theoretical model could explain the social mobilisation produced by the media (as a strong short-term media effect). Nevertheless, it does not explain the transformation of the journalistic discourse into a liturgical one. The study shows that the process of commodification of saints, heroes and stars by the media is mirrored by another process, that of the sacralisation of celebrities through journalistic discourse.

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