Katz and Dayan estimate that 500 million viewers can be watching an event at one time. It must also be programmed . An event like the Three Mile Island nuclear scare, they suggest, was not a media event in the same way because it was not programmed. They mark the rites of passage of the great. In the category of politics, media events include party political conventions and presidential debates.
Conquests are perhaps the most consequential of media events - and also the rarest.
They consist in dramatizing political or diplomatic initiatives aimed at the radical transformation of public opinion on a major issue. Conquests are made possible by the charisma of their protagonists and by the fact that they reactivate the repressed aspirations of a society. In both cases, a great man contemplates the means for breaking a long-standing deadlock, announces a radical solution, and risks his life to enact it. A professor of communication watches the Gulf War on CNN . What we saw were aspects of a war that was said to be in progress. . . .