The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy by Leah Wilson

Author:Leah Wilson [Wilson, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781935618362
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2011-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

The narrative constructed as strategy by Peeta and Haymitch becomes a sort of reality in and of itself, as Katniss begins to buy into it and President Snow capitalizes on it for his own ends.

Propaganda, Not Reporting

Collins, just like the Gamemakers in her books, raises the stakes to a new level in the third book of the trilogy, Mockingjay , when she takes the various themes of ratings and narrative and applies it to the way we approach reporting on wars. After all, it’s not unexpected that the same viewership that craves an increase in drama from season to season of a Reality TV show would want the same out of war coverage. And it’s not unsurprising to think that, in order to increase ratings, a television station or other news outlet might be tempted to construct narratives to corroborate the storyline they think will garner the most ratings. War coverage suffers from the same time constraints as reality television: every military front can’t be shown at all times, and not even everything filmed can make it to air, which means things will always end up being left out. The result can be a story that, even if it’s meant to be objective and accurate, is anything but. What gets chosen to be aired and what gets cut can have an enormous impact on the public’s impression of war.

And sometimes editors determine what to cut and what to print in order to further their own agendas. For example, several historians have claimed that through his propensity for cherrypicking and sensationalizing details and publishing theory as fact, William Randolph Hearst and his New York Journal helped instigate the country’s willingness to enter into the Spanish-American war in 1898. Behind the scenes of Hearst’s reporting was a circulation battle he’d entered into with Joseph Pulitzer of New York World, and both recognized that the more sensational the headline, the higher the sales. Thus, much of their reporting wasn’t about the reality of the events (it’s acknowledged that most of their reporting came from biased third-hand information), but about what would increase circulation or ratings. Hearst and Pulitzer understood the truth that a well-crafted narrative can be beneficial for the bottom line, whether that bottom line is selling more newspapers, garnering more advertisers, or perpetuating a specific ideology.

This is never so evident as it is in Mockingjay, where Katniss is the symbol of the revolution, not through her actions, but through the carefully constructed and edited perceptions of those actions through propaganda. Even those moments that are based in truth, such as Katniss walking through the field hospital in District 8, are later molded into narratives. Shortly after visiting those same hospitals, Katniss and Gale engage in a battle with Capitol planes, after which Katniss becomes aware of the television cameras and shouts for the district to join the rebellion, essentially turning the moment into a commercial by taking that raw event and crafting it into a compelling bit of narrative about the war.

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