Cottle’s approach to the media can be regarded as part of the broader movement to reinvigorate sentiment, and to develop methods for analysing its effects. His analysis is useful, for my purposes, because he moves beyond viewing the media primarily as a means of communication, to investigating its role in producing collective sentiment. In contrast to Habermas’ critique of the public sphere, which privileges rationality and ignores the emotions, Durkheim argues that ritual and public ceremony can mobilise collective sentiment by producing symbols that constitute a sense of ‘higher’ or ‘sacred’ purpose.^[16] Through symbolisation and collective sentiment, ritual can ‘build particularised solidarities or publics’ and thereby contribute ‘to social and political change’.^[17] Cottle applies Durkheim’s sociology of ritual to the media, to analyse what he calls ‘mediatised rituals’ and to explore the ways in which they produce ‘sacred’ symbols and mobilise collective sentiments. ‘Mediatised rituals’ are, by definition, ‘exceptional’; they attract considerable interest and are reported across a range of media, including newsprint, television and the Internet.^[18] Moreover, ‘mediatised rituals’ are those rare cases in which the media do more than simply report events; they actively enact responses to events ‘in a subjunctive mode’.^[19] By a ‘subjunctive mode’, Cottle means that the media ‘invoke[s] and sustain[s] through symbolisation collective sentiments and solidarities about how society should … be’, rather than simply engaging in ‘objective’ reporting. Cottle suggests that performativity is a key element in media rituals: ‘We can say that ritual only comes alive empirically, emotionally, subjectively, when actively experienced by audiences who are prepared to “participate” within its symbolic meaning for them and accept the imagined solidarities (or “social imaginary”) that it offers.’ ^[20]

How ‘mediatised rituals work performatively to energise different “social solidarities”’ requires us to recognize, however, that ‘mediatised rituals are destined to have differential effects on different participants’.^[21] In Van Nguyen’s case the media did not simply report that the date for his execution had been set. Rather, journalists articulated a view of what was wrong with capital punishment, and a society that condoned it. By reporting in the ‘subjunctive mode’, the Australian media performatively appealed to and mobilised readers to protest against Van Nguyen’s execution. In engaging readers in collective protest, newspapers were not ‘reflecting’ or ‘representing’ the views of the Australian public, which were apparently divided. They were promoting a view of how society should be — it should value human life and encourage rehabilitation — and inviting readers to participate in this vision. In Van Nguyen’s case, shared sentiments were created and mobilised through three ‘sentimentalising’ strategies: his lawyers’ presentation of him as an exceptional young man who should be spared; the media’s use of gendered images of the ‘suffering mother’ and the ‘vulnerable boy’; and the production of ‘national sentimentality’ through images of Australia as a civilised, egalitarian and inclusive society.