This description, provided by Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan, is amplified in Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Harvard University Press, 1992). In their book, Katz and Dayan describe how this other television differs from the daily diet of series and "news magazines." Examples they cite include the funerals of President Kennedy and Lord Mountbatten, the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, the journeys of John Paul II to Communist Europe and Anwar el-Sadat to Israel, the preelection debates of John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the Watergate hearings in the United States Congress, the revolutionary events of 1989 in Eastern Europe, and the Olympic Games.

According to the authors, this kind of television resembles holidays. It declares "time out" from the routines of broadcasting daily life. It demands that we stop all other activity to celebrate an event that embodies a value that all of us share. These media events can transfix a nation - or even a large part of the viewing public around the world. Katz and Dayan estimate that 500 million viewers can be watching an event at one time.

They define their subject as alive event - occurring in "real time." It must also beprogrammed. 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. (It may still be, of course, a major news story.)

The authors separate these events into three categories: coronation, contest, and conquest.

• Coronations are not only monarchic events; they characterize inaugurations of all sorts, such as official funerals and commemorations. They mark the rites of passage of the great.
• Contests are the ceremonies of sports and politics; they are designed to identify the best contender or the best team. Contests are pure celebrations of achievement; their message is that the winner won by playingby the rules. 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. President Sadat goes to Jerusalem, while Egypt and Israel are nominally still at war; Pope John Paul II visits Poland and confronts the Communist leaders of the most Catholic nation in Europe. 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.

As Katz and Dayan view it, this kind of "festive" or even ritual television allows the principals totalk over the heads of the "middlemen" who normally mediate between leaders and their public. The live broadcasting of media events, they conclude, "has redefined the relative power of organizers, intermediaries, broadcasters, and viewers, and the very essence of a public event."