Is TV News a Window on the World?
TV news certainly claims to be an unbiased window to the whole world. They use a certain styles of iconography which helps to connote these ideas of urgency, impartial objective news and importance: here's how. They are also required by law to be impartial as well. Ofcom state that 'All news in any part of the service should be presented with due accuracy and impartiality.' Therefore, news channels are required by law to have this trait. This is practically impossible as choices have to be made for the news to arrive on our screen, whether this is choosing which cities and areas to monitor or the choice of the camera's position. The are all subjective choices. In my essay I will explain in greater depth why impartiality is impossible to be represented by the news:
First of all, who makes the news? Well, the majority of them are demographically white, middle aged, hetrosexual males who have lived in the south of England and been educated in private schools and studied their degrees at a prestigious universities. They would most likely fall in the middle to upper class with a psychographic of money driven, Tory devoted, upper-class inspired. Therefore, this collective of like minded thinkers will steer the news with their interests, beliefs and ideals, even if it is subconsciously. Already when can see that a bias is inevitable, and it doesn't stop here.
For stories to be picked so they are represented and shown on the news, they have to be chosen by the editorial team. If it's for the News at 10 then the choices are made at about 9:30 in the 'morning meeting' and after the news at 10, another meeting is held which is called the 'look ahead' meeting, who plan for the morning news. This means we have small team of people, most likely containing the above paragraph's traits, choosing the news which their company will show of the world. Two sociologists and media researchers, Galtung and Ruge have come up with a theory of 12 values which news editorial teams consider when choosing the news for that program:
1. Frequency - Short-term events like murders are preferred over long term developments such as famine or global warming. This is because there are key events which happen in an acute manner of time. Unlike a more chronic event which may have a very important and disastrous outcome but takes a long time to unravel with few key events to report on.
2. Threshold - basically the size of an event indicates the importance. If one person dies by drowning on the same day as 10 people dying in a car crash, then the person drowning is not only unlucky that they no longer have oxygen in their lungs, but also that news teams consider him a minority. 10 people in a car crash will be chosen over him to be shown in the news because threshold is bigger.
3. Unambiguity - events do not have to be simple but they must be accessible to the public. Basically, simplified by the media. Take for example the Iraq war. Everytime the media portrays this topic, it is usually that they are Evil and America and England are the good guys liberating the place: how very black and white. The news does not really go into the many shades of grey. They do not talk about the reason why the war started in the first place, the history which has happened to lead up to these series of events not their motives. Instead they leave all of that out and package it up as Good Vs Evil so the public know easily who to back.
4.Meaningfulness - This is divided into two catergories - a) Cultural proximity in which the event agrees with outlook of a specific culture - b) Relevance where vents will be reported and discussed if they seem to have an impact on the home culture, especially a threat.
5. Consonance -or correspondence where the familiar is more likely to be thought than the unfamiliar.
6. Unexpectedness or surprise - where it is the rarity of an event which leads to its circulation in the public domain; Dutton notes that the 'newsness' of the event is usually processed through a familiar context. It has to work with theory 4 and 5. So, say if a dog bites man. That is a pretty standard way round for things to happen and will probably be unlikely to be reported. However, if a man bites dog, this is an incredibly rare and unusual outcome which would therefore increase its chances of being reported in the news.
7. Continuity - once a story achieves importance it will be continued to be covered for some time. Syria would be a good example of this. The conflict in Syria has been going on for years and we have now become use to seeing it in the news. Our society may now expect updates on what is going out there because it has been established in their minds.
8. Composition - this is to provide a sense of balance, gloomy news with good news, foreign with domestic.
9. Reference to elite nations - events are more likely to be reported if they occur in the developed world; the threshold system would apply for developing countries for events to be reported.
10. Reference to elite persons - the famous and the powerful are more newsworthy than ordinary people. A good way to explain would be if we went back to point 1 - Threshold. If the person that drowned was a famous, beloved singer and the car crash was of 10 ordinary people. Then the singer singing with the fishes will out trump the 10 ordinary people because he is an elite person who we idolize and the majority want to hear news about. The sad thing is, those 10 people with families that loved them may never get mentioned because the news team thinks our society values the life of one famous person over 10 normal people.
11. Personalisation - events are seen as actions of people as individuals; an institution may be personalised by reference to a prominent within that organisation.
12. Negativity - bad news is good for the press and TV news; the threshold is much lower for bad news than for good news
If the piece of news works within these 12 points, meeting the correct thresholds for its 'value' ,then it has a chance of appearing on the television as news. However this is not the only variable on whether the news is either found or shown. Galtung and Ruge also came up with the term 'Gate-Keeping'. This referrers to the decisions that news producers choose whether to use or reject possible news stories; everyone involved that works on producing the news is a part of the gate-keeping process. These processes are: 1) Whether the station values the news. This point involves a lot of the 12 values of news such as threshold, reference, negativity etc. So, say for example that one teacher in a six form college broke their leg from just a regular day to day accident. It would remain unreported and lost in the 'historical dustbin of unimportant, irrelevant, unmonitored, technical difficulty, pit of oblivion', and we would never know about it via the news station. However, if 10 teachers, from different six form colleges all broke their leg in a similar freakish accident, then it would be reported. This is because it has the values of Threshold - multiple teachers with the same accident; Frequency - the leg breaking would happen around the same time, once, on a timeline between news channels and Unexpectedness- it's a freak accident, out of the norm and multiple teacher have suffered this on the same day. A story like this would have a good chance of passing the first 'gate-keeper' towards our television.
The 2nd gate-keeper would be News Sources and the locations they monitor. News stations choose key locations such as embassies, both national and foreign, parliament and other significant political buildings, events and capital cities. They also monitor key, high-priority figures on social media platforms. This means that only the places in the whole-wide world chosen by the news producers are being monitored for the news. This therefore narrows our view of the world out of all of the possible news stories going on out there because it just won't be seen by the reporters. Theoretically, if a remote Amazon tribe which has not made official contact with the outside world yet, has been wiped out due to a brand new strand of bacteria from a mosquito bite, then we would never know about it and it will be lost in the Dustbin of history.
The 3rd gate-keeper is to do with economics. First of all, if a news station has invested a lot of money on sending reporters, crew, equipment, accommodation and food on reporting a story, it is more likely to appear on the news line-up because of the amount of investment that has taken to report it. In fact, even if nothing is really happening or progressing, they may still report about it because of the money invested. An example of this comes from the Gulf War. They were using channel time to report on the 'event', even when nothing is happening... This can be seen in the video at 9 minutes in as they have a live satellite link to a reporter with nothing going on other than false alarms.
The other factor to do with economics is where in the financial year a news event breaks out. At the beginning of the year they have the full budget available for them to invest in news stories, as the year progresses they have less money and if news companies don't budget carefully, they may not have enough funds to cover a story near the end of a year. ITV found this out the hard way because near to the time of the Tianamman square massacre was near to the end of their financial year and unfortunately for them, didn't have much money to cover the story or collect their own footage.
All they had was a phone link to a reporter as they thought the whole situation was going to fizzle out into nothing. However, the history of that event is quite different as we all know the story of the massacre. On the other hand, the BBC sent out a lot of resources to cover the build up to the event and captured the horror which followed it. In the end, the BBC one awards whilst ITV staff lost jobs, all because of poor choices in finances.
Another gate-keeper is the routines of news gathering. This is to with the how newsrooms gather their stories, from camera men, reporters and editors and many other factors. All of which can alter whether it is shown on air or not. If a show has technical difficulties with a story, such as, not receiving footage in time or losing a satellite connection to reporter in the field, some stories may be dropped from the lineup and replaced by another. Therefore, we won't know what they were ever going to be and lost, once again, in the Dustbin of History. Also, News teams compete with one and another. The way which they decide who is biggest and best is by how quickly they can get news out, not how well it is presented or thoroughly researched and packaged. Therefore, small, important details may be missed because they are racing and competing with each other. More worried about what they other news teams has or hasn't got than what the whole story is. In Fact, you can tell how concerned they are that they don't miss out on what the other has got because they even share the same news stories. On the 22/05/2017 both the BBC and ITV news shared the same story: (PM announces climbdown over Tory socialcare plan - ITV News) (May defends revised social care plans - BBC News) Therefore, showing you their competition with each other.
Another factor which would fall into this category is if a late breaking story occurs which is valued much higher in importance than the already chosen line up. The late breaker may then replace one of the previous packages which will now be lost in the bin of history.
The last process an event goes through to reach our TV as a news 'story' is its actual construction into a story. These two words 'construction' and 'story' are interesting to use to do with something which you are claiming to be and your audience considers are facts. Construction means that something is built, therefore not natural but man-made. Whilst the word story connotes fairy tales and fiction but the news claims to be nonfiction... So, does this mean poor choices of words are being used to label processes or is this the most truthful part of the whole process: they are man-made? Back to what I was saying, for stories to be shown on the TV they need to be constructed with their narrative. To do this, they use the continuity system. The same continuity system that makers of fiction use to blend the pretend world into a convincingly real one. They use techniques such as establishing shots, reaction shots and the 180 degree rule to keep the audience immersed into their created narrative. You also have the narrative structure where they create a binary opposition of 'us and them' as well as 'heroes and villains' so the audience clearly knows who they should support, sympathize, hate or love. They also use individuals to personify a larger issue or achievement, where they construct a narrative showcasing their quest to overcome obstacles to their end goal. In class we watched a BBC news story to do with the rise in house repossessions. However, instead of showing graphs of facts and statistics they chose to show the story of a young man and his family who were potentially going to have his house repossessed. They began the story with an establishing shot of him walking towards his house in the snow. This makes the viewers connote christmas, bringing the spirit with it, and may make them think how horrid it would be to be without a home this time of year in the winter. They then showed footage of him with his spouse. Perhaps to generate more sympathy that he has a wife and small child. Next they showed him going to a meeting, by himself, to talk about finding a solution to his problem of potentially losing his home. This is our hero trying to overcome the obstacle to his goal. Within the interview, they even made a reaction shot despite being only one camera, which means they moved the camera after they had filmed that statement from the interviewer minutes afterwards just to film our young heros face until a suitable reaction occurred. This shows you that news stories are made for the audience to understand it in a traditional, fiction-like manner. Using tools such as continuity systems and narratives to make the news seem 'real'.
All of these points above which I have mentioned are why I think the news is not an impartial, unbiased, objective view on the world. It is practically impossible. The news teams are constantly making decisions and choices. Whether to show something because they think it is 'newsworthy' or choosing where to place the camera, who to interview, influenced by other news companies etc. Creating stories, using continuity systems and narratives. These choices are made constantly, and by default, that makes it subjective. I don't think there's anyway around it. The only thing which could in someway counter it would be for them to own up to subjective choices that are made; I don't think the audience really wants to hear that or possibly even care about it. Not to mention the Law states they have to be impartial so if they own up to not being so then they are breaking it... they just can't win.
First of all, who makes the news? Well, the majority of them are demographically white, middle aged, hetrosexual males who have lived in the south of England and been educated in private schools and studied their degrees at a prestigious universities. They would most likely fall in the middle to upper class with a psychographic of money driven, Tory devoted, upper-class inspired. Therefore, this collective of like minded thinkers will steer the news with their interests, beliefs and ideals, even if it is subconsciously. Already when can see that a bias is inevitable, and it doesn't stop here.
For stories to be picked so they are represented and shown on the news, they have to be chosen by the editorial team. If it's for the News at 10 then the choices are made at about 9:30 in the 'morning meeting' and after the news at 10, another meeting is held which is called the 'look ahead' meeting, who plan for the morning news. This means we have small team of people, most likely containing the above paragraph's traits, choosing the news which their company will show of the world. Two sociologists and media researchers, Galtung and Ruge have come up with a theory of 12 values which news editorial teams consider when choosing the news for that program: 1. Frequency - Short-term events like murders are preferred over long term developments such as famine or global warming. This is because there are key events which happen in an acute manner of time. Unlike a more chronic event which may have a very important and disastrous outcome but takes a long time to unravel with few key events to report on.
2. Threshold - basically the size of an event indicates the importance. If one person dies by drowning on the same day as 10 people dying in a car crash, then the person drowning is not only unlucky that they no longer have oxygen in their lungs, but also that news teams consider him a minority. 10 people in a car crash will be chosen over him to be shown in the news because threshold is bigger.
3. Unambiguity - events do not have to be simple but they must be accessible to the public. Basically, simplified by the media. Take for example the Iraq war. Everytime the media portrays this topic, it is usually that they are Evil and America and England are the good guys liberating the place: how very black and white. The news does not really go into the many shades of grey. They do not talk about the reason why the war started in the first place, the history which has happened to lead up to these series of events not their motives. Instead they leave all of that out and package it up as Good Vs Evil so the public know easily who to back.
4.Meaningfulness - This is divided into two catergories - a) Cultural proximity in which the event agrees with outlook of a specific culture - b) Relevance where vents will be reported and discussed if they seem to have an impact on the home culture, especially a threat.
5. Consonance -or correspondence where the familiar is more likely to be thought than the unfamiliar.
6. Unexpectedness or surprise - where it is the rarity of an event which leads to its circulation in the public domain; Dutton notes that the 'newsness' of the event is usually processed through a familiar context. It has to work with theory 4 and 5. So, say if a dog bites man. That is a pretty standard way round for things to happen and will probably be unlikely to be reported. However, if a man bites dog, this is an incredibly rare and unusual outcome which would therefore increase its chances of being reported in the news.
7. Continuity - once a story achieves importance it will be continued to be covered for some time. Syria would be a good example of this. The conflict in Syria has been going on for years and we have now become use to seeing it in the news. Our society may now expect updates on what is going out there because it has been established in their minds.
8. Composition - this is to provide a sense of balance, gloomy news with good news, foreign with domestic.
9. Reference to elite nations - events are more likely to be reported if they occur in the developed world; the threshold system would apply for developing countries for events to be reported.
10. Reference to elite persons - the famous and the powerful are more newsworthy than ordinary people. A good way to explain would be if we went back to point 1 - Threshold. If the person that drowned was a famous, beloved singer and the car crash was of 10 ordinary people. Then the singer singing with the fishes will out trump the 10 ordinary people because he is an elite person who we idolize and the majority want to hear news about. The sad thing is, those 10 people with families that loved them may never get mentioned because the news team thinks our society values the life of one famous person over 10 normal people.
11. Personalisation - events are seen as actions of people as individuals; an institution may be personalised by reference to a prominent within that organisation.
12. Negativity - bad news is good for the press and TV news; the threshold is much lower for bad news than for good news
If the piece of news works within these 12 points, meeting the correct thresholds for its 'value' ,then it has a chance of appearing on the television as news. However this is not the only variable on whether the news is either found or shown. Galtung and Ruge also came up with the term 'Gate-Keeping'. This referrers to the decisions that news producers choose whether to use or reject possible news stories; everyone involved that works on producing the news is a part of the gate-keeping process. These processes are: 1) Whether the station values the news. This point involves a lot of the 12 values of news such as threshold, reference, negativity etc. So, say for example that one teacher in a six form college broke their leg from just a regular day to day accident. It would remain unreported and lost in the 'historical dustbin of unimportant, irrelevant, unmonitored, technical difficulty, pit of oblivion', and we would never know about it via the news station. However, if 10 teachers, from different six form colleges all broke their leg in a similar freakish accident, then it would be reported. This is because it has the values of Threshold - multiple teachers with the same accident; Frequency - the leg breaking would happen around the same time, once, on a timeline between news channels and Unexpectedness- it's a freak accident, out of the norm and multiple teacher have suffered this on the same day. A story like this would have a good chance of passing the first 'gate-keeper' towards our television.
The 2nd gate-keeper would be News Sources and the locations they monitor. News stations choose key locations such as embassies, both national and foreign, parliament and other significant political buildings, events and capital cities. They also monitor key, high-priority figures on social media platforms. This means that only the places in the whole-wide world chosen by the news producers are being monitored for the news. This therefore narrows our view of the world out of all of the possible news stories going on out there because it just won't be seen by the reporters. Theoretically, if a remote Amazon tribe which has not made official contact with the outside world yet, has been wiped out due to a brand new strand of bacteria from a mosquito bite, then we would never know about it and it will be lost in the Dustbin of history.
The 3rd gate-keeper is to do with economics. First of all, if a news station has invested a lot of money on sending reporters, crew, equipment, accommodation and food on reporting a story, it is more likely to appear on the news line-up because of the amount of investment that has taken to report it. In fact, even if nothing is really happening or progressing, they may still report about it because of the money invested. An example of this comes from the Gulf War. They were using channel time to report on the 'event', even when nothing is happening... This can be seen in the video at 9 minutes in as they have a live satellite link to a reporter with nothing going on other than false alarms.
The other factor to do with economics is where in the financial year a news event breaks out. At the beginning of the year they have the full budget available for them to invest in news stories, as the year progresses they have less money and if news companies don't budget carefully, they may not have enough funds to cover a story near the end of a year. ITV found this out the hard way because near to the time of the Tianamman square massacre was near to the end of their financial year and unfortunately for them, didn't have much money to cover the story or collect their own footage.
All they had was a phone link to a reporter as they thought the whole situation was going to fizzle out into nothing. However, the history of that event is quite different as we all know the story of the massacre. On the other hand, the BBC sent out a lot of resources to cover the build up to the event and captured the horror which followed it. In the end, the BBC one awards whilst ITV staff lost jobs, all because of poor choices in finances.
Another gate-keeper is the routines of news gathering. This is to with the how newsrooms gather their stories, from camera men, reporters and editors and many other factors. All of which can alter whether it is shown on air or not. If a show has technical difficulties with a story, such as, not receiving footage in time or losing a satellite connection to reporter in the field, some stories may be dropped from the lineup and replaced by another. Therefore, we won't know what they were ever going to be and lost, once again, in the Dustbin of History. Also, News teams compete with one and another. The way which they decide who is biggest and best is by how quickly they can get news out, not how well it is presented or thoroughly researched and packaged. Therefore, small, important details may be missed because they are racing and competing with each other. More worried about what they other news teams has or hasn't got than what the whole story is. In Fact, you can tell how concerned they are that they don't miss out on what the other has got because they even share the same news stories. On the 22/05/2017 both the BBC and ITV news shared the same story: (PM announces climbdown over Tory socialcare plan - ITV News) (May defends revised social care plans - BBC News) Therefore, showing you their competition with each other.
Another factor which would fall into this category is if a late breaking story occurs which is valued much higher in importance than the already chosen line up. The late breaker may then replace one of the previous packages which will now be lost in the bin of history.
The last process an event goes through to reach our TV as a news 'story' is its actual construction into a story. These two words 'construction' and 'story' are interesting to use to do with something which you are claiming to be and your audience considers are facts. Construction means that something is built, therefore not natural but man-made. Whilst the word story connotes fairy tales and fiction but the news claims to be nonfiction... So, does this mean poor choices of words are being used to label processes or is this the most truthful part of the whole process: they are man-made? Back to what I was saying, for stories to be shown on the TV they need to be constructed with their narrative. To do this, they use the continuity system. The same continuity system that makers of fiction use to blend the pretend world into a convincingly real one. They use techniques such as establishing shots, reaction shots and the 180 degree rule to keep the audience immersed into their created narrative. You also have the narrative structure where they create a binary opposition of 'us and them' as well as 'heroes and villains' so the audience clearly knows who they should support, sympathize, hate or love. They also use individuals to personify a larger issue or achievement, where they construct a narrative showcasing their quest to overcome obstacles to their end goal. In class we watched a BBC news story to do with the rise in house repossessions. However, instead of showing graphs of facts and statistics they chose to show the story of a young man and his family who were potentially going to have his house repossessed. They began the story with an establishing shot of him walking towards his house in the snow. This makes the viewers connote christmas, bringing the spirit with it, and may make them think how horrid it would be to be without a home this time of year in the winter. They then showed footage of him with his spouse. Perhaps to generate more sympathy that he has a wife and small child. Next they showed him going to a meeting, by himself, to talk about finding a solution to his problem of potentially losing his home. This is our hero trying to overcome the obstacle to his goal. Within the interview, they even made a reaction shot despite being only one camera, which means they moved the camera after they had filmed that statement from the interviewer minutes afterwards just to film our young heros face until a suitable reaction occurred. This shows you that news stories are made for the audience to understand it in a traditional, fiction-like manner. Using tools such as continuity systems and narratives to make the news seem 'real'.
All of these points above which I have mentioned are why I think the news is not an impartial, unbiased, objective view on the world. It is practically impossible. The news teams are constantly making decisions and choices. Whether to show something because they think it is 'newsworthy' or choosing where to place the camera, who to interview, influenced by other news companies etc. Creating stories, using continuity systems and narratives. These choices are made constantly, and by default, that makes it subjective. I don't think there's anyway around it. The only thing which could in someway counter it would be for them to own up to subjective choices that are made; I don't think the audience really wants to hear that or possibly even care about it. Not to mention the Law states they have to be impartial so if they own up to not being so then they are breaking it... they just can't win.
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