Category: Media

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A2 Media News ‘Window on the World’ truth or fiction?

News producers today want their audience to believe that the news that they see is an unmediated and unbiased product. Despite the BBC’s remit, originally given by its first DG John Reith and updated in 1990 in the British Broadcasting Act, that the news be ‘presented with due accuracy and impartiality‘ with the best will in the world it is not really a possibility merely an ideal.

 

To help create the illusion, studios today are open, uncluttered, with glass windows giving the impression of journalists busily working behind the scenes, brightly coloured in strong but rich and warm colours like the BBC’s with rich red and dark blue hues, dark wood and glass topped tables, encouraging the viewer to feel at home, warm and secure in this environment; encouraging trust.

 

Heavy drumbeat theme tunes impart a feeling of importance and with the BBC’s opening sequence the ripple effect on screen while British and world place names fade in and out all persuade the viewer to feel the equal importance of everywhere to the BBC’s news teams.

 

ITV’s graphic representation of the face of Big Ben with the chimes all connote authority and add to the seeming importance of London as of world significance in the realm of the news.

 

The choice of stories is the most major way in which news broadcasts can definitely be accused of not representing the world in an unbiased or impartial way. How could we possibly think our news was representing the world as it is to us? How many of our stories are international in content? Most international stories only get on to our news unless the story happens to affect someone who is British and then it needs only be one or two Britons even if 5,000 Sri Lankans happen to be killed in rioting for example. This is an example of the news value, first identified by Galtung and Ruge in 1965, that of ……………… wherein the newsworthiness of a particular story is determined by how interested the audience will be in it; here the fact of Britons being involved however few, is likely to be of more interest than if none were.

 

Since TV news’ inception it has been understood that news is boring but necessary and audiences have traditionally sat still in the sure knowledge that it was good for them to know what is going on in the world. However modern audiences are less tolerant and have been switching off in droves since the explosion in satellite stations has enabled more choices of channels to be available. News producers have realised that in order to capture and then hold an audience something new is needed.

 

First studio sets were updated along American studio lines in the early 1990s. From the traditional, middle-aged, white, male sitting behind a desk representing the traditional authority figure, UK channels have gone in for men and women, younger, multi-ethnic and in the case of the recent channel 5, the presenter has no desk at all and perches somewhat uncomfortably on a curved bench with just a large blue screen behind, holding a sheaf of papers in one hand.

 

Second and most obviously in recent years particularly the commercial channels have gone in the direction of assuming their audience is more interested in news items if they involve well-known persons. (This conforms to the news value of ‘elite-persons’.) Hence anything that David Beckham and Victoria do at the moment is immediately reported and very often will hold first place. Quite recently the initial appearance of Michael Jackson in court to answer charges of child molestation was greeted with a real media circus which began hours before his actual arrival. 24 hour news channels like Fox filmed every moment and had continuous moment to moment commentary for several hours; SKY had some footage but took breaks for other news and News 24 had about 5 minutes summary at the top of the hour after he had actually arrived in court. By contrast the BBC didn’t even rate it the first item on the six o’clock news. (Satellite news channels particularly those with 24 hour broadcasting find this type of event a god-send, poor news days must be their worst nightmare! )

 

Third the format has been drastically revised. Now all news bulletins conform to certain conventions: appetisers or hooks are necessary and these will be found in the form of very short headlines at the beginning of the bulletin before even the opening sequence and theme tune. The order of these hooks does not necessarily bear any relation neither to the order in which the story will be broadcast nor to the length of the item or even its importance as a story. These are merely there to entice the audience to tune in and stay tuned in. TV news is written for people who are not really listening so the words used must capture and hold the viewer’s attention; therefore the story is generally written in a conversational or narrative style designed to highlight the most dramatic parts of the story. If there is a human interest angle too, then so much the better and the story will be told purely from that point of view. This was particularly in evidence in the recent second Gulf War where with certain conventions preventing the showing of dead bodies for instance and with government restrictions in force over some aspects of some stories it became quite common to show footage of women weeping and wailing over the loss of their loved ones. Even on one occasion a group of ex-pat Iraqi women living in Saudi Arabia were interviewed about how it felt to be out of contact with their families in war torn Baghdad.

 

Another convention is the intermediate summing up of the main headlines, this assumes that some people have just tuned in and shows that producers no longer expect the viewer to stay for the entire length of the bulletin. This is obviously an important convention for commercial channels particular with the ‘and after the break…’ summary of what is to come and yet it has even slipped into the BBC’s programme format. And of course for years now we have been familiar with the ‘And finally…’ item which arose again out of the need for commercial channels to deliver an audience in a buying not depressed mood, again it is a common feature of all channels keen to ensure that we are left in an upbeat spirit to ensure that we return!

 

It becomes more and more obvious as you analyse any individual news programme that news broadcasters go to great lengths to give to programmes the appearance of a ‘window on the world’. But any news programme has a great number of constraints upon it: shareholders, boards of directors, advertisers, government restrictions etc. are the most obvious external pressures but there are more subtle internal ones: e.g. the actual newsworthiness of any one story over another – who decides? The people who make these decisions are called ‘gatekeepers‘. These were identified by Lewin and White in the late 1940s and later redone by Snider in 1967 among others when looking at why newspaper editors choose one story over another. They originally found that they did it because they believed their readers would like the story, later researchers discovered the answer to be more complicated and that there is a chain involved in the selection process from the journalist on through to the programme editor and that the organisation became the gatekeeper.

 

Then there are the practical constraints of timing, availability of video footage, the plethora of stories available and whether background knowledge of the audience is sufficient for the story to make it through the ‘ambiguity‘ news value.

 

If these are just some of the selection processes that any news story has to go through, is it any surprise that some have levelled the charge of ‘fiction’ at the news as a whole?

 

Schlesinger once described news as ‘putting reality together‘ in his study of how the institution can affect the choice or presentation of stories.

 

The Glasgow Media Group in their study of the presentation of the miners’ strike of the early 1980s discovered a bias in the way language and photographic conventions were used e.g. in the use of the long shot of groups of miners and close ups of individual bosses thus giving tacit approval to the individual as opposed to the group who were presented visually as being more powerful and therefore bullies. This was seen again in the presentation of the firemen’s action of late 2002 early 2003 where firemen were always seen en masse in uniforms huddled around a brazier and bosses were interviewed in shirt and tie and in close up thus creating the impression of ‘them’ and ‘us’ and ensuring that the public knew who was ‘in the right’.

This idea was further supported by Lewis and Philo who suggested that TV news reinforces simple associations, most recently: Saddam = Hitler = bad!

 

Iyengar suggested that the episodic nature of TV news meant that audiences were not encouraged to question root causes and ultimately individuals are blamed for society’s ills.

 

One of the most obvious ways in which we can see that TV news is definitely not a ‘window on the world’ is in the presentation of women. Feminist research conducted by Van Zoonen discovered that while women make up 51% of the world’s population they do not make up half the news stories! Almost invariably women are portrayed in negative ways, grieving widows, victims of rape etc. hardly a fair representation!

 

Perhaps it would be wrong to be so scathing of news organisations’ attempts to be unbiased and impartial and to represent people in the right way, perhaps we as the audience should share some of the blame? Some organisations have been accused of ‘dumbing down’ the news. Well what should we expect? Research shows that we are more interested in the Beckhams’ activities than in third world problems or wars of which our understanding is very limited. But to accuse news of being a ‘fiction’ because of the selection and construction processes goes too far. The framework and method of delivery may be constructed but the story is still true. And here satellite channels and, more importantly, internet accessibility, are able to guarantee this.

With the plethora of news programmes, formats and even 24 hour channels available to us we have choice like never before and we do choose – apparently our preferred deliverer of news are those channels whose news programmes are most like the tabloid newspapers we also seem to prefer. Fortunately for the more discerning viewer there are still, in this country at least, cutting edge investigative news programmes like World in Action, Panorama and Correspondent etc. Let’s hope there will continue to be.

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Why do magazines target their readership by gender?

For thousands of years society has been composed of binary oppositions. From the old Chinese yin and yang through to male / female, hetero-sexual / homosexual divisions of today. Gender is probably the most obvious and most familiar way of categorising humans on the planet.

 

In the magazine world there are very few magazines which do not target by gender and those are usually the likes of the Radio Times and others, some hobby magazines and increasingly food and drink magazines where male and female interest are just as likely.

 

Of course within the gender divide there are many subdivisions because obviously young girls who read J17 are not interested in the same things as older married women with kids who might read Elle or Red. In the male magazine market those for younger males, such as Nuts, Zoo and FHM, tend to encourage ego-centricity, a fondness for alcohol, fast cars and women, as men get older magazines should tend to encourage more solid and traditional virtues (if only there were any of these magazines!)

 

The real question that needs answering is what exactly is gender? Interestingly in one of my magazines, Eve from May 2002, there’s a whole article on gender. From its puff ‘The smarter women’s read’ we immediately are encouraged to see this magazine as having some serious reading material. The strap-line on the front cover reads, ‘Sex Bombshell Jaw dropping news about who’s really male or
female‘ and within the article are a whole host of ordinary people who are tested for various hormones and then rated male or female accordingly. The conclusion, perhaps shockingly for some, is that surprisingly some really masculine males are actually quite feminine and vice versa and actually suggests ‘Maybe it’s time to drop the labels and celebrate our differences.’ Nevertheless it is quite clear what society expects of its women and its men and magazines to a large extent perpetuate that ideological viewpoint.

 

Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory states that women are used to seeing themselves and their role through the eyes of men and that all that we do and want to be is seen in that context. In male dominated societies such as ours it is only inevitable that men have dictated what it means to be a woman and men have traditionally wished for women to be beautiful but unquestioning and submissive.

 

Traditionally men’s roles and their representation by the media were quite straightforward. From 1731 when The Gentleman’s Magazine began and was full of articles on hunting, shooting and fishing, with appropriate pictures of course, men were quite sure that to be a man you had to be interested in these hobbies, politics and the accumulation of wealth. In 1897 Vogue, the first magazine for women, was launched. The cover conventions were exactly the same as they are in the industry today. The ideal reader is represented on the front and the contents were the 3 Rs – Royalty, recipes and romance. Such were the interests of the traditional female. Very little has changed in the world of the female magazine despite the supposed liberation advocated by Cosmopolitan. Again from my copy of Eve, the cover-lines include ‘how to be naturally fit’ ‘Anti-ageing supplements…’ ’39 Body Boosters – Lingerie you’ll love’ and ‘The world’s best – sights, places, experiences’ With a supplementary cover-line suggesting Meg Ryan doesn’t ‘have a clue’ about dating we realise that we are all still expected to be interested in the same old subjects we’ve always been told we should be! Only today celebrity has replaced our old obsession with royalty.

 

Angela McRobbie recognises that the supposed feminist revolution popularised by Cosmopolitan and others failed to carry forward all of feminism’s messages. Although they were quite vociferous in their assertion that women should expect real pay for real jobs they seem to have lost the idea that you don’t have to conform to a glamorous ideal to succeed and rarely do we get other than glamorous women inside the magazines let alone on the front covers. And still my copy of Eve has pages of ‘mouth-watering recipes.’ And ‘How to do everything better (e.g.)…get him in the mood with food.’ So much for the 21st century woman!

 

Foucault and Giddens wrote about how people create a sense of self and construct identities and lifestyles and magazines are just one of the many kinds of guides available in society today.

 

Now a magazine like FHM is a different kettle of fish! Even Loaded is quite playful about gender identity, though apparently quite often that gets lost in the jokey laddishness, but FHM particularly offers quite a broad range of masculinity types. When David Gauntlett confessed he got fed up with the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ which men’s magazines project (and he was referring to Playboy, Penthouse etc) he went for FHM as a change. ‘It is the most ‘nice’ ‘ of the men’s magazines in that it was fun when its insecurities broke through its veneer of confidence. Yet FHM in its mission statement aims to try to cultivate a man who is ‘Good in bed, happy in relationships, witty, considerate, skilled in all things.’ The good thing about a magazine like FHM is that it does allow its readers to acknowledge that relationships do go wrong and that sex isn’t always perfect. Although often it goes about it in a jokey way e.g. ‘ Help! My woman is broken!‘ yet its advice is usually about not being a selfish lover. To this extent at least this kind of magazine has broken the mould of the previous generation of magazines. The magazine presumes that its reader is of average attractiveness yet cover photographs always imply that the model is ready and waiting for him and him only! Because she can’t resist him! The editor of GQ once said ‘ a magazine which aims to address men’s interests must necessarily include beautiful women.’

 

Loaded was the vanguard of the new Lads movement which recognised that its readers were trapped by the women’s movement in a situation of shifting gender roles, feeling unloved and useless and in a growing masculinity crisis, and that they needed cheering up. These magazines did this by allowing lads to be lads, to enjoy going out and getting drunk, one night stands, liking fast cars and fast women etc Nuts and Zoo are just the latest additions to the market and whereas at one time the subject matter and covers would have been regarded as inflammatory, in this post-modernist era they seem to be looked on fondly as ‘alright’!

 

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Ultimately magazines are merely vehicles for the advertisers and it is they who dictate so much of how a magazine looks and who they target. In this way too then, to target by gender seems particularly sound financially. Traditionally women are in charge of household expenditures and men spend the larger amounts on the bigger items, cars, hi-fis, computers etc to maximise effectiveness and minimise costs advertisers choose magazines with well known and researched audience profiles. Using the ABC figures and mission statements produced by the magazines themselves they choose their vehicles carefully before investing but this does mean that they get quite a lot of say in the positioning of adverts within the text. As Tina Gaudoin said, ‘Editors are not in charge of the mags. It is the men in grey suits.‘ In terms of advertising the least important group is the middle-aged, lows-income group. McCracken identified covert advertising as cunningly disguised in the form of advice, ‘If a beauty columnist recommends a certain product the reader will feel more confident buying it.’ And ‘often editorial matter is an extension of the overt advertisements.’

 

Magazines target by gender because they believe this is what their reader wants; women want to read their own magazines and men their own. But of course it is yet another example of a situation that has actually been created by the media – that women are told they should have their own because women are different from men and they necessarily have different interests. Interestingly a magazine like Cosmo is well aware that they have a much wider readership than their actual sales figures would suggest – and a large proportion of those who read friends’ copies are men!