Tag: News

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Transparency and the news

“In this day and age it is increasingly important that the TV news audience regards news as a transparent process.” Discuss with textual examples how far you think the broadcasters are successful in this aim.

[With apologies for Jamie Steele for all changes to his original}

 

Transparency describes the way in which the creations of the culture express or disguise awareness of the human condition. It examines the products of contemporary culture which includes TV News, to show how they reveal or conceal our desire to recreate ourselves and society in the image of the un-fallen [?] World we know should exist. For example local television news, Look East in our region and Anglia news on ITV offers the audience smaller scale dangers and disasters, where more obvious forms of fiction take us the audience, to the conclusion with a generally happy ending in order to turn fear into hope. Local TV news does so by framing its depictions with stories of communities coming together and victims saved. For example on February 14th the last item of ITV 1s Anglia news was about a baby …………….and left the audience on a note of hope rather than fear. Moreover the local news like the national news frames the constant and exaggerated depictions of danger with the presentation in a calm way by professional news readers who are seen as part of the community and this is strong enough to counter the strong sense of danger.

 

News programmes appear to be the most real and least mediated programmes on TV. In the UK and the USA the news on TV is widely seen as more reliable than any other source on news and the BBC throughout the world is held in high esteem for the trustworthiness of their reporting. Unlike newspapers TV news programmes are not supposed to take sides but are required to present an impartial and balanced summary of significant events. This dates back to the memo of Lord Reith the first DG of the BBC who regarded it as essential that the BBC could only be impartial if not required to pass on governmental views.

 

TV news also offers apparently ‘raw’ evidence of events as they happen. (Think 9/11; the Iraq war; the tsunami…). News stories are unavoidably handled from particular points of view. Broadcasters emphasise the informational and factual nature of the news; news can be gathered, uncovered or exposed. The idea that TV offers a window on the world still seems to be common in the newsroom. The newsreader is presented as a neutral observer. By reading the scripted news the newsreader dressed formally in an orderly studio, speaking generally dispassionately directly into the camera, and seated behind a desk, which appears to give them a sense of authority, appears to speak the objective discourse of the truth. This is particularly represented by the BBC with Huw Edwards embodying these criteria. Although the content of the news may be far from reassuring the newsreader’s manner is and the ‘tail piece’ often offers a happy ending. Within the stories chosen a limited number of individuals are deemed news worthy and appear regularly; Ken Livingstone the controversial labour mayor of London is always good ‘news’! (Currently the Michael Jackson case is taking up a lot of air time – 10 minutes on the first day of his trial on ITVs lunchtime edition but only 2 minutes on BBC at 1pm, indicating very different selection criteria at work.) Livingstone was treated with 2 ½ minutes on BBC at 10pm on Feb 14th 2005 and second place in the running order, while on the ITV only 2 minutes were allotted but most of those to the claims that this was a ‘holocaust row’ and to the mayor being close to tears and sixth position in the bulletin. Both broadcasts however cast Livingstone in the role of villain according to Vladimir Propp’s analysis of characters in storytelling. Interestingly the pressure group of holocaust survivors were given a vocal role while the mayor was barely accorded the opportunity to defend himself, ensuring that ITVs viewers were in no doubt about the feeling towards his unfortunate remark.

 

 

Ordinary people are rarely represented on the news while elite persons, group and organisations seem to be given undue coverage. However on a recent C5 broadcast at noon this balance was redressed when there was a lengthy interview with a 50 year old recent divorcee, Sue, who was thoroughly enjoying her new found freedom. Here we had not only a woman but also the over 50s getting, perhaps, a fairer representation. But this does illustrate the point that there are many minority groups whose interests are too rarely given time on the news, or if they are then much of that publicity is negative e.g. trades unions, and equally demonstrate the fact that basically news is about ‘white, middle –class men in suits’; they are both the selectors of what is newsworthy and the focus of it too!

 

Library footage also serves to authenticate stories with the immediacy of live TV being valued for its ability to give us news as it’s happening and to follow developing stories like the Russian School No 1 siege, both of which tends to disguise the process of construction.

An accusation often levelled is that news has an agenda. Themes in the news can display a covert political agenda, although this may be more obvious on commercial channels like Sky News 24 owned by Rupert Murdoch of The Sun and The Times empire but can even be seen on the BBC – most recently and famously during the Andrew Gilligan affair and subsequent Hutton report which castigated the BBC for effectively claiming the government had led us to war under false pretences, (despite the fact that as Tim Gardam says: ‘…ITC research showed that 63% of viewers found the BBC’s coverage fair to all; 25% found it biased towards Britain and America; and only 12% biased towards Iraq or the anti-war lobby…‘ ) and which has led to minister Tessa Jowell and this year’s green paper recommendations setting up a new set of five principles.

 

Another argument against the transparency theory is that news viewers do not necessarily think what they are told to, there is a correspondence between the order of importance the media gives to issues and the order of significance attached to them by the public and by politicians. Whilst this might possibly represent a fair reflection of existing public concerns it is usually interpreted as suggesting the agenda-setting influence of the news broadcasters.

 

On the BBC on February 14th 2005 the news began with the story of the Lebanese bomb which killed the prime minister. The coverage included a report by a female journalist, video footage and images of destruction and the dead an injured being carried away on stretchers. Then we were given a brief history of the conflict, a video statement with translation voice-over and video footage from Arab TV the Al-Jazeera network. The second story was Ken Livingstone, a 2 minute story on the Iraq elections, and 2 ½ minutes on the McCartney murder in Belfast from an Irish reporter. Over on ITV the running order was similar in that the lead story was also the bombing in Lebanon, though here Trevor Mac Donald used emotive language like: ‘brutally thrown back…shattering a decade of peace…doomsday for Lebanon‘ to engage the audience’s feelings more, where Huw Edwards had informed viewers in a much more dispassionate way. In fact the angle put on this story by ITV was much more angled at who was to blame, with Syria being mentioned immediately coupled with the suggestion by America that it would have no sympathy with their troops remaining in the Lebanon after this event – this simple association of Syria with the enemy like Saddam being associated with Hitler in our minds was identified by theorists Lewis and Philo. Then after a story on hare-coursing an interview with the widow of Mac Cartney in Belfast in which she called them ‘scum‘ and ‘animals‘.

 

In recent times viewers have been encouraged to become much more conscious of the production processes which go to make any programme or film so the aim of news broadcaster has been to make that process as unobtrusive as possible. (Schlesinger called it: “putting reality together“)

 

This has been done by making the studios more obviously like workplaces (BBC) with the windows opening on to the workers busy behind the scenes getting the news in and passing it on as quickly as possible, with clean lined studios which resemble the hub of a wheel around which the world rotates (ITV); by using cgis to cleverly fill in where understanding of a difficult story might be compromised and with the ability to get reports in from field reporters in even the most difficult and inaccessible places in the world using video-phones and other satellite technology all interlinked with straight cut editing. Hence the viewer sees the process of the news being broadcast as a seamless one and is not encouraged to think of the fact that the news is most definitely a mediated product, it is constructed and packaged to be delivered to a particular audience watching at a particular time of day.

 

Most broadcaster must be considered to be successful in their aim in convincing us that news is a ‘window on the world’ in that the viewer rarely does stop to consider whose viewpoint he/ she is getting or to question the choice of stories or the delivery of them. This in itself is worrying because humans are by nature a suspicious lot and rarely trust anything. It is only when the technology breaks down (which it does with pleasing regularity) that we are ‘left with blue or green curtains.‘ This usually means blank screens where a live or video or phone report should have been but isn’t, and the anchor is left floundering listening to his /her earpiece getting advice on what to do next, that we suddenly regain our perspective and see news as a series of selected stories being told to us!

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“News broadcasters tend to sensationalise at cost of the truth of an event covered.” Discuss with reference to specific texts, the extent to which this is true.

One of the main criticisms levelled at news deliverers today is that of sensationalising stories and usually the exaggeration of them for dramatic effect. We may in fact be able to think of instances where this has undoubtedly been true for example the Twin Towers disaster of September 11th 2001 when from the moment the first plane hit the first tower. We were given continuous coverage around the clock for several days. This in itself may be no bad thing, it was shocking, interesting (in an horrific way) and was a story which developed over the course of several days. It was also typical of the way stories are sensationalised in the fact that from the first the death toll was estimated to be anything up to 20,000. In the event, of course, it was just over 3,500, not insignificant but nowhere near the first suggested figure.

 

On that occasion we saw, many of us probably for the first time, the conventions of distension and repetition at work. We saw anchors horrified by the scenes of destruction, we heard ordinary people screaming overcome by what they were seeing, we had live footage of the planes, the towers crumbling and people jumping from impossible heights – this latter previously a taboo of news reporting – to their deaths, and we saw this looped time after time after time. And all in the name of serving the public.

 

Goodness knows what old Lord Reith would have thought of it all! He set out his remit for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Public Service Broadcasting guidelines with its emphasis on impartiality and education. The Broadcasting Act of 1990 too, made a legal requirement that news providers to do so with ‘due accuracy and impartiality.’ Can we seriously suggest that those programmes fulfilled those lofty ambitions?

 

Those same broadcasts were good examples of the fairly recent phenomena of tabloidisation. The general opinion is that the public has a very short attention span and therefore has to be given everything in small, bite-sized chunks. This is most obvious in the world of newspapers and magazines where pages are divided up into busy sections all containing a different story but with very few words to each. No wonder then that so much of our news has to fit in with the news value ‘unambiguity‘. There is no longer time or space to explain stories and their contexts. On the television screen this influence has become apparent too. A process which started on the first 24hour news channels, CNN and SKY has now been adopted not just by News 24 but also by mainstream BBC and ITN news. Today whenever you switch on you will see split screen reports, studio interviews, distension of topics, ticker bars, live footage, a multiplicity of anchors and reporters, of reports and video, graphics and computer simulations – anything, in fact, to keep the consumer interested.

 

Indeed the 9/11 attack coverage can be justifiably blamed for the increase in hostility between Christian and Muslim communities in the UK. Here, the media was so determined to find a cause and level the blame that once the perpetrators were discovered they became associated in the public consciousness with Islam in general, thus ‘personalising‘ Al Qaeda. As a result all Muslims were equated with this extremist group and subjected to vigilante style revenge attacks all over the world.

 

However, in total contrast the most recent world-shattering disaster has probably brought out the best in everybody. In the case of the Asian Tsunami the original estimates of the death toll were low and the world watched in horror as hourly our screens were updated on the ticker bar with the rise in the number of dead. We were shown the most dramatic amateur footage of the waves, their power, force and destructiveness, but also horrifyingly we saw people clinging to buildings and overturned buses, torn off their precarious refuges and swept away to their deaths. We were shown pictures of mothers and fathers carrying their dead children in their arms and we were moved. We were shown just as many men who were victims as women when the reverse is usually the case.

 

Yes, we saw the usual distension and repetition which served to inscribe their images indelibly on our minds; yes we also saw a certain bias towards news stories which involved British tourists dead or missing, but overwhelmingly we were shown the devastation wrought on the simple lives of the ordinary Sri Lankan, Indonesian and Thai and those ultimately were the images which worked, which made their mark and prompted the British people to donate over £100 million to aid those who have their lives destroyed. More Britons reportedly watch more news and in particular 24hour news channel programmes about this event than watched any other programme over the Christmas and New Year period. This was ‘transparency‘ of news at its clearest and best, truly a ‘window on the world.‘

 

The only odd note was the fact that FOX News had nothing about it at all on Boxing Day morning. And when it was mentioned in a bulletin that night (UK time) it was only with reference to the cost of rebuilding and how much and should the American tax payer be expected to pay ‘ just so the Swedes can go and holiday in Phuket!’ An extreme example of US news values in operation! Even when it did begin to get more airtime this network strangely used British news reports and footage!

 

Is this what Hartley called an example of ‘infotainment‘? Probably. But also probably for the best motives in the world; this was an event that affected such a huge area, so many people have been killed such an enormous number dispossessed of home and livelihood. It has certainly been the easiest of stories to categorise for its news worthiness, appealing as it does to the values of simplicity, closeness, impact, negativity and continuity. But best of all there has been no political axe to grind. This has been a story which has equally affected young and old and male and female. It has made adults and children alike more aware of the precarious existence many lead in this world.

 

Even the local flooding events in Carlisle and Wales, though closer to home and more recent, have been pushed into second place, as we realise insurance companies will foot the bill and lives will be rebuilt – this has been merely inconvenient, but under other circumstances it would have commanded more coverage, been seen as more dramatic. The gatekeepers of the different news organisations have all made the same decision.

 

The Asian Tsunami disaster has made us re-examine our priorities, review our lifestyles and above all made us realise we are part of the global village, these people are effectively our neighbours and because so many Brits have holidayed in those places we have been shaken to the core and have responded accordingly.

 

In conclusion this has probably been a most unusual event which cannot be accused of having been sensationalised for its news worthiness.