Television News holds a prime position in assessing The significance in moulding opinion and thereby influencing public life.
Once we recognise that News is not an unmediated reality but a selected and represented reality we start looking at other elements behind The selection of items that constitute News. The manner in which items are selected and The way in which The story is "constructed" tells us clearly that News is never "NEUTRAL".
Politics, economy, foreign affairs,domestic affairs, sport and occasional storiyes are usually topics that feature in The News।।
In the West there are four prime news values in the Western world:
· Reference to elite nations
· Reference to elite persons
· Personalization
· Negativity
It is often said that the unexpected always has new value and more so if it has negative consequences involving elite persons of an elite nation.
News on TV can also be an example of manipulation by agencies that control the medium, as in the case of authoritarian regimes or an ideology driven govt which will also use pressure to shape the News the way they want it. Often the owners of the medium become collaborators with the govt.
This sort of “shaping” of the News takes place in the propagandist News that came from the early govts of Soviet Union and China, for example।
In the present set up it is
i) market forces
ii) plurality of voices addressing different audiences and
iii) plurality of outlets
and over above all this professional journalists who ultimately determine the NEWS.
But here what often happens is that there is one part of the world which is kept in total darkness, the spotlight never falls on those ‘backyards’ because ‘Newsmakers” fall in the power elite!
Friday, April 27, 2007
TELEVISION AS TEXT - I
Television is a major source of communication and a source of knowledge about the world even if we accept the explanation that what TV does is putting together of reality and it is a "MEDIATED REALITY".
TV we must rememeber, is directly involved with the provision and the selective construction of social knowledge, of social imagery, through which we perceive the
1)'worlds'
2) the 'lived realities' of others,
3) and imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours into some intellible "world-of-the-whole".
The economic and cultural significance of TV is stronger because of the increasing pace of change in the patterns of global communications.
This often leads to new consuming patterns of the media and through the media as well as "transnational communication".
TV therefore needs to be understood by taking the following aspects into account
i)Texts-programmes
ii)the relshp between texts and audiences (audience research)
iii)political economy (organization/industry)
iv) patterns of cultural meaning.
TV we must rememeber, is directly involved with the provision and the selective construction of social knowledge, of social imagery, through which we perceive the
1)'worlds'
2) the 'lived realities' of others,
3) and imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours into some intellible "world-of-the-whole".
The economic and cultural significance of TV is stronger because of the increasing pace of change in the patterns of global communications.
This often leads to new consuming patterns of the media and through the media as well as "transnational communication".
TV therefore needs to be understood by taking the following aspects into account
i)Texts-programmes
ii)the relshp between texts and audiences (audience research)
iii)political economy (organization/industry)
iv) patterns of cultural meaning.
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