Savannah Houston's BTEC Media Blog: Is television news a 'window on the world'?

Legal and regulatory framework

Television news is portrayed to be un-biased, impartial, objective and a balance between important information that is passed out. Certain companies of authority have regulated a set of rules of how to be un-biased, impartial and find the balance between the information. BBC’s rules on impartiality is that each controversial subject must be treated with an un biased opinion and should balance out the viewpoints of individuals. However this is impossible because when it comes to picking out the stories, everyone has their own ideas, opinions and ideologies therefore BBC are breaking their own rules of being ‘impartial’.

Ofcom also have a set of rules and regulations about due impartiality. It means to not favour one side to another in an adequate matter. However this is the hardest thing to do when war is the subject of the news, since it is hard to ‘not take sides’.

Galtung and Ruge news values

From the word ‘window’, it indicates a sense of reality. Since the object is transparent, in metaphorical terms, so should the news. We know that the news has to contain enough news values to even be considered as ‘important’. News values are a set of values researched by two sociologists, Galtung and Ruga. They wanted to see what stories had to include in order to get onto the news, they came to the conclusion that news stories needed: Frequency, negativity, meaningfulness, continuity, conflict, elite nations, elite persons etc; to become part of a news story. A particular story has to include as many of these news values for it to be considered important. Take for example the Boston Bombings, in my research of the news values (on my blog) I found that this story had included majority of these news values and ended up being the top news breaking story for the BBC, because it was defined as ‘important’. The only other news value that has stuck with us is the way actuality footage is put in for entertainment purposes.

But who defines and selects which stories the news use?

The set of people who choose which news stories are important, are middle class, southern, white men, between the ages of 30-40. The news is meant to be un-biased and free from opinion; however the set of people who choose which news story is important, are casting their opinions and deciding, based on their own judgements, sociolect, class and upbringing which story is being picked because of its importance. It is physically impossible for the news to be impartial in this way because the group of people who select each news story are always going to have an input and define a news story as ‘important’ because of their own judgements and in addition the Galtung and Ruga news values. While selecting the most important stories, if another late breaking one comes through, then they have to discard 1 package from the 7 news stories and put it in the ‘dustbin of history’. The dustbin of history is for news stories that have been made into packages ready for the presenting of the news but have been discarded because another one has come through. Only a select few people know about the stories that were discarded but the rest of the public have no idea what they could be. To make it unbiased then the general public should have a say in which new stories are going to be covered, however everyone’s opinion is going to be different so a white man’s perspective is used instead of people from let’s say Asia. Everyone in world holds some sort of prejudice towards other conflicts, situations and everyone is judgemental. This is why it is logically impossible to be unbiased in television news. The biggest example of television news not being a window on the world is when wars break out. People don’t know what report on because the ‘sides’ are completely mis matched and the subject is very sensitive

What impact does new technology have on news?

New technology has enabled the news to have a much larger impact on the public than before. The good impact would be that it has enabled the people who are involved with news stories to get it out to the public as quickly as possible. The public are able to access all of the information through mobile devices while they’re on the go. The bad side of technology that has impacted the news is that people are able to find out about events around the world through social networking sites before the news have even gotten a hold of a story. Because people can’t control these social networking sites, it is almost impossible to take what they said back. For example, the incident in Arab Springs, dictators couldn’t stop people using Twitter, so the public’s opinions were on the site and the dictators couldn’t do anything about it because they couldn’t take down the website and the people using it were out of their constriction area. They used to kill people for this and now they can’t, because of the social networking site and how controversial it is.

Twitter is the most influential site because of the masses of celebrity figures, politicians. For instance, if David Cameron had an announcement to make, saying he’s visiting a hospital for the day to meet children, then he would only need to put that on Twitter and everyone can see that piece of information, rather than having to get news teams to him and for the public to switch on their TV etc just to watch him say that. People are now more likely to get involved with what people say on Twitter and being more opinionated, rather than listening to it on the news. This is bad for the news, but good for the general public and celebrity figures. However, for the news Twitter can be a good thing. Celebrity ‘arguments’ are also tended to by the news and can appear on there. All in all, the sites aren’t very good for the news.

Starting sequences/sets/presenters

Starting sequences for the news portray that the news is a window of the world but there are some key features that suggest the news is only for and is made by a particular group of people, therefore not a window on the world. In the BBC starting sequences, there are transparent objects flying across the landmarks of different places in the world. However, the landmarks are only of on-going news stories such as, Afghanistan; and also first world countries/cities such as London and America. From this we know that the news only concentrate on getting stories from larger countries. If any of the public wanted news from anywhere else in the world, they would have to travel there or find a website/leaflet/radio that specialises in it. Phallic symbols also suggest that the news is a working area for just men and that only the men should work in jobs like the news. This completely goes against the idea that the news is supposed to be ‘balanced’ and ‘neutral’. But by only including men this gives a sense of inequality.

As the cameras crane into the presenters, you can clearly see the whole set, including cameras, microphones, the background behind the presenters, TVs, the presenters scripts etc; this shows us as an audience that nothing is hidden from the public, this relates to the fact that the news is supposed to be a window on the world and everything you see, is what you get. However the representation of the presenters differ because they are picked on their looks and age etc; for instance many of the women who work in the news are young, attractive, thin, females and the many of the men are attractive, older (more experienced), clean cut and above the age of 30/40. This is becoming a common trend amongst news programmes and doesn’t fit in with the ‘balance’ and ‘neutrality’ of the people presenting.

News construction process

Narrative Structure

The narrative structure of the news is much like any fiction story. It is based on the classic realist structure of a fiction. Here is the ‘classic realist structure’ also known as ‘classic Hollywood’ narrative based on the ideas of the theorist Todorov.

The news contains each of these narrative structures.

Normality: The world is fine.

Enigma: Something bad has happened somewhere in the world.

Path to resolution: Someone talking about what’s going to happen about it.

Closure: Happy stories that are ‘unimportant’

This also happens to each individual story that is shown on the news. One example I have seen recently is a man who is losing his home, through to his mental illness which is no fault of his home. The way the scene is set up gives us an indication that the news is in fact not a window on the world because it has been manipulated and set up for entertainment purposes and continuity purposes. Also we get a close up of the baby, which is put there for sentimental reasons, to make the audience connect with the people in the footage and feel for their situation. Also when the man went to see the local council, the interview was also set up and re created for continuity purposes. The cameras were set up and placed in an over the shoulder shot for each person when they were speaking to each other. Also a voice over was placed ontop of some parts of the footage which means most of the interview was cut out and the news are only showing us some of the interview that they want to show. Cutaways are used to disguise the editing to create ‘realism’ which isn’t the same as ‘reality’, which is what media is supposed to show us; reality.

Conclusion

Overall, television news is shown as ‘window on the world’ because of obvious features such as transparent objects, the sets, etc; but to an extent it is not a window on the world because of the way it is construction in conjunction to reality. Cutaways, planning process and especially the selection process is deemed to be biased, and logically impossible to follow the rules of impartiality. There will always be someone’s judgements and perceptions on a certain topic, this will always be a problem because it shapes ‘society’ and what is deemed as important, by views of individuals casted to the whole world. You cannot be impartial unless you have no views on anything what so ever.