Is TV news a window of the world?

Is TV news a window of the world?

 

 

It has come to our concern while finding out about how TV news operates that they hide some inportant steps in history from our eyes. At first we thought that news had nothing to hide from us due to researching and analysing a news programme clip.  But when we looked further into it we found that they aren't able to show every clip due to there being too many top stories or not enough evidence that it is true.

TV news tries to present itself as unbiased, neutral, impartial but as I will show you news in no window of the world. The TV clip that I blogged earlier shows what I saw before, I found out that news doesn't show us everything. What I didn't go into detail about was the news readers. Most news readers are middle classed and if they are men they are most likely middle aged and if they were women they would be around the age of 30. Even though this is just the stereotypical type of news reader it is usually right.

 The impartial laws:

 

Two men Gultang and Ruge came up with a system which shows what kind of news is good news. Some of these points consist of:

• Negativity
• Meaningfulness
• Personalisation
• Continuity
• Frequency

Negativity:

Negativity is used to entice audiences. Gultang and Ruge would put this before politics because people would rather hear about people dying rather than what is happening in the houses of parliament. An example of this is Rolf Harris who was seen for years as a lovely man until recent months and has now been accused of and guilty of 12 accounts of indecent assault.

His family still stand by him today even though it has been proven true. The whole nation is shocked at this because no one would think that he would do something terrible like this because he had given himself a good image.


Meaningfullness:

This was created by Gultang and Ruge to show stories that relate to their audience. Just like the main news for UK and the World we then have news which specifies the area we live in such as Look East. An example of this is the suicide on top of Wilkinson’s. Fiona Anderson killed herself by falling off a multi-story car park her three children were then later discovered dead. This was shown on BBC news the week it happened.

 This was a shock to everybody who lived in the Lowestoft area as something like this had never happened before. Just like the recent news story about a murdered boy in Hemsby it shocks everyone because we are not use to hearing anything like this in our area.

Personalisation:

This is where the news repeats itself about a famous person that everybody or some people love. The news can twist, tell the truth about or be nice to a celebrity. At first the news idolized Justin Bieber when he first became famous but as he has gotten older they only look on the negative side with the things he has done. He’s been said to spit on his fans, has gone to jail and done drugs. The most recent thing that Justin has been accused of is a racial comment about black people when he was younger which was originally filmed for his film documentary Never Say Never.

 

I do think it was a very bad thing that he done that, I also think that he hasn’t learned from his mistakes but he has apologised for this comment which is the morally right thing to do. I also know that his fans will always stand by him and the media mostly look at the bad things teenagers do and put negativity on us and the older generation look at this and believe we are all like this. I do not think the news should do that because we are supposed to trust the media and if we don’t trust them who can we trust.  

Continuity:

This is where a news story is shown and keeps on occurring whenever it arises again. This keeps us informed with information about this topic. This kind of story would mostly be a story that has shocked us and is still unresolved and we are hoping that one day it will be. An example of this is The Madeleine McCann which has been going on since she was 3 in 2007 and nobody knows what happened and if she is still alive.

 

It’s a tragic story which everyone in England is interested in and has had so many debates about who took her, is she still alive and feel sorry for her parents knowing that she’s missing and just wanting to see her again. Too long this has gone on for and everyone just wishes it was over.

Frequency:

Lately in the News there has been information about The World Cup as that’s what has been and still going on until the 13^th July. Frequency is when news is put on the TV if it is relevant to what is going on. Just like Luis Suarez a football player for Uruguay decided to bite Giorgio Chiellini an Italian player when they were playing football in the World Cup against each other.

 

This hit the news because Suarez has already done this before and obviously hasn’t learnt from his mistake as well as shocking the World by doing it again.

The Hierarchy of truth:

When the news are presenting the news that they have been given they like to show that they have evidence of the event that has taken place. To show this they normally have a structure that they have to make sure the viewers believe what they are being shown.

 

 

This is a diagram of how they perform each news story. They would have the main news reader in the studio inform the viewers what has happened or is happening. Then they will go to the location where the event has just taken place. If it is live they would be showing us what would be happening. If it isn't live then they would then show us the actuality footage that took place at that specific location. They would then go back to the studio to hear the next piece of news. This is a good way of showing viewers the news because it makes sure that we are shown every vital piece of news that has occurred during that day or week.

 

 

 If you go to 3 minutes 54 seconds you will see the news reader showing you the news she is about to show. You then see on location the Queen and her family and then you hear the Queens speech.

 

However this is not the case. We have learnt from the gate keeping process that only a few stories out of a dozen are actually shown on the news, which just shows how good they are deceiving us in making us think that they show us everything. In every stage of the gate keeping process news stories are thrown away.

 

• The first stage of news gathering is the sources of the event. Are there enough sources or have the sources been wrong.
• The next stage are the news values. Is the news relevant to the events that have happened this week, or is it a little issue or a common thing to happen.
• The third stage is then gathering the news. If there is breaking news or technical problems or legal constraints then news will be thrown away.
• The next stage is costs. BBC, ITV and SKY are given a yearly budget that they can spend on news. If they think the budget is going to cost a lot and isn't that important or a bigger news story will arise then they will throw it away.
• The next stage is competition. If for example the BBC was watching ITV news they will see what stories they have during the day and would match it to theirs. Sometimes I find that when you are switching over to news channels they have the same news stories but at sometimes the same time but mostly one after the other and news channels want to be the first to air it.
• The last stage is broadcast. If they have a breaking news just as they are broadcasting they will then focus on the breaking news and get rid of he story they were about to talk about.

 

All media is a representation of who we are as a country and what we class a good news. All representations involve choices and we have to decided what choice is right and the news are responsible for how we see this.

I think how we show news does matter because a lot of people watch it. What I would class good news as is a sad story because people find it shocking to watch.  I don't like that I think that way and I think it would be nice if we were able to show the lighter side of life but then if we were only to show the lighter side of life they wouldn't see what was really happening behind closed doors. At least the news at the moment shows both sides the good parts of life and the bad and even though they don't show us all the stories, at least they show the truth in the different sides of life.