TELEVISION NEWS

Television is a medium of impression;

print is a medium of precision.
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Yesterday’s newspaper is used to wrap fish and

yesterday’s broadcast does not exist at all.
—Martin Mayer
Financial journalist and author
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To the broadcast journalist, what happened yesterday is

dead and buried. There has to be something new to
say, some fresh angle. And with hourly bulletins,
even what went on at 11 will have to be updated for
noon.
—Andrew Boyd in ‘Broadcast Journalism:
Techniques of Radio and Television News’
(available in the Commits library)
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7:30 pm. July 5, 1954.
First edition of BBC’s ‘News and Newsreel’.

At the time no one could have possibly imagined that

television news would supersede print and radio
as the most powerful and effective form of
journalism. (Television News, by Ivor Yorke—available
in the Commits library)

(1959—Experimental telecasts by Doordarshan in Delhi

1972—Two hours of television daily in Mumbai)
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
[7:30 pm. July 5, 1954.
First edition of BBC’s ‘News and Newsreel’.]

The presentation of the first evening’s lead story, about

continuing truce talks in Indochina, would hardly have
seemed to hold the promise of such a glittering and
controversial future: a caption title reminiscent of cinema
newsreels, a map, and a couple of agency photographs,
accompanied by a sparse voiceover commentary and
discreet music.

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
The early days

Yet, despite a few notable landmarks—the Suez Canal

standoff, the Hungarian uprising, for example—the ability
of TV news to influence public opinion to any significant
event was probably not fully recognised until the mid-
1960s after the broadcasters had demonstrated that new
communications technology, combined with a willingness
among some services to cooperate regularly in the
exchange of news material, could make pictures of any
important event available beyond national boundaries
within hours.
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS

The early days (contd)

Once world audiences had shared the Kennedy

assassination, student riots in France, and, in the
US, Watergate, terrorism, and various wars
including Vietnam and the Middle East, nothing
could ever be the same again.

(contd)
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The early days (contd)

By the 1980s, anyone who remained sceptical about

the power of TV news to move public opinion
must have had all doubts swept aside by the
astonishing, spontaneous response to the
appearance in 1984 of harrowing pictures of
famine in Ethiopia.
[NEXT: BAND AID]
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The early days (contd)

The impetus for the creation of the Band Aid relief

fund, and all that has followed in an attempt to
ease the suffering of millions, can be attributed
directly to the reports seen on the news bulletins
of an estimated 400-plus broadcasting
organisations.
For more, click on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_Aid_(band)
(NEXT: BBC VS ITN)
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The early days (contd)

The style of BBC’s ‘News and Newsreel’: impersonal, sober,

self-conscious.

The content: hard, heavy, and with an obsession for accuracy

or official confirmation even if it meant the loss of a
scoop.

On one occasion a BBC reporter’s eye-witness account of the

death of a speedboat racer on a Scottish lake sent just
before a news bulletin was not used because no agency
had yet confirmed it. (contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
The early days (contd)

The daily 20-minute ‘News and Newsreel’ was stuffy,

dull, wordy, primitive with confused production
values and untelegenic newsreaders.

What changed the BBC’s approach to news, it’s

widely recognised, was the growing threat of ITN
(I = Independent), the news service of ITV, in
1955.
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
The early days (contd)

Only weeks before ITN’s transmission, the BBC was still not
showing its newsreaders’ faces on the screen for fear
that this would jeopardise the bulletin’s impartiality.

By contrast, the commercial pressures driving ITV meant that

ITN was encouraged to reach a wider audience by
promoting the personalities of its newsreaders.

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
The early days (contd)

Robin Day was the first ITN star:

“As the newscaster became known to viewers, his

professional grasp of his material, and his lively
interest in it would make the news more
authoritative and entertaining.”

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
The early days (contd)
Drawing extensively on the model of ABC and CBS journalism
in the US, ITN allowed the news values of television to
emerge and embraced more populist elements such as:
• Human-interest stories
• Vivid action film
• Use of reporters on the spot
• ‘Vox pop’ location interviews
• Humour
• More combative interviewing style (In contrast to the
‘deferential’ interviewing style of the BBC, ITN’s reporters
were unafraid to tackle senior politicians and statesmen.)
(contd)
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The early days (contd)

A major problem of news at this time: refusal to deal with

any given subject for more than about a minute. The
main fear was that audiences would be bored by
anything longer.

The resulting lack of depth given to any TV news report

created a vacuum in news presentation that led to
the development of the current affairs programme—
a kind of offshoot of TV news.
(contd)
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The early days (contd)

In the UK, Panorama, Tonight, Searchlight, World In

Action, and Sixty Minutes followed in the footsteps of
the American programme, See It Now, whose
creator Edward R Murrow dared to challenge such
orthodoxies as Joseph McCarthy’s communist
blacklist and the US involvement in Vietnam.

(contd)
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The early days (contd)

The political power of TV images, combined with the

increasing use of TV satellite transmission around
the world (after 1962), gave the medium even
greater importance.

Coverage of the civil rights campaigns in the US in the

late ’50s and early ’60s was widely seen as
making possible the passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and the voting rights of 1965.
(contd)
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The early days (contd)

Following broadcast footage in 1965 of US marines

razing to the ground the Vietnamese village of
Cam Ne, burning alive some of its inhabitants,
President Lyndon Johnson famously rang the
president of CBS shouting, “Frank, are you trying
to f*** me?”, and adding, “Yesterday your boys
shat on the American flag.”
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
The early days (contd)
In 1968, protesters outside the Democratic Party
convention in Chicago chanted, “The whole world is
watching” while police beat them in front of the news
channels.

The awareness of the potency of TV images was not

confined to the US. One of the causes of the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was the ending of
TV news censorship under Alexander Dubcek’s liberal
regime.
[NEXT: STUDENT RIOTS IN FRANCE]
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The early days (contd)

During student riots in France in 1968, the government

intervened to prevent TV journalists giving airtime to
student leaders.

The resulting strike by TV journalists meant that during five

violent weeks of social unrest that brought the country
close to revolution, French TV, controlled by the ministry
of information, had only brief news bulletins produced by
a skeleton staff. Following De Gaulle’s defeat of the
students, the striking journalists lost their jobs and the
state’s monopoly of broadcasting continued.
(contd)
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The early days (contd)

Now, in the US, in the ’50s and ’60s, news had been
regarded as something of a public duty. But by the
early ’70s it had become a profit centre, as important
in the ratings battle as a soap opera or game show.

The trendsetter was ‘Eyewitness News’, a local

programme put out by stations owned and operated
by ABC.
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
The early days (contd)
The ‘Eyewitness News’ formula:
• Plenty of sports reports
• Even more weather forecasts
• A little news, kept as ‘soft’ and as ‘visual’ as possible
• Interminable jokey banter between anchor-people and the
weather-man

This kind of inanity became known as ‘Happy Talk’ news, and

stations around the US hired ‘news consultants’ to come in
and convert their programmes to ‘Happy Talk’.

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
The early days (contd)

Now, internationally, news programmes have a certain

similarity.

According to journalist Rosie Millard (1993):

‘From Sweden to Greece, England to America, we see the

same bright set; the jaunty electronic theme tune; the
branding of packages within the programme [‘India
Matters’, ‘Focus on Britain’, ‘And finally…’] and the
emphasis on live ‘happening events’.”
NEXT: THE MAIN ADVANTAGE OVER THE PRESS
 TELEVISION NEWS

TV’s main advantage over the press:

Television can deal with today’s news, or even news

as it breaks, unlike most daily papers, which can
report only yesterday’s events.

During the first Gulf War, CNN’s reputation as a news

channel soared throughout the world because it
reported events as they happened.
NEXT: CNN’S GULF WAR REPORTING
 TELEVISION NEWS
John Eldridge in ‘Getting the Message’ (1993):

“These CNN reports had a raw quality about them. They were
unfiltered happenings.

“We see one reporter knock over another as the sirens wail in
Dhahran and they instinctively duck to avoid the
anticipated missile.

“At times, because of the noise or because their voices are

muffled by gas masks, we can scarcely hear what they
say.
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
John Eldridge in ‘Getting the Message’ (1993):

“But what kind of knowledge is this?

“It was fairly described by one critic on BBC2’s ‘Late Show’ as

‘immediacy without understanding, drama without
information’.”

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
John Eldridge in ‘Getting the Message’ (1993):

In the same article on the first Gulf War, Eldridge quotes an

ITN reporter:
“One of the standard devices is the live two-way…you go to
your man on the spot…
“ ‘Bill, what’s the latest.’ … In Dhahran you didn’t know what
the latest was because the latest was 150-200 miles
way, or in Riyadh. So what was a perfectly respectable
journalistic device—asking someone who was there—
actually became downgraded and abused in that
situation: ‘I’m informed that such and such is going on..’
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
John Eldridge in ‘Getting the Message’ (1993):

“The only reason they knew was that they phoned their office
[the London newsroom] just before going on air and the
office had read over to them the latest wire copy.

“I know. I did that.”

NEXT: THE MAIN SIGNIFICANCE OF GULF WAR I FOR

TELEVISION
 TELEVISION NEWS

The main significance of Gulf War I:

For television, the main significance was its use of

satellite technology.

For the first time an international news event was

dominated by live TV coverage—more
specifically by CNN, which relayed events
unedited to a global audience.
NEXT: PICTURE VALUE
 TELEVISION NEWS

Picture value

“Television news is generally given greater credence

by the public than either newspapers or radio;
probably because it is perceived to be less
partisan than the press, and because it offers the
‘evidence’ of pictures that isn’t available on the
radio.”
—Andrew Goodwin in TV News: Striking the
Right Balance (1990)
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Picture value (contd)

Today ‘picture value’ has very high importance—too

high according to many critics.

A common complaint: TV news’s reliance on

dramatic, visual events reinforces the lack of
coverage given to long-term developments that
may be far more ‘important’ in terms of their
effects. (contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Picture value (contd)

Floods, for instance, affect many people and make

dramatic footage.

The destruction of forests, however, which in many

instances causes such floods and displaces as
many people, is a daily reality and therefore
makes far less dramatic footage for a news
report.
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Picture value (contd)

• Unemployment
• Pollution
• Malnutrition
• Disease
• Political oppression
These are also slow-acting, if far-reaching, developments,
but lack the visual punch of an earthquake or a rocket
exploding and so tend to have a lower priority on TV
bulletins.
NEXT: COVERAGE
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage

Short-term, immediate, and easily explained filmed news items

will generally take precedence on TV bulletins.

For example, minor outbreaks of violence among Hong Kong

citizens queueing for documentation at the British
consulate found its way into British news reports because a
camera crew were present at the incident.

Had the crew arrived five minutes later it is highly unlikely the
item would have been covered at all.
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)

In fact, the majority of film on news items shows places and

persons connected to a story after the event.

The principal action is over and news teams resort to a

repertoire of visual prompts around which the spoken
narrative can be organised. These include shots of
location; library film; ‘stagings’; photos; footage from
related items.

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)
When cameras are present at the news event, however, the
effect can be very powerful:
• The Ethiopian famine of 1984, coverage of which resulted
in the Band Aid relief programme
• Scenes of the Baghdad shelter during
Allied bombing in 1991
• Scenes of the Serbian-run internment camps in Bosnia,
shown by TV in 1992
• Demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992
• Planes crashing into Twin Towers in 2001
• Mumbai terror attacks Nov.-Dec. 2008
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)

At the same time, when cameras are present the

protagonists’ behaviour can undergo a change or they
may be “inspired” by the cameras to “put on a show”.

For example, stone-throwing youngsters in Gaza and the

West Bank.

Examples closer to home?

NEXT: TWA HIJACK

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Coverage (contd)
In June 1985 an American airliner (TWA) carrying more than
100 people was hijacked in the Middle East. One
passenger was murdered and others were spirited from
the aircraft as it sat on the ground at Beirut. For the next
two weeks, as the US government negotiated for the
hostages’ release, the country’s three TV networks were
locked in private combat to bring their viewers the most
detailed coverage. ABC got an agreement to interview the
pilot and two crew under the eyes of a gunman in the
cockpit.
Later, pictures and interviews with other hostages were also
telecast. The question arose: Had journalists allowed
themselves to be manipulated… (contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)
… manipulated by people who understood how the appetite for
a big story could be satisfied at the same time as
motivating American voters to exert pressure on their
president?
And a new word passed into the language: TERRORVISION.

After 17 days the aircraft returned to Beirut after Israel

released 435 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners.

And people began to ask if there would have been any

hostages if there had been no news cameras around.
(contd)
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Coverage (contd)

Given the constraints of time and the medium, TV news has a

preference for simple stories over complex ones. This is
hardly surprising given the constraints of time and the
medium.

A typical news programme attempts to pick out what it

considers will be of interest to its viewers from thousands
of news reports and reduce all that information into the
same number of words as can be put on one page of a
broadsheet newspaper.
(3 words per sec; 30 minutes = 5,400 words) (contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)

Furthermore, the speed of electronic news-gathering and the

pressure for TV stations to be first with the news has
“turned newspapers into magazines”.

“Being unable to compete on news, newspapers put their

resources into features. As a result of this same process,
however, TV itself has become less interesting. The
immediacy has meant that pictures are thrown onto the
screen straight away and the painstaking TV journalism
has been pushed aside.” – Peter Ibbotson, former editor
of BBC’s Panorama (contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)

It is relatively easy, for example, to focus on the images of

suffering caused by war—such as civilians whose legs
have been blown off by mines.

It is more difficult, however, to investigate the more complex

causes of these atrocities, such as western ‘aid’ in the
form of weapons, government subsidies to arms
manufacturers, or the reluctance of western powers to
sign international treaties outlawing mines.

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)
Thus, TV news tends to be reactive rather than
investigative…

The medium’s reactive news values tend to

undermine the ‘mission to explain’ – providing
focus, context, and background to news
bulletins.

But, according to some experts, this is true of the

media in general at the moment. (contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS

Coverage (contd)

In Television Culture, F. Fiske illustrates how

deadline pressures and news conventions mean
that TV news stories are effectively pre-written…

“…the tyranny of the deadline requires the speed and

efficiency that only conventions make possible.
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)
“The type of stories, the forms that they will take, and the
programme structure into which they will be inserted are
all determined long before any of the events of the day
occur.

“During the forced withdrawal of Belgium from the (then)

Belgian Congo, an American journalist landed at Zambia’s
Lusaka airport and, on seeing a group of white women
waiting for evacuation, rushed over to them with the
classic question: ‘Has anyone here been raped and
speaks English?’ His story had been ‘written’ before
landing; all he needed was a few local details.”
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Coverage (contd)

So TV news has been criticised for its inability to scratch

beneath the surface and for its reliance on secondary
sources of information.

But that is changing rapidly. In India, for instance, NDTV,

Aaj Tak, Star News, CNN-IBN, and Times Now have
recruited scores of specialist correspondents in a real
attempt to generate original journalism.

NEXT: PROBLEMS, PROCESSES, TECHNIQUES

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Problems, processes, techniques

Very few detailed studies have been made into the

problems, processes, and techniques involved in
bringing news to the screen several times a day,
365 days a year.

It is not an easy subject to explain. TV news well

done is not simply radio with pictures.

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Problems, processes and techniques (contd)

TV news has been described as a kind of electronic jigsaw

puzzle that, like other puzzles, makes no sense until it
has been completed.

Taking a few separate pieces at random is rather like

examining the big toe and thumb and expecting tem to
give an accurate picture of what the entire human body
looks like.

(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Problems, processes and techniques (contd)

In TV news, the most important parts of the jigsaw puzzle

are people, operating within their own spheres of
activity along parallel lines that converge only at the
times of programme transmission.

And TV news channels, fully aware of the ever-mounting

pressure upon them to produce news programmes of a
professionally high standard, need the journalists they
hire to demonstrate immediate expertise and reliability.
(contd)
 TELEVISION NEWS
Problems, processes and techniques (contd)

The craft of writing clearly and succinctly is only part of it.

There’s a bewildering battery of electronic equipment and

strange jargon that needs to be mastered before a single
word is spoken.

This means the journalists must understand the nature of

television news, what they are doing, why, and how their
roles fit in with the rest of the team.
NEXT: GETTING INTO TELEVISION