Television News Broadcasting



Television News Broadcasting

Project Question:

1) “Because we refuse to accept the complexities of the real world and understand them, we imposed upon events the stirring simplicities of the Hollywood action movie”

Discuss with reference to either television news or Current Affairs broadcasting

 

Introduction

There is a great range of non-fiction television programmes available to audiences, from news to lifestyle to reality gameshows. How do viewers make sense of an increasing complex, hybridised, and ever changing factual environment? Viewers do not experience news or documentary or reality television in isolation but as part of factuality as a whole. Viewers use genre evaluation as a tool for understanding a wide range of factual content. Television viewing trends for contemporary news, documentary and reality programming show a genre map divided according to pre-existing categories associated with public knowledge and popular culture. This way of categorizing and valuing factual and reality programmes highlights the importance of social and generic discourses on television, and pre-existing attitudes towards British and Swedish television contexts and genres. The concepts of public service and commercial broadcasting frame attitudes towards television programmes. Factual and reality programming includes a broad understanding of non-fictional programming on broadcast television, satellite, cable and digital television. The breakdown of factual and reality programming into specific genres includes news, current affairs, documentary and reality programmes, with further sub-genres applied within each of these categories. . News, for example, is a category that encompasses regional, national and rolling news programmes. The main news programmes are often flagship productions, providing the main source of public information. . Current affairs and investigations is a broad category that encompasses both long form journalism, political debate, consumer based stories and investigative journalism.

Documentary is a category made up of different documentary modes (Nichols, 2001). Selected documentary modes included specialist documentaries, observational documentaries and general documentaries, which can either be a strand, or stand alone documentaries on any number of topics. . Reality TV is a catch all category for a variety of different one off programmes, series and formats that follow real people and their everyday or out of the ordinary experiences. In previous research, Hill (2005) outlined four sub-categories: infotainment, often about crime or emergency services; docusoaps, often about institutions or groups of people; lifestyle, often about making over someone's home or personal appearance; and reality gameshows, often about an experiment with a group of people, or situation. We would now add life experiment programmes to this group. Whilst popular factual is located in border territory between factual and other non-fiction and fiction genres, it is nevertheless part of the story of contemporary factual television and needs to be included in any discussion of factual categories.

Factual and Reality Programming',1 which is concerned with the power of public service factual genres to inform and potentially influence the viewer. Traditional factual genres can inform viewers about political, economic and social issues, and can help in their development as citizens who take part in democratic processes. There is a common assumption that factual television ...