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The News: Realism, Narrative and Form

 The questions of Realism, bias and representation take us back to the material we looked at in the first two weeks of the course. As I have tried to stress, when we look at the issue of "realism" and the "representation of reality" in the media we have to be aware of the fact that the media always presents a "mediated" version of that reality, on its own terms. Sociological, political, cultural and ideological influences determine the way in which the media presents (or constructs) reality to us, as does the all-important influence of financial and economic factors. Also, in terms of the forms and conventions of media texts themselves, media texts re-package "reality", presenting events in terms of "stories", with a structure ("beginning., middle and end"), with characters and from a particular point of view. This takes us back to the work we looked at in the second week of the course, on Narrative.

If we look at the News we can see that various political, social and cultural factors do impinge on the version of "reality" which the News presents to us. British News may well deal with international affairs, but its main focus is likely to be British in focus, as opposed to the News presented by CNN or the American TV news programmes. Furthermore, the News organisations (BBC, ITN, Sky News etc.), are bound by British legal and political constraints, as regards questions of taste, decency, balance etc. Various events have, in recent years, demonstrated the conflicts of interest which can arise here, as for example occurred in the 1980s with the Falklands War, the Miners Strike, or more recent coverage of the Gulf War and Northern Ireland. Because of the nature of the patterns of ownership, and mechanisms of control and moderation which govern British news broadcasting, the balance and fairness of British news broadcasting has come under question in recent years. The work of the Marxist Glasgow Media Group (found in their collections Bad News, More Bad News, Really Bad News) has looked at British news broadcasting over the last twenty years and, through a series of close analysis of individual broadcasts, has attempted to demonstrate that British TV news is systematically and structurally biased towards Establishment and Conservative interests, largely because of the nature of the ownership and political control which is exercised over the news and broadcasting organisations themselves. Alternatively, from the political Right, politicians such as Norman Tebbit have attempted to suggest that the bias works towards the Left, largely because of the background and education of media news professionals.

The question of bias is a tricky one, and we need only think of the problems to see why news professionals conclude that if they are being criticised by Right and Left then they must be getting it right! Burglars or terrorists, for example, might complain that news programmes are biased against them and, to a certain extent, there is some limited credence to their argument. Alternatively, if news programmes are directed towards balance between the extremes of Left and Right, aren't they therefore biased towards the middle ground and the general area of the "consensus" and the status quo? Furthermore, certain news stories are so involved and complicated (Northern Ireland, for example, or the War in former Yugoslavia) that it proves well-nigh impossible to provide a totally impartial, balanced, full and accurate account of events without implicitly or explicitly imposing some form of interpretation or point of view on those events. These political and ideological issues are worth exploring when looking at news programmes in detail.

 In addition to the role of outside influences, we also need to be aware of the ways in which news programmes, as media texts, present, construct or package "reality" through the forms, conventions and "codes" of the media text itself. TV news is, naturally, very different from the news in newspapers: the medium is different, the style is different, a different set of audiences is being addressed, the conventions are different.

Take, for example, the 6 o'clock News on BBC1. This has certain conventions and styles. After the opening headlines, with news stories arranged into a hierarchy of "importance" (and think of the problem of deciding which stories are, on any one day, the "most important"): these headlines give attention-seeking snippets of information about the news items, although the main treatment of the items is left to later in the broadcast. After this introduction to the News, including welcoming and familiarising the viewer, individual news items are presented as stories with pictures (and on TV news pictures are everything!), with different allocations of time and depth to the news stories. At the end of the broadcast there is generally a "mood-lightening" story, and the programme ends with a repetition of the main "news headlines".

Certain narrative conventions govern the programme as a whole, and the treatment of individual stories within the programme. It is, for example, only at the end of the programme that we the viewer know all that the "news reader" knew at the very beginning - we have been kept watching by the programmes control of the news "stories". Furthermore, the stories have to be (made) interesting, whilst also attempting to be balanced, fair and accurate, because News programmes are designed for a mass audience and so have to attract that audience. This may mean that important stories about European politics are downgraded to minor items, whilst major controversies about Liz Hurley's underwear are exploited to the full. It is a good exercise to see how individual news programmes present (or, rather, re-present) "News" through using the various conventions, styles and methods of story-telling. Close analysis of news programmes might well reveal (as the work of the Glasgow Media Group attempts to reveal) ways in which the form, style or narrative form of a news item leads towards a partial, biased or unbalanced version of events. It is often just as important to consider what news programmes choose to leave out, to skim over or to suggest in their treatment of individual news stories. Is this simply an issue of not having the time to tell us everything, or are there other reasons for omission. selectivity or elision of items.

A further complicating issue is what goes on in the reader's mind when s/he watches a news item, and the extent to which s/he processed the programme in terms of individual preferences, prejudices, outlooks and interests: a member of Socialist Worker is very likely to watch a news item about Princess Di in a completely different way to a reader of 'Hello'. If we look at the psychological processes which are involved in the watching and interpretation of news programmes we can often be amazed at the speed at which the brain has to work to process all that visual and auditory information, and it is little surprise to find that one viewer can pick up something completely different from another viewer of the same programme.

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