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The Power of Television News
| Article
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20359 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
7,702 Words |
| Author
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Joshua Meyrowitz
Joshua Meyrowitz is professor of communication at the
University of New Hampshire. He is the author of the award-
winning book No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media
on Social Behavior (Oxford University Press). |
Since the early 1960s--when household TV ownership passed 90 percent in this country--Americans have told Roper Organization surveyors that they receive most of their news from television, rather than newspapers, and that they find TV news most believable. Yet by traditional standards, television news programs offer very little news. The twenty-two-minute script for a network's typical evening news program (without the eight minutes of commercials) would fill only two columns of the front page of the New York Times. Observations of the limited amount of "information" conveyed by television news, along with numerous studies that show that viewers have great difficulty remembering what they see and hear on TV news, have been used to argue that the claimed impact of television news is merely a myth.
It is not surprising, however, that the power of television news is tendered invisible by methods that grow out of work-based conceptions of news. To grasp the impact of TV news, we need to understand television as a distinct medium of communication, and we need to study TV news as a distinct genre.
This article will argue that television news is a powerful force, but one whose influence is not easily measured by looking at "message content, “the "amount of data" presented, viewer "comprehension and recall" of news reports, or the role that news "information" plays in subsequent viewer "decision making." Further, I will suggest that the impact of TV news is not uni-dimensional. Television news is in some ways a potent force for change and in other ways a powerful tool of the political status quo. But most of all, TV news presents a different setting, or context, for the experience of events--a context whose impact is not adequately portrayed by percentages or arrows or other symbols that attempt to describe the "direction of effect."
Expressions Vs. Communication
One of the most dramatic differences between newspaper news and television news is their primary reliance on different types of symbols: language "communications" versus images and "expressions."
Expressions include body and facial movements, gesture, and vocalizations. Expressions are both more direct and more ambiguous, more natural yet less precise than linguistic statements. While one can start and stop communicating verbally, one is constantly giving off expressions. Expressions suggest how people really feel and what they are "really like." Expressions are a rich and essential
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