Is TV News a "window on the world"? To what extent does TV show reality, and to what extent does it construct it for us?

Starting Sequences

The starting sequences suggest that what we are seeing is an impartial view of the world. The blog post below discusses the connotations of the images in the starting sequences

http://fayejarvismedia.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/connotations-of-tv-news-starting.html

Ofcom

The law states that the news should be accurate and impartial. The following are rules that the news should follow in order to be impartial.

• All news in any part of the service should be presented with due accuracy.
• Due impartiality should be preserved on the part of persons s=providing the service as respects matters of political or industrial controversy or relating to current public policy.
• The Act paces the addition duty on the ITC to do all that it can to secure the exclusion of all expressions of licensees' views and opinions on matter (other than the provision of programme services) which are of political or industrial controversy or relate to current public policy. If a director or officer of a licensee does express an opinion on such controversial matters, in a broadcast by the licensee, it must be in a context which makes clear that the opinion expressed is not that of the licensee. Speeches in Parliament are exempt.
• Licensees should adhere to the rules on impartiality drawn up in accordance with Section 6(3) of the Act, contained in Section 3 of the ITC Programme Code.

However due to how the world and time works it is impossible for every story/event to become part of the news in a completely biased way. 

News Values

One of the best known lists of news values was was written by Galtung and Ruge's. They analysed international news stories to find out what factors they had in common, and what factors placed them at the top of the news agenda worldwide. Some of their values are:

• Threshold: The bigger impact the story has, the more people it affects, the more extreme the effect or the more money or resources it involves, the better its chances of hitting the news stands.
• Reference to elite persons: The media pay attention to the rich, powerful, famous and infamous. Stories about important people get the most coverage. Hence, the American President gets more coverage than your local councilor.
• Composition: Stories must compete with one another for space in the media. For instance, editors may seek to provide a balance of different types of coverage. If there is an excess of foreign news, for instance, the least important foreign story may have to make way for an inconsequential item of domestic news. In this way the prominence given to a story depends not only on its own news value but also on those of competing stories. This is a matter of the editors' judgement, more than anything else.

Gate Keeping Process

News Gathering Processes

If an event fits the news values so is therefor news worthy, it may still not appear on the news. If there are no news sources that report the event, then no one will know it ever happened so it would never be shown. For example there could be isolated tribes wiped out from illness but because a news source wouldn't find out we wont either. However, due to social media it makes it harder for stories to remain undiscovered.

Newsroom Routines & Late Breaking Stories

News teams work together to create "packages" of news programmes. Script writing, camera operating, and graphic designing are a small number of jobs that are involved in this process. The running order then has to be decided as they have limited time per piece of news. So the most important will get shown. However any late breaking stories will push one story out to take it's place so we wouldn't see a story that we were meant to see. Examples of late breaking stories would include, terrorist attacks or a famous persons death.

Technical Problems

News stories can also be cancelled if there are technical issues like satellite links lost, or equipment not working as it should. Due to the heavy reliance on technology within the news it means that if something goes wrong, the story has to be scrapped.

Economics/Competition

News companies are always in competition with each other to bring out a news story first, with the  most detail. This leads to seeing the same five news stories on every news channel or website. This narrows our window on the world as the news focuses on stories that are already being covered, rather than presenting a wider range of news. If the company, for example BBC, are nearing the end of their financial year they may not be able to cover big or international news stories. An example of this is the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was the end of the financial year for ITV and a lot of money had been spent where as it was the  beginning of a financial year for BBC. This meant BBC could fly out news teams and camera crews while the other could only use a phone call. This process means that we hardly see anything that happens in the world at all, only what those who run the news believe to be important.

BBC News Webpage 05/06/2017

Sky News Webpage 05/06/2017

ITV News Webpage 05/06/2017

Continuity System

When presenting the news stories they flow more like a fictional narrative than how you may expect. They use close ups, establishing shots and a narrative to make us feel emotion towards the news story. Because of this, the news chooses how we view a certain situation. It has the power to make us feel angry towards an event that if we were just told about in an impartial way, we may not even care about.

Overall, the claim that the news is a 'window on the world' is proven false because it is impossible to show everything in the world in an unbiased view. The running of news packages can be changed last minute on any day, it must remain simple and concise to be able to convey any information across at all. Not just this, but those in charge of what we see are not a diverse group of people, the majority being middle classed, middle aged, heterosexual white men.