News and Politics

The Rise of Live and Interpretive Journalism

Stephen Cushion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415739887
• eBook ISBN: 9781317540533
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

News and Politics critically examines television news bulletins – still the primary source of information for most people – and asks whether the wider pace and immediacy of 24-hour news culture has influenced their format and style over time. Drawing on the concepts of mediatization and journalistic interventionism, Stephen Cushion empirically traces the shift from edited to live reporting from a cross-national perspective, focussing on the two-way convention in political coverage and the more interpretive approach to journalism it promotes.

Challenging prevailing academic wisdom, Cushion argues that the mediatization of news does not necessarily reflect a commercial logic or a lowering of journalism standards. In particular, the rise of live two-ways can potentially enhance viewers' understanding of public affairs – moving reporters beyond their visual backdrops and reliance on political soundbites – by asking journalists to scrutinize the actions of political elites, interpret competing source claims and to explain the broader context to everyday stories. Considering the future of 24-hour news, a final discussion asks whether new content and social media platforms – including Twitter and Buzzfeed – enhance or weaken democratic culture.

This timely analysis of News and Politics is ideal for students of political communication and journalism studies, as well as communication studies, media studies, and political science.

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Chapter 1

Interpreting news conventions as journalistic interventions

Exploring the changing nature of television journalism and political reporting

Introduction

In March 2013 the BBC moved into a new £1bn multi-media newsroom at Broadcasting House in central London. The aim – in the BBC’s own words – was to put as many journalists “under one roof … where they sit alongside colleagues who handle the essential live and breaking news content as it comes in and alongside the television, radio and online production teams”.¹ Of course, BBC journalists had previously moved between mediums – to report live for the news channel, to offer opinions on evening television bulletins, to blog some analysis online or tweet the latest update to the story – but the new £1bn newsroom strikingly delivered what is known as media convergence, more fully integrating news services between different media. While perhaps not on the same scale, the BBC is not alone in converging its newsroom. In different parts of the world, broadcasters into the twenty-first century have increasingly connected competing platforms of journalism in order to more efficiently produce news output.

Since journalists are less likely to be confined to one medium, the culture in which they practise journalism appears to be changing and becoming more fluid. After all, journalists today routinely multi-task, producing news in different media, formats and styles. In doing so, this raises questions – often overlooked by commentators or scholars as the spotlight turns to the latest media technologies – about whether the journalistic practices of ‘old’ formats of news have changed and adapted to a new environment of news making. Or if they have resisted pressures to conform to the shared culture of news production and maintained their practices and principles.

The aim of this chapter – and overall purpose of the book – is to establish how these questions can be explored in respect of television news bulletins, a long-standing format that has been operating in most advanced democracies for more than 60 years. Over recent decades, however, its raison d’être has been threatened by a more competitive and faster-paced news culture. For television time bulletins – whether morning, lunch time, early or late evening – appear at fixed time slots in the schedules, programmes that deliver an update on the day so far. Whilst television channels have always run unscheduled ‘news flashes’ or what are more commonly known as ‘breaking news’ bulletins today, these are extremely rare and reserved for major events, such as a terrorist attack or during election time. Up until the late 1980s, or even – for some countries – well into the 1990s, it made sense to punctuate the schedule with fixed time bulletins. In the analogue age, after all, television was in a period of programme scarcity, with limited space to schedule everything from the news to comedy, soap operas and other entertainment-based formats.

But since then there has been a rise of dedicated 24-hour news channels, of rolling online news and more recently social media platforms. Thus, fixed time television bulletins operate in a far more competitive media environment – beyond just radio or newspapers – where audiences no longer have to wait to see the news, they can switch channels, go online or tap an app for an immediate update. All of which, needless to say, puts considerable pressure on television news bulletins, prompting existential questions about their role and purpose in supplying news in a far more accelerated and immediate culture of news consumption and wider journalism practice. To put it another way, the media logic of fixed news bulletins could have changed over recent decades as competing logics – from news channels, online and social media platforms – push television journalism in a potentially new and faster-paced editorial direction.

This chapter will begin by exploring the birth of television news bulletins and how they evolved in the post–World War II decades. It will consider how the format of television news altered and matured up until the 1980s, at which point the media environment changed markedly. New competition from an ever-expanding media marketplace has put pressure on how contemporary television bulletins operate and their underlying logic. In order to interpret whether there has been a change in media logic, debates about mediatization will be introduced and understood in the context of studying television news bulletins. In doing so, the analytical framework used to interpret the mediatization of news and political reporting will then be explored, drawing on the concept of journalistic interventionism. The chapter will propose new theoretical and empirical lines of inquiry, with the final section methodologically explaining the research design shaping the many studies drawn upon throughout the book.

Overall, this chapter will introduce the overarching analytical framework for interpreting whether television news bulletins have become mediatized over recent decades used throughout the book. However, each chapter will provide more specific details and wider context about how news is analysed and interpreted between media systems and journalism cultures cross-nationally in light of debates about mediatization and journalistic interventionism.

The birth and evolution of television news: establishing routine conventions on evening bulletins

When news was first broadcast on television in the 1940s, its routine conventions and practices bore little resemblance to contemporary news bulletins. For radio had been the dominant medium for several decades and its mode of address – connecting aurally with listeners – was difficult to easily reconcile with the format of television. After all, television is a visual medium, making it a challenging prospect for journalists of this generation to juxtapose both audio and images in the presentation of news. NBC aired a scheduled television bulletin in 1940, for example, but it was exactly the same as its NBC radio network broadcast. Likewise in the UK, where – according to Crisell (2002: 98) – “between 1946 and 1954 the BBC offered no television news as such, merely a late night evening relay of the radio news during which viewers were obliged to stare at a single photograph of Big Ben”. The BBC – the monopoly broadcaster at the time – had experienced radio producers who were reluctant to compromise their practices and principles to accommodate the medium of TV. When a more conventional bulletin was aired in July 1954 it still had the hallmarks of radio rather than television, since a newsreader remained out of shot and narrated over images and film.

It was in the US where news conventions and practices suited to the medium of television were pioneered. Conway (2009) has argued that CBS news in New York City was the first to visually experiment with television news bulletins in the 1940s. But it was not until the 1950s that more generic television news conventions began to emerge on different broadcasters. So, for example, while CBS had more than a dozen presenters of the news between 1944 and 1948, after this point in time the concept of the television news anchor was established and popular personalities – Walter Cronkite, say, or Dan Rather – became permanent fixtures on bulletins ever since (Conway 2007). The 1950s into the 1960s witnessed the rise of television news anchors, who – according to Meltzer (2010: 31) – became “the face, the identifying signature of the news broadcast, and signified that television had changed the expectations of what it meant to be a journalist”. In other words, television news bulletins had acclimatized to the visual potential of the medium, with anchors placed at the centre of the narrative. Not only did they narrate one story to the next, they controlled the live flow of images and filmed packages.

Not every country so readily embraced the personality-fused role of television news anchors. In the UK, for example, “presenters”, “announcers” or just “newsreaders” were – and sometimes are today – used to describe the equivalent of a US television news anchor. In the minds of the British political establishment, these labels conveyed a more detached position from which to narrate the news, curbing the possibility of any personal views or bias in broadcasting (Robinson 2012). It took ITV – a new commercial broadcaster – to shake up the format of UK bulletins. Whilst the BBC had employed an anchor just prior to ITV’s arrival, it was pressure from the commercial channel that made anchors more central figures in UK bulletins, creating a less formal mode of address and enhancing a new visual style. So, for example, ITV news brought “an unprecedented quantity of film in its bulletins and incorporated as much informed comment as possible to give viewers better perspective” (Crisell 2002: 98). This was, of course, a period when video recorder equipment became more widely used by broadcasters.

Despite ITV’s intervention into television news in the 1950s, according to Nick Robinson (2012), the BBC’s political editor, bulletins remained qualitatively different to today’s format. In his book, Live from Downing Street: The Inside Story of Politics, Power and Media, he observed at this point in time that “there were no satellites to deliver live broadcasting from anywhere at the drop of a hat; no lightweight cameras recording sound as well as pictures; no sophisticated graphics, and, of course, no colour” (Robinson 2012: 122). Moreover, he continued:

Bulletins were … much shorter than they are now, around ten to twelve minutes long. Largely silent film had to be brought to the studio – in the case of international news, this meant shipping it back from abroad – and developed before commentary, sound effects and, perhaps, music were added. Foreign reports did not carry the voice of the reporter: they were read out by the studio presenter or a specialist ‘commentary reader’. Journalists never spoke to camera and appeared only occasionally when asking a question …

The first reporter ever to broadcast live from Westminster was … Roland Fox. He used a tiny purpose-built studio near the Palace of Westminster …

For many years to come most political reports on BBC TV news would be provided by a man sitting in that little studio, staring into a camera and reading from an autocue controlled with a foot pedal. … [W]ith cameras banned from the Commons there were rarely any pictures, and reports were largely free of commentary, analysis and explanation.

(Robinson 2012: 122–23)

Robinson (2012) describes a history that is largely shared by television news bulletins internationally. For television news bulletins were constrained by technology, with live reporting limited to particular locales and editing packages considered highly cumbersome and time-consuming. At the same time, journalistic editorializing was not widely part of coverage – partly, of course, due to strict impartiality laws in many countries – and cameras prevented politics from being televised either live or in an edited format in Parliaments, Senates and Congresses. Televising their main legislative chambers in the US and Canada began in the late 1970s, in the UK it was 1989 and a year later for Australia. In other words, many television news bulletins around the world matured in the post–World War II decades without the opportunity to televise political institutions. Political soundbites of this era – where politicians talk on screen uninterrupted – were far greater in length. This was not only due to the comparatively unsophisticated editing equipment of that era – with interviews conducted live – but the relationship between journalists and politicians, which remained less adversarial and more deferential compared to later decades.

However, the character of television news bulletins became more distinctive in the 1960s and 1970s. As journalists became more familiar with juxtaposing sound and images, different kinds of news events were covered in new and pioneering ways. Meanwhile, television news anchors became more confident, more at ease with the format and began to stamp their own identity on individual bulletins. Television was also fast becoming the medium of choice. According to Crisell (2002: 100), 24 per cent of people in the UK chose television news as their principal source of news in 1957 – behind both radio and newspapers – but by 1962 52 per cent did, a majority of the population. Television news has not only maintained its popularity since then, it has increased it substantially to over three-quarters of the population more than a decade into the 2000s (Ofcom 2013).

Of course, the rising level of popularity and journalistic advancements in television were made easier as technology became more sophisticated, with improvements in editing equipment and live broadcasting. So, for example, when John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963 the US network bulletins could replay the footage with journalists live on-hand to interpret the reaction. By the end of the 1960s bulletins could broadcast in colour and many extended their length to convey events that could be captured on film or reported live. The BBC’s 9pm evening news bulletin began in 1970 and remained until 2000, at which point it moved to 10pm. 1pm and 6pm television news bulletins were introduced in 1986 and 1984 respectively (both have remained since). In other words, in the 1980s fixed time television news bulletins – at lunchtime, early and late evening – became permanent slots in the weekday schedule.

Indeed, throughout the 1980s technological breakthroughs changed how broadcasters operated. There was, according to Nick Pollard (2009: 116) – a former executive producer at ITN in the 1980s – “very little ‘liveness’” at the beginning of the decade, due to two factors: the technical equipment and lack of time within a 25-minute bulletin format. While satellite technology was improving, it was at this point costly and had to be limited to specific time slots in mostly urban developed countries (Pollard 2009: 117). This meant, in effect, live broadcasts remained reserved for big events at locations where equipment could be shipped and set up in advance. At the same time, however, the 1980s brought the first rolling news channel, CNN, at first an American domestic channel, but then an international one when CNNI launched in 1985. Initially the channel was perceived as amateurish, reliant on limited resources, raw images and live reporters pontificating at length on camera (Cushion 2010). Compared to the network bulletins – which had now mastered packaging edited film and sound together, along with anchors that followed carefully crafted scripts – 24-hour journalism produced a messy and somewhat frenzied format. But CNN’s ability to instantly go live – during a failed presidential assassination or the launch of a space shuttle – gained journalistic traction. Indeed, it was the live reporting of the first Iraq war (1990–91) that put CNN on the global map. As argued elsewhere, this event can be seen as the “coming of age” for 24-hour news channels – the first of three overlapping phases – for it demonstrated the potential of live news to instantly communicate news around the world (Cushion 2010). The second phase of rolling news channels can be characterized as an era when national and international news channels attempted to emulate CNN’s influence and generic conventions, as live and breaking news coverage became accepted journalistic wisdom. While a third phase and ongoing of rolling news has more hybridity in its journalism – with more regional and local news channels broadcasting – CNN’s generic footprints remain imprinted on the way most 24-hour news channels operate (Cushion and Lewis 2010). But dedicated news channels were not the only format in competition with fixed time bulletins.

By the end of the twentieth century, 24-hour news channels were also operating with rolling online news competitors. As Internet penetration levels increased from the 1990s into the 2000s in many advanced Western democracies, more dedicated online news and blog sites emerged. While this gave rise to many alternative news websites, more than a decade into the twenty-first century the evidence suggests that it is legacy news sites – previously existing mainstream media – that have become the most popular sources and today wield the most online influence (Curran et al. 2012). In other words, well-established broadcasters – from the BBC to ABC – have morphed much of their content online, another vehicle for 24/7 rolling news. It has also granted specialist broadcast journalists – political, economic and business editors – the space to blog their views and verdicts on the latest events. This has been enhanced more recently by social media platforms, another place for immediate news and analysis. As Chapter 7 explores, Twitter, in particular, has become the signature tool to communicate not just a breaking news story, but to deliver instant analysis (in less than 140 characters).

Thus, the media environment television news bulletins had grown up in post-1950 changed markedly over the past 20–30 years. For television news bulletins today exist side by side with the pace and immediacy of 24-hour news channels, online news and social media platforms. As a consequence, many broadcasters who supply fixed time bulletins have converged their journalism on different mediums, pooling resources and integrating newsrooms. In doing so, the journalistic culture of news-making has become more fluid, with journalists moving between platforms and different formats. But what is less clear is how far old news formats have been influenced by new media and the emphasis on delivering live breaking news, instant comment and analysis. It is claimed, for example, that newspapers – an even older medium than television news bulletins – have responded to 24-hour news channels by morphing into viewpapers, delivering more opinion and speculation, since they cannot keep up with the pace of both dedicated news channels or online platforms. Put differently, it is suggested that newspapers have adapted their format and style in order to become more comment driven rather than simply reporting the ‘facts’ about an issue or event (Franklin 1999).

This book similarly explores the impact of rolling broadcast news and online news over the last 20–30 years. But the focus is on examining the changing form, structure and style of evening television bulletins. For, as already acknowledged, fixed time bulletins have historically had a different media logic when compared to instant news offered on dedicated 24-hour news channels, online and social media platforms. Before outlining how these competing media logics will be interpreted within the research design informing this book, it is first necessary to introduce debates about mediatization and how the concept of media logic can help measure whether and how fixed time bulletins have changed over recent decades. While debates about mediatization have explored media influence from a wide range of perspectives, the approach taken in this book proposes new theoretical and empirical lines of inquiry. The concept of mediatization thus needs some introduction and wider contextualization before it is applied.

Entering into mediatization debates: interpreting competing media logics

Mediatization is an interdisciplinary concept used to broadly interpret the influence the expanding media market is having on different aspects of society and culture (Hepp 2013a; Hjarvard 2008, 2013). For Lundby (2009a: 1), it signals “societal changes in contemporary high modern societies and the role of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: From mediation to mediatization
• 1. Interpreting news conventions as journalistic interventions: Exploring the changing nature of television journalism and political reporting
• 2. Embracing or resisting a rolling news logic? Understanding the changing character of television news bulletins
• 3. The media logic of immediacy: The mediatization of politics in UK news bulletins
• 4. Comparing news cultures and media systems: Developing a comparative study of television news bulletins in the UK, US and Norway
• 5. The rise of live news and the two-way convention: Evaluating the value of journalistic interventionism
• 6. Interpreting the impact and consequences of the mediatization of news and politics
• 7. Interpreting 24/7 journalism on new content and social media platforms: The online challenges and future directions of news and politics
• References
• Index