Understanding Broadcast Journalism

Stephen Jukes, Katy McDonald, Guy Starkey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138240995
• eBook ISBN: 9781315281636
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding Broadcast Journalism presents an insightful exploration of broadcast journalism today; its characteristics, motivations, methods and paradigms. The authors balance discussions of industry practice with critical examinations of content, across television, radio and associated multiplatform journalism. They highlight key issues including ownership and shifting regulatory environments, the revolutionary role of user-generated-content and digital convergence, and coverage of global issues by rolling news services.

Chapters include:

• a brief history of broadcasting;

• an overview of recent commercial challenges in the news industry and the impact on television news;

• current trends in the running of local radio stations, with particular focus on the rise of 'hubbing';

• the ethics of broadcast journalism;

• the significance of international broadcasters including the BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera.

The book identifies how the dissemination of broadcast journalism is evolving, whilst also arguing for the continued resilience of this industry now and in the future, making the case that journalistic storytelling remains at its most effective in broadcast environments. Professional journalists and students of media studies and journalism will find this a timely and thought-provoking intervention, which will help to inform their professional practice and research.

1The importance of being broadcast

The nature of broadcasting

As this book is about broadcast journalism, it is appropriate to begin by considering what is meant by the adjective ‘broadcast’, the verb ‘to broadcast’ and the noun ‘broadcasting’. The number of different ways of accessing media content has proliferated over recent years, so it would not be surprising if younger generations began to emerge with little real understanding of the meaning of broadcasting. Put simply, and in its broadest sense, broadcasting is the dissemination of media content over a wide enough area to cover neighbourhoods, communities, towns, regions, whole countries or continents without any need for a physical connection between the originator and the recipient. That is why the developing medium of radio was originally, in the 1920s, called the ‘wireless’ (Crisell, 1994). Broadcasting usually refers to sound or a combination of sound and vision, but encoded data have been included in broadcast transmissions since the addition of teletext in the 1970s to television screens in order to provide scrolling pages of information – some of it journalistic in nature – and, because of its apparent immediacy, at the time this was quite an innovation.

Similarly, in the 1980s the Radio Data System (RDS) began to add basic display information, such as the name of the station, and to divert car radios to retune from the programme being listened to, to another, to provide local traffic and travel information at different times of the day. Nonetheless, broadcasting is (and always has been) in most cases something that is offered to anybody within its coverage area to be tuned in to free of charge, and the broadcast signal is unaffected by the number of receivers in that area that are tuned into it. There could be just a single person listening to or watching a given transmission at any time, or a million, and the size of the audience would make no difference to the quality or availability of the transmission – whereas a live stream or any kind of data transfer using the Internet is limited in terms of the number of devices that can connect to it at any one time.

This distinction between the use of electromagnetic waves distributed through the atmosphere to transmit content and the relatively simple sending and receiving of data transmissions back and forth along either copper wires or fibre-optic cable is an important one. For some, who might be called purists, broadcasting will always have only its original meaning, dating back to the days when in the late 1890s Marconi first demonstrated the ability to send rudimentary but essentially meaningful ‘content’ in the form of Morse code over long distances (Street, 2002). The content may have changed dramatically, becoming much more sophisticated and soon used to communicate with many people at a time, rather than a means of one-to-one messaging as Marconi had originally envisaged it. But listening to the radio requires a box with an aerial on top in order to be radio. In the same way, intrinsic to watching television is a larger box connected to an outside aerial, carefully directed at a distant point from which the transmissions originate. Others will take a more liberal view of the term, noting that the radio began to appear in large numbers of cars in the 1960s, as the technology that underpinned the ‘platform’ shrank dramatically in size with the development of the transistor – a tiny electrical component that replaced the huge, glowing valves inside the very first wirelesses of the first half of the twentieth century (Starkey, 2014). The television aerial, too, began to be supplemented from the late 1980s on many dwellings by a satellite dish and, at about the same time, both television and radio programmes became ‘time-shiftable’ through the use of cassette tapes that could capture the broadcasts and enable them to be enjoyed later, or played back repeatedly, or even fast-forwarded and rewound according to the predilection of the listener or viewer.

Suddenly, media that were previously only consumed in a linear, once-only, catch-it-now-or-miss-it fashion, were becoming non-linear. But their audiences did not consider they were now consuming something new. To them these were still radio and television. Soon it was common for mobile phones to include within their circuitry an FM radio receiver, so small had the technology become. Doubling up as an aerial is the earphone cable, with this modern, miniature radio set also sharing the phone’s touch-screen user interface. Even though the marketing for the device describes it as a phone, and its primary use is normally as a phone, it is in essence just as much a radio as any other box with an aerial on top that can receive and play out FM transmissions. Today’s modern smartphone is capable of receiving live radio and television as streamed data, as opposed to an analogue radio wave, and playing it out using the loudspeaker and, in the case of television, the screen. To complicate the issue for purists, the digitally-encoded data that carries the radio, television and also any phone calls arrive at the phone’s built-in aerial on an analogue radio wave – one which is dissimilar to an FM transmission only in length and height. In fact, all of the data received and sent by the phone rely on analogue radio waves to make the journey to and from the nearest mobile phone mast, but they are waves which carry digitally-encoded information. If the receiving equipment is a laptop or a desktop computer or a digital television set connected by a wire to a data network, it is further evidence of the blurring of boundaries between what would once have been considered to be discrete, or completely separate, technologies.

That blurring of boundaries over the past twenty years or so is commonly referred to as ‘convergence’, and it is difficult to predict what further convergence will occur in even the very near future, so rapid has been the pace of change. Whether we will still commonly refer to certain forms of media content as ‘television’ or ‘radio’ in a few years’ time is uncertain, but in fact they are useful labels for describing the way content is framed, arranged and presented. To be pedantic for a moment, when people say they are watching television, they are usually referring to the content on the television set, rather than watching the television set itself. Listening intently to a radio set that is turned off would not be a particularly rewarding experience, so when they say they are listening to radio, they really mean they are listening to the various sound elements that have been assembled into a particular order, mixed, faded up and faded down in ways that are recognised as displaying the common codes and conventions of radio broadcasting. Radio programming can sound more or less the same, whether or not it is coming from a small box with an aerial or a laptop, just as television programming may not change through being viewed and heard through a tablet or iPad. Some media producers go further than this common multiplatform approach to distributing their content, and exploit their brands through different but complementary content for different platforms. In the United Kingdom, the BBC creates visual live and on-demand content under its youth-focused Radio 1 brand, as does Global – a company which has dropped the word ‘radio’ from its different radio brands, identified only as Heart, Smooth and Capital, even though it is content that uses mainly established radio codes and conventions to communicate with its audiences and the company shows music videos on parallel satellite and cable television channels operating under the same brands.

Such big operators as the BBC and Global are not the only broadcasters to routinely disseminate parallel time-shiftable and extended content online through other, essentially mobile, platforms that are complementary to the broadcast output of their television and radio platforms. For a radio station to own a complementary television channel, even to run relatively cheap music video programming continuously, requires deep pockets. However, most radio and television services run much cheaper website operations in order to extend the brand to another platform, to make certain content – especially their journalism – instantly available, and to act as a conduit for interactivity between the audience and the broadcaster. Typical content for a website might include: instant access to the most recent news bulletin broadcast; a live stream enabling viewing or listening without access to a radio or a television set; an archive of past programmes, perhaps searchable by date or key words; extended content, such as the full-length version of an interview that was edited for broadcast due to lack of airtime; and a blog or podcast featuring highlights of past programmes or a background profile of a news story or an individual. It would be wrong to assume that such relatively sophisticated parallel content is only made available in the most developed of countries since, for example, in parts of Africa the radio station and its website may be the only source of locally-produced media content (Damome, 2011).

The term ‘broadcasting’ contrasts markedly, of course, with ‘narrowcasting’, one that was unkindly applied to some very early cable television experiments in the 1970s because their potential audiences were tiny compared to those of the few mainstream television channels on air then. ‘Narrowcasting’ could equally be applied now to some specialist or ‘niche’ programme-makers who reach very few people at a time because they are among the less popular options in a now very crowded media landscape. In short, the always-on availability of radio and television transmissions using electromagnetic waves that travel through the air to communicate their content, rather than wires or fibre-optic connections, has unlimited potential to build audiences – unlike the one-to-one nature of Internet, wifi and mobile phone connections, which means they have only a finite capacity to transmit and receive data to and from individual devices. When that capacity is exceeded, online streaming services simply cannot accept any further data traffic, and so reject any additional requests to connect to them. This greater potential of broadcasting to connect with unlimited audiences has particularly important implications for journalism at times of crisis or national disaster, as will be explained later.

Why broadcast journalism?

What, then, are the implications for journalism of being broadcast? And why is the act of broadcasting any form of journalism inherently significant? To answer these questions requires a thorough examination of broadcast journalism and of the environment in which it takes place – including the ways in which it relates to the other forms of journalism with which it competes for attention. Like all journalism, the importance of the broadcast variety derives in part from the need in democratic societies for citizens to have sufficient access to information and informed comment to participate fully in society, but also to be able to distinguish between the two. Information consists of one or more hard facts that enjoy some level of incontrovertibility, depending on the subject matter and the robustness of any proof underlying them, while informed comment is opinion provided by someone whose perspective may be treated with some confidence because they ought to know what they are talking about.

Depending on the credentials and the credibility of someone commenting on a situation, their opinions can carry more or less weight. US president Donald Trump, for example, has been very critical of most of the mainstream media in the United States and made it clear that he viewed their coverage of his presidency as biased. At the same time, his view was not universally shared in what the 2016 election showed to be a divided nation. And, sometimes, distinguishing between information and comment is genuinely difficult, especially when audiences are unable to use their primary senses to see, hear, smell or feel for themselves what has happened – as they might if they were at the scene of a major incident. It is here that an essential characteristic of journalism comes into the argument: the notion that the journalist acts as a proxy for the audience, relaying a more or less faithful version of the reality the journalist perceives, to the audience, on the audience’s behalf (Starkey, 2007: xvii). That proxy – or representative – is clearly able at times to deliberately or unknowingly distort the truth, but ‘ethical’ or ‘responsible’ journalists would try not to do that, even by accident.

This book argues that in a world in which the various ‘truths’ underlying journalism are increasingly being challenged, broadcasting environments often offer the greatest chance of journalism being ‘truthful’, and therefore can be of greatest service to democracies and their peoples. That is one particularly good reason to contend that broadcast journalism is a positive influence on the world in which we live. But this sense of optimism can no longer be maintained lightly – both television and radio face serious challenges if they are to live up to this role in the future. Despite broadcasting’s resilience as a dominant medium, discussed in detail below (see pp. 23–30), there are worrying concerns that young people are deserting traditional broadcast news. At the same time, competitive pressures are impinging on all sectors of broadcast news, whether this be delivered by commercial providers or those operating in a sheltered, and often highly regulated, public-service broadcasting environment. Such regulation can sometimes go a long way to supporting the democratic role of broadcasting, usually applying a set of commonly agreed rules and standards to all broadcasters in the country or region, and ensuring that they adhere largely to the rules and uphold the standards that are expected of them. In the United Kingdom, for example, this role is performed by the Office of Communications (Ofcom), which was set up by an Act of Parliament in 2003 and was preceded by the complementary bodies, the Radio Authority and the Independent Television Commission (1991–2003) and before them the Independent Broadcasting Authority (1972–1990) and the Independent Television Authority (1954–1972). The very names of these august bodies suggest the importance with which they were regarded in government, and they have each had the power at some stage to appoint or reject commercial radio and television broadcasters by giving or denying them licences to broadcast their programmes.

Licences could – and still can – be taken away in the event of the very worst breaches of the rules, and fines can be imposed for lesser offences, for example the broadcasting of swear words at inappropriate times of the day. Needless to say, major transgressions on the part of the operating companies have been very few and far between since commercial television began in the United Kingdom in 1955, because to lose a licence to broadcast would bring with it damaging consequences for the company that owns it. However, there have been very few serious suggestions that regulating broadcasting in this way has resulted in any systematic compromising of the standar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The importance of being broadcast
• 2 Understanding television journalism
• 3 Understanding radio journalism
• 4 New platforms, new journalism?
• 5 Broadcast journalism in context
• 6 The ethics of broadcast journalism
• 7 A world of journalism
• Conclusion: Established media, new challenges
• Index