Tabloid Television

Popular Journalism and the 'Other News'

John Langer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134920112
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Social Sciences

Fires, floods, accidents, celebrity lifestyles, heroic acts of humble people, cute acts by family pets and the weather. Television's non-news about non-events takes up an increasingly large part of contemporary broadcast journalism, but is regularly dismissed by television pundits as having no place on our screens. To its critics, this 'other news' distracts our attention with trivialities and entertainment values, and undermines journalism's relationship with the workings of democracy. Yet, in spite of these protests, this 'lite news' remains as entrenched and as popular as ever.
InTabloid Television, John Langer argues that television's 'other news' must be recognised as equally important as 'hard news' in the building of a genuinely comprehensive study of broadcast journalism. Using narrative analysis, theories of ideology, concepts from genre studies and detailed textual readings, 'other news' is explored as a cultural discourse connected with story-telling, gossip, social memory, the horror film, national identity and the cult of fame. Langer's study also examines the political role played by an allegedly non-political news and explores the links between this type of news and recent broadcasting trends towards 'reality television'.
Tabloid Television, Popular Journalism and the 'Other News' provides an eclectic and intriguing look at one of the most maligned areas of television news. By offering an extended and thoroughly grounded analysis of actual news stories, John Langer locates the question of representational power as one of the central concerns of the media studies agenda and offers some interesting speculation about where television news may be heading.

1
THE LAMENT, CRITICAL PROJECT AND THE ‘BAD’ NEWS ON TELEVISION

The following conversation between a seasoned veteran of television journalism and a fledgling reporter is recounted by Edwin Diamond in his discussion of the connection between television news and politics:

I’m going to tell you a story and after I tell it, you will know all there is to know about television news... The executives of this station [in New York] were watching all three news shows one night. There had been a fire in a Roman Catholic orphanage on Staten Island. One executive complained that a rival station had better film coverage. ‘Their flames are higher than ours’, he said. But another executive countered: ‘Yes, but our nun is crying harder than theirs.’

(1975: xi)

Such apocryphal stories circulate with enough regularity to make them notable as more than a passing shot at broadcast journalism. They function as provocatively succinct commentaries which resonate with assumptions not just about what television news is, but by implication, what it ought to be. Presented less anecdotally, a series of propositions might be unravelled:

• Television news is primarily a commodity enterprise run by market-oriented managers who place outflanking the‘competition’ above journalistic responsibility and integrity.
• Television news is in the business of entertainment, like any other television product, attempting to pull audiences for commercial not journalistic reasons.
• Television news has set aside the values of professional journalism in order to indulge in the presentation of gratuitous spectacles.
• Television news is overly dependent on filmed images which create superficiality and lack information content.
• Television news traffics in trivialities and deals in dubious emotionalism.
• Television news is exploitative.

The list could go on, but essentially the assumptions embedded in such a story seem to lead to what might be generally designated as the ‘lament’ for television journalism. Diamond’s book is in fact one version of this lament but there are many others (Shulman 1973; Littlejohn 1975; Conrad 1982; Esslin 1982; Diamond 1982; Postman 1985; Bennett 1988; Altheide and Snow 1991; Postman and Powers 1992). One variant from Australia (where this study was done) is provided by Clements (1986) writing about the way television news suffers from a pronounced inability ‘to adequately inform’:

The familiar newscasts, strategically placed at the on-set of prime time, cram a large number of stories into thirty minutes, each averaging about ninety seconds. The problem of deciding on how wide or how narrow a context to set each item is hardly faced here, time is so short. Unfortunately, the most important stories of the day, mainly political or economic, receive the same narrow focus as the latest... robbery.

(Clements 1986: 5)

According to Clements, we are ‘lulled by the entertainment values which often replace news values’ and ‘are left contentedly confused’.

The various manifestations of the lament for television news spring from what is held to be a fundamental relationship which must exist between journalism and the successful workings of a liberal democracy. Liberal democracy, the argument goes, needs an informed citizenry who can make rational decisions on the basis of the kinds of information available, especially in the realm of politics. That information is often complex, untidy or even held back; the task of the journalist is to overcome these obstacles, to shed light in dark corners, to act as the nation’s watchdog, to present information on the events of the day with impartiality and objectivity. Diamond’s version of the lament is certainly grounded in these precepts. Before the anecdote about television news he places this observation by Walter Lippman:

All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster, must come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts. No one can manage to live on pap. Neither can a people.

(Lippman in Diamond 1975: xi)

It is this contention which provides the foundation for much of the lament. Television news has systematically undermined the crucial arrangement which is meant to operate between a working democracy and its citizens. At its most reprehensible, television news actively turns away from the ‘most important stories’ completely.

Too often television has been content to take the easier path of irrelevant coverage: sports, weather, traffic accidents and smoky fires. Too often ‘access to facts’ has been translated to mean higher flames and more tearful nuns.

(Diamond 1975: xiv)

Moreover, it is argued, the inclusion of such ‘irrelevant coverage’ actually changes the character of the ‘serious’ news. The preoccupations and strategies used to produce ‘irrelevant’ news begin to interfere with, to shape and finally overwhelm the ‘relevant’, ‘important’, ‘consequential’ news. For Conrad (1982: 132–3), the restless search for images which accompanies the reporting of what he terms ‘nonevents’ ultimately compromises the coverage of important political developments, so that ‘significance’ is determined solely by the extraction of ‘visual highlights’. Bennett (1988) detects a further wayward tendency in contemporary journalism, arising out of an unwarranted ‘preoccupation with drama’, a unfortunate spill-over from the conventions of news reportage used principally for stories which the lament would categorize as irrelevant coverage. Like Diamond, he draws on a troubling tale to make his point. An American journalist recalling his early days as a reporter explains how he used to marvel at the ease with which a senior staffer could write ‘accounts of routine catastrophe’ (Lapham in Bennett 1988: 37). After several months on the job the novice discovers the veteran’s secret:

In the drawer, with a bottle of bourbon and the manuscript of the epic poem he had been writing for twenty years, he kept a loose-leaf notebook filled with stock versions of maybe fifty or sixty common newspaper texts. These were arranged in alphabetical order (fires, homicides, ship collisions, etc.) and then further divided into subcategories (fires–one-, two-, and three-alarm; warehouse; apartment building; etc.). The reporter had left blank spaces for the relevant names, deaths, numbers, and street addresses. As follows: ‘A ___ alarm fire swept through ___ at ___ St yesterday afternoon, killing ___ people and causing ___ in property damage.

(Lapham in Bennett 1988: 37)

For Bennett, the formulaic use of a ‘dramatic script’ is especially evident in television news where pressure to win ratings has resulted in the distinctions between news and entertainment becoming worryingly blurred. Postman and Powers (1992) are even more scathing, suggesting an analogy between television news and the carnival sideshow, each using ‘temptations’ to obtain an ‘immediate, largely emotional reaction’ in order to get and keep audiences in the (electronic) tent.

Whichever manifestation of the lament one encounters, there seems to be a consistent tendency, in the first instance, to link what Littlejohn (1975: 64) describes as the ‘simplification and popular reductivism’ of broadcast journalism to particular types of news stories. At one point it was thought that television news could be redeemed by ‘cleaning it up’, expelling the disreputable elements and relegating them to the dustbin of journalistic history.

crimes, accidents, beauty contests, royal weddings and sports... rarely have relevance as such to the life of the audience or to intellectual activation... the use of such materials attracts the interest of the audience away from more important issues to trivialities. Therefore, there is reason to exclude such items from news broadcasts.

(Nordenstreng 1972: 404–5)

More recently however the path to reformation, according to some, has become permanently blocked. And again, particular kinds of stories prove to be the most stubborn obstacles in the way.

If you are expecting to hear the most important news... on any given day, you will often be disappointed. Never forget that the producer of the program is trying to grab you before you zap away to another news show. Therefore, chances are you will hear a story such as Zsa Zsa’s run in with the law, Rob Lowe’s home videos, Royal Family happenings, or news of Michael Jackson on tour. Those stories have glitter and glamour in today’s journalism. And if glitter and glamour won’t do the job, gore will.

(Postman and Powers 1992: 38)

The voices that make up the lament have been wide ranging and insistent, yet broadcasters, it seems, have not been sufficiently remorseful to change their practices, nor apparently have audiences felt enough shame to avert their eyes or demand alternatives; and if Australian television news is anything to judge by, this type of news is estimated not only to be solidly in place in the bulletin but actually to be on the increase (Gerdes 1980; Bell, Boehringer and Crofts 1982; Gerdes and Charlier 1985). To make matters worse, those ‘items’ which ‘rarely have relevance’ appear to have propagated more elaborate versions of themselves, growing into what broadcasters like to call ‘reality programming’ and critics prefer to label ‘tabloid tv’. Rescue 911, Australia’s Most Wanted, Emergency 000, Cops, Hard Copy, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Police, Camera, Action are just a few of the many available examples where smoky fires, accidents, home videos, royal family happenings, pop music tours, beauty contests and tearful nuns have all become key ingredients for an entire television genre. Perhaps these are the kinds of developments Altheide and Snow (1991: 51) had in mind when announcing that, as it pertains to television, ‘organized journalism is dead’.

One of the difficulties with the lament is that in its disapproval and its concern to reform certain assumptions about television news are left only partially examined. Although the lament offers a sustained commentary on broadcast journalism the basis of its arguments seems to rest on the notion that, given the right conditions and circumstances, news on television has the capacity to act as a transparent and neutral vehicle for relaying information. Altheide and Snow (1991: 51), for instance, talk about ‘the journalism enterprise, especially TV news’ treating events through its own ‘frames of reference, rather than attempting to understand the events in their own terms’ and Bennett (1988: xiii) refers to news as a ‘broadly shared window on reality’. This point of view seems to implicitly subscribe to the idea that news can apprehend the world impartially and factually–recently it has been looking out at the wrong things but this is a problem which could be corrected by adjustments in orientation and content, providing access to different facts or substituting the ‘serious’ for the ‘trivialities’. However, such strategies may have little overall effect on some of the more fundamental ways in which television news works. Events, whether they are defined as inconsequential or important, cannot be treated outside specific presentational practices.

For television news is a cultural artefact; it is a sequence of socially manufactured messages which carry many of the culturally dominant assumptions of our society. From the accents of the newscasters to the vocabulary of camera angles; from who gets on and what questions they are asked, via selection of stories to presentation of bulletins, the news is a highly mediated product.

(Glasgow University Media Group 1976: 1)

Another difficulty with the lament’s position comes from its desire to define news and the institutional workings of journalism as primarily about the transmission of information which can be used by a citizenry to accumulate knowledge and engage in responsible judgements. Yet, relying on the ‘informational model’ to explain television news and its unworthy tendencies may fail to recognize that in the daily recurrence and recognizable features of such programming viewer linkages to the news and the larger world it represents may be more ritualistic, symbolic and possibly mythic than informational, and in this sense television news might better be conceptualized as a ‘form of cultural discourse’ (Dahlgren 1988: 289). The intransigence of broadcast journalists to remove such insignificant reportage from their bulletins may have its motivation in news values based on commercial considerations which promote drama, sensation and visual impact in order to create and build an audience. But if Dahlgren is correct in posing television news as a cultural discourse, a different and perhaps more broadly based explanation still needs to be found for why such news remains ‘popular’.

If there are limitations to the ways in which the lament conceptualizes news, the general importance of its preoccupations has to be acknowledged as well. A considerable time before contemporary communication research and cultural studies definitively focused on the ‘entertainment’ and non-political components of news with their analytical gaze (Curran and Sparks 1991), the lament had these features in its sights, arguing that these were a doggedly persistent, albeit problematic part of news which had to be confronted. The impulse of the lament however has been primarily corrective, attempting to imbue journalism with a more ‘responsible’ attitude. The best solution for some was simply to dump the disreputable elements altogether, but if this was not entirely possible, at least to get journalists to adopt a set of ‘critical guidelines’ (Bennett 1988: 187) in order to reflect on their practices. More recently, with the realization that neither of these strategies has been remotely workable, the lament has taken to addressing the audience directly with practical ‘recommendations’ for ‘adjusting [its] relation to TV news shows, or in helping others to do so’ (Postman and Powers 1992: 159).

This study begins where the lament in a sense ends. It argues that this purportedly insignificant news has to be approached and understood in exactly the opposite way, and precisely for the reasons the lament would wish it to go–its longevity, its palpable and influential presence, its use of a logic based less on models of information transfer than on structures of sentiment and sensation, its commitment to story-telling, its formulaic qualities as well as its search for visual impact are all key features which provide the grounds for assessing this disreputable news from an analytical perspective rather than through mere prescription. More critically perhaps, it will be suggested that the significance of the insignificant news resides in the way it needs to be theorized around the question of what the Glasgow University Media Group refer to as broadcast journalism’s ‘communicative power’. To study news on television, they contend, it is necessary to be engaged in an investigation of ‘the right to define and demarcate situations... to typify, transmit and define the normal, to set agendas... to reproduce highly selected events... to do... judgmental work for society’ (Glasgow University Media Group 1976: 13–14). Whereas the lament leads to a focus on journalistic practice as a ‘problem’ requiring prescriptive interventions, a critical project can conceptualize this same practice as a site from which certain ‘ideological work’ can be accomplished (Hall 1977: 340).

A formulation offered by Thompson (1990) might provide the initial parameters of such an approach.

the concept of ideology can be used to refer to the ways in which meaning serves, in particular circumstances, to establish and sustain relations of power which are systematically asymmetrical–what I shall call ‘relations of domination’. Ideology, broadly speaking, is meaning in the service of power. Hence the study of ideology requires us to investigate the ways in which meaning is constructed and conveyed in symbolic forms... [and] to ask whether, and if so how, the meaning mobilized by symbolic forms serves, in specific contexts, to establish and sustain relations of domination.

(Thompson 1990: 7; italics in the original)

There has, of course, been a large volume of research work done which attempts to uncover and scrutinize meaning in the service of power as this manifests itself in the institution of journalism and the practices of news production. However, the ‘angle of vision’ has overwhelmingly tended to focus on that news which, at first glance, seemed to fit most overtly with what could be described as the ‘purer’ forms of political culture, where the relations and structures of power, control and legitimation appeared to be most explicitly represented. Industrial disputation, law and order, political dissent, race relations, institutional politics, forms of deviance, drug use, unemployment and terrorism, and environmentalism were just some of the problems, events and issues which have commanded most research attention in terms of news coverage.¹A serious discussion of the news assumed an investigation into what was apparently most ‘serious’ in the news, perceived to be most politically salient or most troubling for the maintenance or otherwise of the relations of domination, consensus and legitimacy while news which was presumed not to fit this context tended to get a cursory mention–sometimes as the ‘lighter items’ (Glasgow University Media Group 1976) or ‘soft stories’ (Hartley 1982). This contrasts markedly with the lament which has actively drawn attention to the ‘lighter items’ but without providing much sustained analysis.

More recently, perhaps because of the burgeoning and apparent widespread success of tabloid journalism, more scholarly effort has been made to track down and account for the ‘trivialities’.²Although the results of these investigative incursions into popular journalism are an encouraging sign that news analysis is according ‘irrelevant’ reportage some degree of critical importance, the tendency of much of the work in this area has been largely on print media, still leaving broadcast news, especially what television networks like to call their major news bulletins of the day, relatively unexamined. This remains a particularly notable omission for two reasons. In television programming terms, the day’s main bulletin–typically, the early evening news broadcast–is ‘high profile’ in content. In the ‘flow’ of television, on most network channels, it remains the programme which is generally given ‘flagship’ status. Provided with very generous budgets and resource allocation, even in times of recession, broadcast ‘news services’ are often the type of programme around which a station makes its bid for seriousness and consequentiality. The time and effort spent searching for, and the subsequent promotion of ‘authoritative’ newsreaders attests to this valuation. Typically, at least in Australia, it is also the programme which leads into the rest of the evening’s viewing, so its premier status is attached to audience market share considerations as well. Perhaps more importantly, in the context of this study, is the fact that the lament sounds most forlorn and baleful when it casts its eyes (and ears) over this particular format for news–where claims to important journalistic standards are given frequent rhetorical emphasis by broadcasters (‘eye-witness news’, ‘live to air’, ‘on the spot report’, ‘the day’s most comprehensive news round-up’, ‘that’s the way it is’ and so on) but where, upon closer scrutiny, the profession of journalism is found to be disturbingly flawed, especially when it is reported that so many people are ready to accord these news broadcasts a high degree of trustworthiness and reliability (Philo 1990; Bennett 1988; Western and Hughes 1983). Tabloid journalism may be popular, but from the point of view of the lament its status as ‘real’ journalism is questionable, so it can be marginalized and then disqualified; but not the major television news bulletins, where the lament’s expectations are high and disappointments profound. According to Altheide and Snow (1991: 51–60), for example, it is television news, overwhelmingly oriented around a ‘media logic’ of entertainment values which has led inexorably and fatally to the ‘postjournalism era’ where in news terms a ‘kind of entertainment programming’ is always given precedence over ‘doing deeper, more complete and accurate reports’. For them, the flaws of broadcast news actually become a harbinger for the ultimate degradation of the potential of television itself as a ‘source of public information’, once ‘looked to with hope by those who felt that more detailed information could reduce the great misunderstandings that had for so long widened cultural and territorial gaps between peoples’ (Altheide and Snow 1991: 57).

This book begins then, around the subject of everyday broadcast news, specifically at the point where the discourse of the lament and a critical project m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1: The Lament, Critical Project and the ‘Bad’ News on Television
• 2: Of Paradigms, Pendulums and Media Power
• 3: Situating the ‘Other News’
• 4: The Especially Remarkable
• 5: Victims
• 6: Communities at Risk
• 7: Will the Cycle be Unbroken?
• 8: Politics, Pleasures,‘Spin-Offs’
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography