Television news has been long established as regularly scheduled programs designed to present audiences with factual, relevant and un-biased information on current events. Traditionally, families would gather around the television set to watch the 6pm news broadcast in order to keep up to date with what is happening in the world. However, as the public sphere has started to move into a post-broadcast era, ‘liveness’ in television has started to become a valued concept in news. This is to consider ‘liveness’ as content being broadcasted directly from the studio to television screens at home, with no time delay. Now considered a near pre-dated method of presenting live information, liveness was once considered a unique characteristic of television.
The ABC’s talk show Q&A presents a weekly debate between public figures on current news topics. The show is broadcasted live to air, encouraging audience interaction with both the studio audience though open questioning and through the audience at home being invited to share their thoughts through twitter and text messaging. These text messages and tweets are then seen rolling along the bottom of the screen, further adding to the value of liveness.
Although Q&A is an ideal example of live television, it has also provided many examples of live television ‘going wrong’. In June, both the program and the broadcaster came under fire when audience member Zaky Mallah (who had previously been an audience member) asked one of the panellists a challenging question that had been pre-approved. This ensued in a backlash against the ABC for providing Mallah with a platform. On another occasion, the show was disrupted by a group of university students protesting against proposed higher education cuts when Minister for Education Christopher Pyne was on the panel. These occurrences were broadcasted immediately throughout the country, with no time for editing anything out.
The ABC receives a lot of criticism for choosing to continue live broadcasting, as the behaviour of the audience and the panellists are largely un-controllable. However, they continue to broadcast live, on front of a studio audience as the ‘liveness’ of the program adds an extent of authenticity in its content. Audience members at home get the feeling of ‘being there’ as the events unfold, and value what is being presented to greater extent. Although Q&A is also available to watch after the original scheduling, the audience feels a lesser effect of involvement when watching it a later time.
Although there is a rise in demand for technology that allows you to watch what you want, where you want, the effect of live television on audiences has remained different to the effect of watching re-runs or streaming television. With the demand of up-to-date news on the rise, live news broadcasts will continue to develop regardless of what device they are watched on.
