While in the first lecture we focused on our introduction into TV cultures and asking what TV is and why it matters, the second lecture was certainly more in-depth into a specific are of the social, cultural, and educational impacts of television. In that lecture we looked at broadcast media and more closely at broadcast news.
When TV was first becoming popularized, it was marketed as an “Electronic hearth” that brought the family together following the post-WW2 recovery and the establishment of what could be called the “nuclear family” (mum, dad, and a couple of kids). TV stations assumed that since most families would be like this, that at night they would show the network news for when the “breadwinner” father comes home from work and needs the information, and at day they would show the drama/operettas like “Days of our lives” for the housewives at home in-between various ads for household products like soap (hence the term “Soap operas”). Now, gender dynamics have changed, we can DVR, Tivo, or simply stream to watch our shows when we want – from soap operas to the news. We even have 24 hour news stations to provide the news, or to “sell” mass audiences to advertisers.
Broadcast TV news compels viewers to interpret the world in a certain way, including events in terms of what they mean for “national interests” or the “nation”. The shared features of broadcast news include:
- “Liveness”
- Ritual
- Scheduling
- Flow and segmentation
- Authority of the anchor
- The simulation of conversation (seeing as an audience can’t just talk to a TV and get a response)
Nowadays we have “Post-broadcast” news, which created significant changes in certain areas, such as:
- TV institutions/major players
- Technologies of production, distribution, and consumption
- Audience practices
- Aesthetic sensibilities
There also seemed to be a trend towards cable news, online news sites
Our main screening from week 2, “Last Week Tonight”, is a show hosted by John Oliver that satirizes and pokes fun at recent news over several segments. Other shows have exited beforehand, with shows like “The Colbert Report”, “Real Time with Bill Maher”, and “The Daily Show”. These satirical news shows generally have an introduction similar to regular broadcast news (with the exception of Last Week Tonight which has a very different style of introduction), show clips of other news stations and their stories, have Photoshopped images to enhance certain jokes or points, and just make fun of all news stories they feel should be made fun of while also doing longer segments about certain stories or issue they feel need addressing (Last Week Tonight always do a 20-minute segment on a single “main” story of the night). They also tend to be run like an ordinary TV show (one episode a week, only a certain number of shows per year, etc) as opposed to regular broadcast news (one episode a night at least for their main broadcast, and maybe others at other parts of the day by other anchors).
Due to John Oliver’s deal to be free to say whatever he wants, and the fact that he, like few others, gets an entire week to prepare his stories and jokes, is how he can into such detail. However, neither he nor John Stewart classify themselves as journalists, even if statistically people who watch the satire news that they create end are more informed about current affairs than those who watch broadcast news.