Abstract
Television news is so ubiquitous in our culture, it is easy to overlook how its technical, economic, and cultural elements have shaped message construction and processing. However, the cumulative influence of these messages is great, and the subject bears a close look.
News and Politics: The Rise of Live and Interpretive Journalism, by Stephen Cushion, is an ambitious and focused examination of an important subset of television news. Specifically, this monograph content analyzes political coverage on television news bulletins (in the United States, network evening news shows) across time (going back to the emergence of cable news channels) and comparatively (across three countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Norway).
Just what constitutes “journalism” varies across cultures and news institutions. However, one common element is the ideal of objectivity. The journalist may cover the story but stands apart from it. Another is layers of oversight—many eyes may sign off on a story, editing and sharpening, before it is presented to the audience. However, what if the story is constructed live, on the fly?
The study focuses on this kind of “rolling news” content. It has been made possible through technological advances such as satellite and microwave transmission of live interviews. Cable channels initially turned to this kind of coverage by the need to fill a seemingly endless news hole, and this approach has become common on video news programs.
What is wrong with rolling news? It is viewed as “the most interventionist way of reporting politics” (p. 11). Journalistic interventionism is “the extent to which journalists intervene in the campaign or follow party political agendas” (p. 8). In a typical recorded news package, the interventionist elements are usually relegated to the close, in which the journalist attempts to put the story into a larger context. However, in a live two-way interview, with no clear a priori sense of how the interview may go, interventionism may appear at any time.
Cushion further demonstrates that television news has a crucial role in mediatizing social institutions, particularly political ones. Through this process, news attaches itself to, influences, and even subordinates political actions or events through its own unique formats and codes.
One interesting by-product of Cushion’s extensive analysis is watching the physical elements of television news change over time. The author shows how average sound bites have shortened over time (from 43.1 s in 1968 to 8.9 s by 1988). We learn the structural characteristics of reporter packages and variations on live and recorded coverage, lengths of stories, and other story elements.
In the final chapter, Cushion extends his inquiry to digital media, focusing on Twitter and Buzzfeed. These choices seem puzzling, because the rest of the book focuses on video coverage of politics, and neither of these channels are video-dominant. Better choices would have been Facebook, the largest social network and home to much video sharing, or YouTube, the largest video sharing site.
Television news bulletins are culturally important but serve as only one source of video journalism. Today, they are in deep decline. The CBS Evening News ratings dropped from 15.9 in November 1980 to 4.7 in November 2014. In addition, audiences for these shows are older than the general population; in the United States, the average viewer is 53 years old, perhaps a good target for the pain reliever ads that commonly are shown (Pew Research Center, 2014).
As this influence has moved elsewhere, it would be worthwhile to examine these channels. For example, cable news networks have created entire shows out of the rolling format, with guests either in-studio or appearing via satellite. Although these shows are pure commentary (often with a strong left- or right-wing slant), many viewers process them as news.
Today, the average news consumer may watch video news on network TV, a comedy show on cable, or on clips shared on Facebook or other social networks. In the viewer’s mind, it may be one big slurry of video information with fuzzy boundaries. However, these stories do likely share one quality: an increase of interpretation, subtly mixed into traditional reportage.