Television journalism

Abstract

This chapter locates television within both the longer gestation of broadcasting and as a rival to printed news media. If radio journalism was essentially distinguished in its early years from an opinionated press, television did not emerge from the same sort of technological vacuum. Its moving picture presentation came from a tradition that had been already established as a part of an entertainment culture: the cinema. From the start, the expectations from the audience were for content and presentation that could maximise the entertainment potential of the medium. As with radio, the introduction of television journalism was spread between public service and commercial models along pre-existing national traditions. Eventually, most countries would adopt a mix of the two and even the public service models were in all but name competitive with their commercial rivals and adopted similar strategies to maintain or increase audience share. This chapter explores the prominence of individual presenters and celebrity anchors as popular focal points on television news as well as highlighting debates on the role of women as part of this very visual journalistic medium. In addition, it explores the implications of recent technologies such as rolling news formats for journalism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.