Living Without the Screen by Krcmar Marina;

Author:Krcmar, Marina;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Television as Authority

For a majority of Americans, their primary contact with news and politics is via television (Pew Research Center, 2005). Although the Internet is achieving growing importance and newspapers, while usage is down, still provide access to political information, it is television that puts a living, moving face on the news. However, as McLeod, Kosicki and McLeod (2002) argue, politicians “learn to speak in brief sound bites, and advertisements are increasingly limited in length. Neither affords the opportunity for any sustained political reasoning, even if the candidates were inclined to reason”. In other words, television, by virtue of its brief sound bites and reliance on images, is not a medium that lends itself easily or willingly to sustained political discourse on complex and nuanced issues. Therefore, one problem with television as a source of political information is that, as a medium, it may be ill-suited to conveying multiple points of view or the finer details and minor distinctions that are so important in political and social issues.

In addition to the images themselves, the viewers’ own processing strategies may affect how television news becomes an individual’s political reality. Again, critical scholars and social scientists offer support for the role of television in influencing our social realities. Consider Bourdieu (1996) who argues, “The political dangers inherent in the ordinary use of television have to do with the fact that images have the peculiar capacity to produce what literary critics call a reality effect. They show things and make people believe in what they show”. According to Bourdieu, television’s ability to convince us that what is shown and what is said is somehow a direct and unadulterated version of truth creates a situation in which viewers accept messages without the critical stance that is necessary to make decisions about complex issues. Television, or more specifically television news relating to politics, does not present us with news that is framed as a version of what happened. Rather, television news is framed as fact. Bourdieu further argues that “one thing leads to another and ultimately, television, which claims to record reality, creates it instead. We are getting closer and closer to the point where the social world is primarily described—and in a sense prescribed—by television” (p. 22). In other words, if television presents a version of reality, but calls it reality, it has, in an instant, taken a bias and given it roots.

Although Bourdieu’s (1996) argument is incendiary, quantitative research has supported his theoretical positions. Take, for example, cultivation theory (Gerbner, 1969). Cultivation theory is one of the most frequently cited theories in the media effects literature. Its straightforward premise argues that the more television we watch, the more our view of reality begins to match the one presented on television. Although cultivation initially focused on television violence, suggesting that the excess of violence on television contributed to viewers’ belief that the world was a mean and frightening place, more recent research has examined many aspects of television reality (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorielli & Shanahan, 2002).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.