Becoming The News: Time And Space

By Author: Amandda
Total Articles: 60
Comment this article

Like a newspaper, a network evening newscast has a certain amount of space to fill. Television time can be increased by adding news bulletins or special reports, and newspaper space can be increased Thomas Sabo Charms by adding extra pages, a special section, or even a special edition, but to do so is costly. On days filled with newsworthy events, some stories that might otherwise be printed or aired will be omitted.

On the other hand, because a certain amount of time or space must be filled on a predictable basis, what is newsworthy on a day barren of interesting events will be different from what is newsworthy on an action-filled day. Yet because we receive a news-paper of a certain number of pages or a half-hour news telecast, we are likely to conclude that the events covered on the two days are of comparable importance. A publisher or producer has yet to announce, "There was no news today, so the next eighteen pages (or the next twenty-one minutes) are empty." As commentator David Brinkley observes, "Here are days, as we all know, when material of any ...
... kind is scarce, and we have to use what we can get, including some we know is not great, but air time has to be filled."

What is covered and published is influenced by factors outside the story itself. These include access, cost, available time or space, and the number of newsworthy events to fill them.

The characteristics of the medium itself may influence whether or not an event is covered and, more important, whether a story is printed or aired. These characteristics of the medium are what we call "internal constraints." Some of these constraints are a necessary part of the medium; some are conventions.

Television news coverage is also unique because television can replay its own past from tape and film archives, storehouses of the conventions and commonplaces that are television s memory. In the archives are televise bits of the lives of famous persons who engaged in dramatic events during television's lifetime. The information stored in television's memory is different from that in the morgues of the nation's newspapers. For example, when Representative and former Senator Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) died in summer 1989, the broadcast networks called up the peroration of his stirring appeal to the House to pass catastrophic health insurance. Print obituaries recounted events from his entire career and included tributes from the people who had known and respected him.

Television is a more intrusive medium than print. In most cases, a print reporter will alter the observed environment less than a television reporter ac-companied by a camera crew. Does television coverage change the nature of the story? The question was answered dramatically in June 1981, when ABC's crew for the newsmagazine 20/20 was filming a story about the emergency care of infants in Arizona. The filming focused on the Air Evac Rescue Program, a service that airlifts patients to physicians or physicians to patients. On June 2, "several Air Evac officials delayed Thomas Sabo Necklaces for an hour the emergency departure of an emergency flight from Phoenix to Douglas, a mining town with a population of 12,000 near the Mexican border, so that a larger plane could be outfitted for the television producers and cameramen."38 The infant waiting for the physician was suffering from "respiratory distress," but the child's life was not in danger.

The Arizona Republic covered the story on the front page. The director of the Air Evac service was suspended. ABC contended that it had not requested the delay; nonetheless, the delay would not have occurred if the film crew had not been covering the story. What if the infant had died as a result of the delay? Did the absence of a life-threatening situation justify delay in the name of televised coverage of the Air Evac unit? These are the sorts of troublesome questions posed by the intrusive nature of television.
In other words, news coverage and publication are influenced by the criteria of newsworthiness, the conventions of news coverage, and the characteristics of the medium itself. A story is more likely to be aired on television if there is footage available in the archive, if the event is visual, if the item concerns newsworthy people, if it is inoffensive to audience tastes, and if there is little chance that the sheer fact of coverage itself will become newsworthy.