Television & New Media current issue

Three Dimensionality: Taxonomy of Iconic, Linguistic, and Audio Messages in Television News

Wojcieszak, M. E. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:01:18 PDT

Visual critics interested in news primarily analyze still photographs in print media. Thus, the questions of how images in television news are contextualized, complemented, displaced, explained, or contradicted by the auditory channel and linguistic messages on the screen have not been studied extensively. Based on an exploratory content analysis of CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, the author categorizes the interplay between the three modes of information transmission in the broadcast news: moving footage (iconic messages), on-screen textual elements (linguistic messages), and voiceover (audio messages). The analysis identifies six organizing categories: (1) polysemy reduction, (2) meaning attainment through audio, (3) reinforcement, (4) contextualization and acquiring meaning, (5) contradiction, and (6) slogano-symbolism. These categories provide an interpretative framework for visual analyses of television news and offer new directions for research.

Paying for Fewer Imports: The BBC License Fee 1975--1981 and Attitudes toward American Imports

Weissmann, E. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:01:18 PDT

This article investigates the impact of the BBC license fee negotiations between 1975 and 1981 on the relationship between the broadcaster and American programming. It highlights the increasing dependence of the BBC on imported programming and on the export of content to America due to a series of below-inflation increases that left the BBC financially weakened. The article’s main concern, however, is with the management of attitudes toward American television that were exploited by key executive personnel in the United Kingdom for political ends: the campaign for a higher license fee. The author argues that the successive campaigns during the late 1970s exploited fears of Americanization to emphasize the lowering of quality in the output on the BBC, which connected to debates around public service ideals and hence, to the legitimization of the license fee. The campaigns ultimately also affected public attitudes, which increasingly registered American programming in relation to the lowering of standards on the BBC.

Block Booking Migrates to Television: The Rise and Fall of the International Output Deal

Torre, P. J. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:01:18 PDT

This article examines the recent Hollywood studio practice of distributing international television programming via a bundling strategy, labeled an output deal, and situates the practice as a further iteration of the early Hollywood system of "block booking" feature films. Using Germany as a case study, the authors looks at how Hollywood compelled German distributors and broadcasters to take on large packages of television programming that combined highly desirable blockbuster motion pictures with far less valuable television series. Just as the original practice of block booking exerted financial pressure on theater owners, the burdensome practice of television programming output deals led to a major upheaval in Germany’s entertainment industry, driving the second largest German media company into bankruptcy. The international television output deal persists, however, because transnational media regulations cannot hope to marshal the enforcement powers of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Supreme Court. Market forces within the global entertainment industry have done little to curtail the expansion of global media conglomerates. And yet, even as global power dynamics remain essentially the same, with Hollywood retaining its primary position, this case study points to rising instabilities that threaten an American-dominated international media economy.

What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty?: An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom

Esposito, J. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:01:18 PDT

This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race "matters" is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse is the notion of a "color-blind society" (meaning that we no longer see color or that the color of one’s skin will not determine his or her life chances). This idea has been has been recently redefined by the media as "postracial" (meaning that we have moved beyond race and that race no longer structures our thinking or our actions). Either discourse silences talk of racial privilege and disadvantage. As a discursive racial project, the Ugly Betty text helps reify notions of race and difference.

Internet Protocol TV in Perspective: A Matrix of Continuity and Innovation

Kim, P. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:01:18 PDT

The telecommunications firms have continually attempted to introduce a new intelligent television system for the past thirty-plus years by making the best use of ever-developing information and communication technologies, changes in media consumption patterns, collapse of regulatory barriers, and so on. Internet protocol TV (IPTV) is the most recent version of such corporate attempts. This article contextualizes IPTV in terms of its history, identity, and challenges. Despite the rhetoric of newness, IPTV is a replica of the interactive TV of the past, which has a turbulent genealogy of its own. Even with the interactive services based upon advanced IP technology, it is not structurally different from conventional television as the medium is organized following the TV model. In addition to competition, a contradiction between the open internet and walled-garden IPTV will pose critical challenges to the medium. However, IPTV is still evolving, and its future is not yet fully determined.

"Making It Our Own": BBC Newsround Professionals and Their Efforts to Build a News Agenda for the Young

Matthews, J. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:01:18 PDT

This article, based on an observational study of the BBC children’s news program Newsround (UK), discusses how news professionals’ particularized news culture shapes the production of the specialized news agenda. Studying the agenda-building process with this concern reveals how an understanding of their target audience plays an important role within the news-making process. This informs professionals’ collective understanding of an "ideal" Newsround story that is used within production to select and shape a simplified and personalized news agenda for children. The impact of this process on children’s "cultural rights" as would-be citizens as well as the importance of the news form and its inscribed audience for an understanding of agenda building is then addressed within the article’s conclusion.