Is TV News a Window on the World?

There are probably many arguments to whether or not TV News is a Window on the World. but as much as the News try and be unbiased, I feel that the interpretations of the news are definitely structured and biased. Why might I say this, well lets's take a look at why the news things that they are truthful. Though when you think of news, you think that it's being told to you exactly how it is or was or in a balanced way, like looking through a window, seeing the transparency, the news, the connection between us and what happened. Well you see how it may be asking is TV News a Window on the World, yet you wonder how true that may be. Of course the news wants to tell you that it is true, which is why the question is there, is it true, and unbiased, does the news tell you everything, it's a window on the world.

I mean, the news has certain representations to keep it neutral and truthful as they show you the intro and the newsreaders portray the neutrality, but all of this is written about in my other post where I have analysed the introduction of BBC news and newsreaders to how they are truthful and honest about their window on the world. On the other hand though, there are laws that back up points where even though the news is meant to be truthful Ofcom states that the news has to be impartial (the link to this statement can be found here). I think that this makes it obligatory to be a window on the world as they have to be impartial, giving a neutral view upon all matters. Not only that but looking at the BBC guidelines for impartiality, it;s rules are quite similar.  

As you can see in the image beside it states that the news has to be impartial, but furthermore they've extended it to be impartial on all subject matters, this means that everything has to be neutral and no matter what the news will be seen transparent and balanced. These codes of practice are linked in with each other to make it so that the news is impartial. Although this may be the case there are still problems as there are cases where the BBC has been seen to be unbiased, the example of this is when Margaret Thatcher died and there were over 700 complaints that the coverage was biased.  There were various coverage's about this and here is a link to one (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2307211/Margaret-Thatcher-dead-Readers-fury-biased-BBC-website-articles.html) where this was said that they covered it without the neutrality. Though it wasn't and then it went further into the radio where a song went into the chart 'Ding Dong the Witch is Dead' but they only aired five seconds of the song. This was a huge bias situation where the BBC were not neutral about the situation at all. Although this may be in a bolder matter, and not to the selective stories, it was down to the newsreaders and how they presented the matter.

However, saying that the news is a window on the world is a mistake because it isn't. Although I just mentioned a story of the news being biased, there are other factors that enforce that news can't simply show reality, for many reasons, there is a gatekeeping process which is processed on a piece of news even before it makes its way onto the TV, so things are already being narrowed down. If you look at the image below you can see the drawn version of the gatekeeping process.

After looking at that, you can see that there are various ways of getting out of the TV News, in fact, there's more chance to have a story go into the 'dustbin' rather than actually make it on the TV. All of these factors are really important to how a new story is determined to whether or not it is screened, I find this to be quite interesting to know the features that come into play to whether a story is 'worthy' or not to be shown and that there are certain people who feel that other stories have priority. Looking back on these points that determine what gets to go on TV or not, firstly with the news sources, there are always certain terms that have higher importance, such as; police stations, other news companions, social media, court houses, Parliament, other political buildings and more, these will be monitored more than many other things and will always have priority over other stories. Having such a wide amount of stories in the news, how do you pick and chose what actually makes it onto the news?

Looking at the process of this, firstly the routinely monitored sources are only in certain areas, such as the parliament or in police, therefore there are usually news reporters standing by ready to get the story, whereas if a huge story breaks out in New Guinea, it's likely that the story won;t be covered because it's not somewhere news reporters are on stand by. So there are no sources and the story goes into the 'dustbin'. After that is the news values, the higher the importance the more likely the news story will be in the news, if the story has no values then there is no point in showing it because there are better stories out there. After selecting the stories with the most values they are then 'packaged' together in time slots with everything prepared, so you can't pick a 'package' apart. If there is a late breaking story, you can't shave time off of each story, you just cut one out entirely and that story is lost forever. Also, the Ministery of Defence may not allow a story to be shown for national security reasons and the law. Leading onto the next point of cost where the more expensive the story, the less likely it is to show it. An occurrence has happened before where the ITV couldn't afford the costs and therefore couldn't show it, but the BBC covered it, making it a competitive world with the news stories and because of the competition, if you are filming on story and there are a group of others filming somewhere near-by you're going to want to see what they are filming and try and get the better story out of it, this competition makes the window narrower because everyone can be fighting for the same story. Finally, if there is a technical problem and something happens then this could lead to the story just being dropped completely.

Two psychologists, Galtung and Ruge created a list of twelve values which they identified and use to justify what they found to be the occurring themes in news. A fair few of these values can be compared with the Rolf Harris case, the reason I'm using this story is because he definitely fits in with the values, a main one being elite persons, as he is considered an important person, not only that but the negativity of the incident has lead to it being searched into for an ongoing time, which then links into the threshold and continuity and this story is already in the news, as it started back last year and then it went on and the story got bigger as it continued, as the BBC reported more stories, which can be found here and here and I think that this story has been so big in news purely because even though he is seen as an elite person he is also a really meaningful individual to a lot of people, purely because he's been such a role model and he relates to a lot of the audience.

Not only is there the gatekeeping process but there is also another way that news goes about telling their stories, and they do this by making a fictional narrative alongside the story, this is where continuity editing is used and there is a kind of 'quest' in the little news story. There is a prime example of this when we watched an interview about a man who was about to be evicted from his home and he went on a little quest about the whole issue, although this is seen to be real life and actually happening, if there are such continuity techniques being used then that means the whole clip had to be staged and makes the story fake (in terms of the quest happening there and then). The reason these narratives are done is to make a little background and pull out the heartstrings on the audience as there is a little emotional heartfelt for the guy in this situation.

Also news tends to use a lot of actuality footage, which is real footage but the problem is that this footage that is used on a certain news story is not what they went out and filmed specifically for that story, they probably went down to the archive and used something that would fit well. This makes the news story unrealistic and not true to what it could actually be making the clips used, selected ones making the window on the world a little smaller because the news companions are choosing certain clips to pull on those heartstrings a little more.

Overall, it's clear that there is a window on the world, it's just a really tiny window on the world because there are so many processes and values that go on to make a piece of news to finally be selected to then appear on the news. As true and unbiased as the news would like to be, it's really clear that it isn't and then you wonder what if these other stories were shown? There are lots of things to influence the news stories that appear and it's clear that this 'window' is opaque.