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This book is for people who want to work in television news, are interested in the practical techniques of television news, or who want to know how it fits into the multimedia/Net-media make-your-own-news world we now live in.
To understand fully what the place of television news can be in the first decade of the new century we also need to know how it developed. There were three ages of broadcasting. First, wireless telegraphy and radio. They revolutionized commerce and communications. Among thousands of historical moments our grandparents may have known was Neville Chamberlain’s announcement that Britain was at war with Germany. Or, in America, the day when the actor Orson Welles terrified the audience with his theatre group’s performance of The War of the Worlds. A work of fiction appeared to be reality – not just because of the way the drama was presented as ‘live news’ (Earth is being invaded, right now, by scary Martians!) but because of the mood and times in which people lived their real lives.
Then the second wave: television. Many business people did not regard television as having any commercial potential. Like the telephone, there was initially nobody to talk to, or broadcast to. This device, as its critics described it, would be no good because the word was half-Greek and half-Latin. The first event filmed specifically for television news was by the BBC in August 1936, when the ocean liner, Queen Mary, docked in Southampton. The pictures were transmitted four hours later from the home of the new BBC Television News service at Alexandra Palace, a Victorian pile situated in parkland in north London. Four hours to make transmission was a major achievement and this was long before a fully-staffed television newsroom had been established. That was followed in September 1936 by the German service, Reich Rundfunkgesellschaft, which filmed the Nuremberg Rally, flew the material to Berlin, and transmitted it the same evening. The race against time had begun. News would never be the same again.
Now, in the third age, there is television news in which the viewer can choose to select pre-prepared news items, or select only news services which are continuous and often live. The race against time is irrelevant, because ‘we are live’. It may be live for no particular reason, but you can see events happen as they happen. There is also television news linked to the Internet, with news discussion groups in which anyone can have their say about news events – all this, plus digital or interactive services, widescreen viewing and home shopping. Twenty-four hour news, years ago the monopoly of CNN, is now on hundreds of cable services. The problem that faces television news journalism is convincing the audience that self-selection of news subjects, news-that-suits-me, will mean that vast numbers of people may not be aware of the real world at all. They can airbrush out the unpleasant and unwanted events of life. People do not always know what they need to know. With self-selection there could be millions of people who would never have known about a war in Sierra Leone, let alone been able to place it on a map. If they do not know about such things, then why should they ever care.
If we sit back after consuming this mass-menu of television news we should ponder the future by remembering how it came about. On a summer Monday in 1994, in an elegant function room at Alexandra Palace, about a hundred men and women began to assemble to celebrate a special anniversary. Forty years earlier, in a now disused, dilapidated studio at the other end of the building, a handful of the veterans among these partygoers had been midwives at the birth of the first regular television news service in the United Kingdom. The pathfinders who had made television news were retired by the time it matured into the modern digital services we now take for granted. What the 1994 reunion group had in common with the pioneers of Internet services in that year was recognizing a moment in history when they were doing something new, that they were changing the world of communication and knowledge.
At Alexandra Palace, the speeches, the brief video compilation of highlights and the conversations with old friends and colleagues over a convivial glass or two must have stirred marvellous memories, but it is doubtful whether any of those involved in the first edition of the BBC’s News and Newsreel broadcast at 7.30 on the evening of 5 July 1954, could possibly have imagined at the time that one day television news would supersede print and radio as the most powerful and effective form of journalism. Or that television news would bond with cable, satellites and computer-based technology to find itself spread across the globe and then onto computer screens at home. The presentation of that first evening’s lead story in 1954, about continuing truce talks in Indo-China, would hardly have seemed to hold the promise of such a glittering and controversial future: a caption title reminiscent of cinema newsreels, a map and a couple of agency photographs, accompanied by a sparse voice-over commentary and discreet music.
The evolution of television news, 1954–2000
The ability of television news to influence public opinion to any significant extent was probably not fully recognized until the mid-1960s, after the broadcasters had demonstrated that new communications technology, combined with a willingness among some services to cooperate regularly in the exchange of news material, could make pictures of any important event available beyond national boundaries within hours. Over the years world audiences shared the John F. Kennedy assassination, student riots, Watergate, terrorism and various wars including Vietnam and the Middle East, and nothing could ever be the same again.
So, by the 1980s, anyone who remained sceptical about the power of television news to move public opinion must have had all doubts swept aside by the astonishing, spontaneous response to the appearance in October 1984 of harrowing pictures of famine in Ethiopia. The impetus for the creation of the Band Aid relief fund and all that has followed in an attempt to alleviate the suffering of millions can be attributed directly to the reports seen on the news bulletins of an estimated 400-plus broadcasting organizations. The same pool of material from television news influenced opinion about what was happening in the late 1990s in Rwanda, Kosovo and Indonesia.
Today’s news programming has become an accepted part of the culture of every society which embraces television. Those who report and present the news are famous enough to be caricatured. Their faces adorn magazine front pages. Their on-screen performances, and the salaries they earn for them, are the subject of endless discussion and speculation. How they live their private lives, what they wear, what they do and what they say (especially if it is controversial in the slightest) are followed with almost indecent interest by press and public.
At last there is fiction, too, about television journalism – and American films, although neither Network nor Broadcast News ranks with an old classic, The Front Page. It is also seen as worthy of parody – by television. Drop the Dead Donkey, a 1990s’ situation comedy series set in a television newsroom and The Day Today, a spoof news programme broadcast opposite the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News, achieved cult status – even if most of the cult’s adherents were themselves journalists searching for clues to the real identities on whom the fictional characters were based.
Television news has become a respectable subject for serious academic study, especially by sociologists postulating theories about the role and motivation of the practitioners, and the influence they bring to bear on ‘agenda-setting’ – what stories they choose to cover and then how they process them.
Every so often an aggrieved public figure will complain angrily about stories ‘got up by the media’ or the concentration on personalities rather than issues. The media were accused of being responsible for stirring up stories about perils for society likely to be caused by the ‘Millennium Bug’, when of course ‘the media’ could have ignored all those computer scientists gushing with anxiety and doomsday warnings about computer programs which relied upon clock-based chips. There is in British television news history, so far, only one occasion when the criticism was fundamental enough to warrant being met head on. In the autumn of 1986, BBC Television News executives took the unprecedented step of issuing a line-by-line rebuttal of charges made by the then ruling Conservative Party. The complaints, detailed to the point of challenging certain words used in the headlines, were about the way the BBC Nine O’Clock News had covered a controversial American bombing raid on Libya six months earlier. Overall public assessment of this bout of linen-washing was that if the politicians lost the argument they succeeded in making the journalists justify their actions to the audience to an extent previously unknown.
Figure 1.1 The face of television news for the 21st Century. Ananova, the newsreader at www.ananova.com website, is a fully animated cyber character who may well threaten the large salaries of human newsreaders. (Courtesy of Ananova Ltd, formerly PA New Media)
The suspicion exists that ‘the establishment’ – no matter what party holds power, or who runs the Church, the judiciary or the military/industrial complex – dictates what and how television reports. But there is probably greater genuine surprise that television journalists do not see it as their first duty to protect society from the unpalatable, the outwardly reasonable view being that the world would be a better place if items about civil disturbances and similarly distasteful events were simply not shown. There exists a belief that those who are responsible for television news programmes demonstrate their partiality by the very act of reporting the existence of dissent, and a theory that various royal marriages would still be intact and several politicians still in their posts if television had not made matters worse by taking up, however reluctantly at first, stories based on the newspaper agenda.
The paraphernalia of television itself is considered to be provocative at times: in the days when the coverage of protest demonstrations featured regularly in diaries for otherwise quiet weekend news bulletins, it took a while for the journalists to spot the coincidence between the outbreak of trouble and the appearance of the camera. Suggestions of a ‘copycat’ phenomenon were raised about a series of riots in British cities in the early and late 1980s. It happened again when riots broke out in Britain and America around the time of the trade talks in Seattle in late 1999. The demonstrators appear to have been highly offended by the suggestion that they were influenced by what they saw on television news, and chiefly tried to convey the message that it was the police who were to blame. ‘The police themselves dismissed the idea that the violence was copied from television. They saw the causes of the riots as many and varied: social deprivation, frustration, and hate.’1
Governments seem to have no doubt about the influence of television. Most democratic governments even build the reaction of the public to television news reports into their foreign and diplomatic policy – What will people say if the TV news reports that we bombed civilians?
The coexistence between the political/military establishment and world television journalism was mostly laid down during the original Gulf War, fought out in Kuwait and Iraq early in 1991. Months of diplomatic shadow-boxing before the fighting gave the military time to draw up ground rules. Journalists were attached to Media Response Teams – pools – under the eye of a military officer who viewed reports before they were transmitted to ensure that Ministry of Defence guidelines were not broken. These forbade among other things any references to the number and location of troops and weapons and future battle plans. No details of dead soldiers were to be given until their families had been told. A few brave – or difficult – souls doing things on their own initiative were arrested, while about 300 other journalists threatened to get in their cars and drive to the front unless the US-led coalition gave them more access to the combat zones.
For television the main significance of the Gulf War was its use of satellite technology. For the first time an international news event was dominated by live television coverage – more specifically by CNN, the 24-hour news channel, which relayed events unedited to a global audience. Reports of the first raid on Baghdad and Iraqi missile attacks on Israel made particularly riveting viewing. At times it seemed that even the politicians in the White House and Baghdad were relying on CNN for their information. CNN’s performance was not universally acclaimed, and the network’s relationship with the Iraqi authorities was questioned, particularly in the period when all other Western news media had been expelled. There were other worries, too: ‘live coverage of the damage caused by Scud missile attacks on Israeli cities could enable the enemy to identify the random sites on which their projectiles had fallen and to readjust their targeting’.2
But the Gulf War left a permanent mark. More players have hastened to join the ranks of the all-news leaguers, as personified by CNN, Sky News, BBC World, BBC News 24 and others, and the portable satellite-uplink has become an indispensable tool in the reporting of events. Without it, it is doubtful whether many of the other big stories attracting huge and continuing coverage in the mid-1990s, among them the internecine conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda, would have made such an impact.
As Nik Gowing, a television journalist with long experience in covering diplomatic events for ITN and the BBC, puts it bluntly in a fascinating study of the impact of television’s coverage of armed conflicts and diplomatic crises: ‘Often no dish means no coverage.’3 What Gowing defines as ‘real-time television’ – live or very recently recorded pictures beamed back by satellite – has created a new grammar and editorial agenda for TV news coverage, bringing with it fresh dynamics and pressures. But his paper, based on his own experiences and more than a hundred interviews with senior officials and politicians at the heart of policy-making in several countries, challenges the belief that television’s ability to provide instant ‘video ticker-tape’ should be mistaken for a power to influence foreign policy.
In a study dominated by the appalling events in Bosnia, Gowing recognizes that ‘on a few occasions it [the impact of television coverage] can be great, especially when it comes to responding with humanitarian aid. Routinely, however, there is little or no policy impact when the television pictures cry out for a determined, pro-active foreign policy response to end a conflict.’4
How television’s insatiable appetite will continue to be filled is another matter, and whether viewers will be satisfied with analysis and interpretation (what others might call ‘waffle’) in the absence of real news is hard to gauge. The signs are that journalists will become more resistant to some of the more obvious attempts at news management and blandishments of the spin doctors. Questions are starting to be asked about the value of some of the international ‘spectaculars’ involving world politicians and statesmen, and the attitudes of those in authority who are happy to welcome the cameras when it suits them, but who seek to keep them out when matters of real importance occur.
A former editor of The Sunday Times, Harold Evans, who later spent many years working in journalism in America, expressed anxiety about the need for live and continuous news services to fill airtime. He described it as the ‘tabloidisation’ of news, notably on television that was available round-the-clock on several cable stations. ‘They have discovered that the only way they can keep an audience is to hit a single story with everything they have got. OJ Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Princess Diana, Kosovo, school shootings … when stories like these are running, nothing else in the world is happening.’5
The mirror image of that stance can be seen in the large number of countries where reporting is not ‘free’ in any sense. Given that television in many countries is controlled or funded by governments, it is not difficult to appreciate that many news services are able to produce little except what is officially sanctioned. In addition, foreign camera crews and reporters cannot fly in with their equipment to anywhere they please and expect to start work. Some countries simply refuse to allow them entry: visas to get into others may take months, and when permission is finally granted the presence of ‘minders’ may be so inhibiting that the reports which are made may be no more informative than those old-fashioned cinema travelogues.
In the meantime, one effect is that some events about which there is no independent confirmation might just as well not have happened, for while pictures of, say, a serious accident on a foggy German autobahn would be available to the rest of the world in next to no time as a matter of routine, some natural disaster which wiped out a remote African village might go unreported because no cameras were there until months afterwards. In this way, even in the satellite age – just as no dish means no coverage of armed conflict – it is still possible for whole areas of the world to remain ignorant of what is taking place in others, either by reason of geographical accident or through the deliberate actions of governments anxious not to let any event of an unfavourable nature be seen by outsiders. As an insurance, among the first things some governments or their agents will do when contemplating something nasty will be to kill, intimidate, imprison or expel any journalists considered likely to be an embarrassment to them. Sometimes it is done quite blatantly.
The newspaper world, meanwhile, has maintained its morbid interest in the fortunes of television and television news, developing an ambivalent relationship which allows its reporters to dig deeply for the dirt while simultaneously devoting pages to programme previews, reviews and personality interviews. For although some journalists writing about television news display a distressing lack of understanding of the subject, they are usually cute enough to realize that television news is news.
Despite their own new technology and their lavish investment in their websites, newspapers are unable to compete for speed, have long been relegated to second place behind the electronic media in the coverage of news, and so have had to develop along different lines – the brash, irreverent tabloids and the weighty broadsheets offering the main contrasts in tone and style. Few papers are spared the need to battle for circulation, with cuts in the cover price, reader competitions and various special offers among the weapons employed.
Mass communication, like all forms of technology, evolves from one medium to the next. They need each other and the changes in mass communication do not jump abruptly, but overlap into stages. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was predicted that first radio, and then television, would put newspapers out of business. Then at the end of the century the Internet and the web were expected to put them all out of business, at least from the comments of people you would expect to say that. It is more likely that the web will force significant change on television news during this decade, but it is less likely that the actual content – assessed, judged and provided by humans – can be replaced. ‘Computers can be programmed to play chess like Gary Kasparov but they can never paint like Picasso. They can mimic the look but never the touch, the passion, the emotion. These are inherent components of a human newsroom, not a machine.’6
The fact remains that very few detailed studies have been made into the problems, processes and techniques involved in bringing news to the screen 365 days a year. Admittedly it is not an easy subject to explain. Television news well done is not simply radio with pictures or identical to any other part of the television business. It has been described as a kind of electronic jigsaw puzzle which, like other puzzles, makes no sense until it has been completed. Taking a few separate pieces at random is rather like examining the big toe and thumb and expecting them to give an accurate picture of what the entire human body looks like. In television news the most important parts of the jigsaw are people, operating within their own spheres of activity along parallel lines which converge only at the times of transmission.
How those pieces fit together may not greatly interest the professional critics, but it does concern those journalists for whom television companies all over the world are continuing to provide worthwhile and stimulating employment. It also concerns the companies who, fully aware of the ever-mounting pressure upon them to produce news programmes of a professionally high standard, need the journalists they engage to demonstrate immediate expertise and reliability. The craft of writing clearly and succinctly is only part of it. Much of the rest of the battle has to do with the bewildering battery of electronic equipment and strange jargon which needs to be mastered properly before a single word is spoken. This means that journalists must understand the nature of television, what they are doing, why, and how their own roles fit in with the rest of the team.
More than ever before, all this has to be achieved in the full glare of the public spotlight, for while members of the viewing audience may expect the daily newspapers they buy to reflect their own political viewpoints, they have every right to demand that those involved in television news take seriously their responsibilities for accuracy, fairness and decency. Sadly, the fun days of television news went many years ago: too much is now at stake. So while it may be considered a denial of personal freedom, it is not too much to ask any television journalist voluntarily to stay free from active and formal allegiance to any political party or sensitive cause. As for ‘committed’ journalism of any hue, that has always seemed to me to be counter-productive, because one part of the audience is inevitably going to be alienated.
For all these reasons and more, every journalist planning a career in television must be attuned to the demands of an exacting occupation. That means a certain amount of formal training, which has become more important than ever as television techniques advance and which, significantly, seems to escape the severest cuts when economies are demanded in other areas. Fortunately, too, only a few dinosaurs remain to be convinced that training is a valuable way of equipping the recipient of it with the know-how and confidence to employ the marvellous technical resources which are about to become the tools of his or her trade.
The experienced newcomer to television news might have been employed on a radio station, news agency, magazine or a weekly or daily newspaper. The recruit from a journalism course will have a grasp of the fundamentals. The novice might be straight out of university or elsewhere and needs initiation into journalistic principles as well as the special skills needed for television. All have the same thing in common: they need to learn, preferably as swiftly as possible, how.
What follows in this book is not intended as a substitute for a properly run training scheme led by expert professional trainers. It makes no attempt to standardize editorial procedures or the processes guiding news selection and judgement because none is universally accepted. Neither does it claim to be comprehensive, as working practices and conditions, terminology, systems and equipment in use are bound to vary considerably according to the importance and financial resources of the station concerned.
What this book is intended to be is a first reader in basic television news style and production. In the face of the fast changes in the way real information and fact, together with individual comment and often unreliable rumour, are being moved, accessed and traded in the first decade of the new century, it is still essential for journalists or aspiring journalists to know about how television works at a practical level, together with enough background to put it into the modern context. It is an attempt to help newcomers fit the pieces of the electronic jigsaw puzzle together in as painless and nontechnical a way as possible.
1. Howard Tumber (1992). Television and the Riots, British Film Institute.
2. Leader column, The Independent, 25 January 1991.
3. Nik Gowing (1994). Real-time television coverage of armed conflicts and diplomatic crises: does it pressure or distort foreign policy decisions?, paper, Harvard College.
4. Ibid.
5. The Guardian, 8 November 1999.
6. Piers Morgan, editor of The Mirror, writing in The Guardian, 6 December 1999.