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MEDIA WRITING AS MASS COMMUNICATION
Mass communication is a powerful force in a modern society. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, film, public relations and advertising all shape the way we react to the world around us. When federal agents in Chicago in 1934 shot and killed John Dillinger, then America`s most-wanted bank robber, the story was reported mainly by newspapers. Radio, which began broadcasting as we know it in 1920, was in its infancy, newsreels were not able to produce and distribute a report to movie theatres until days after a major event, and television was still only a laboratory experiment. Sixty-five years later, when two teenagers shot and killed a dozen students and a teacher and wounded twelve others at a high school in Littleton, Colorado, before turning their weapons on themselves, television transmitted the drama live to millions of viewers around the USA from cameras in helicopters hovering overhead. And in September 2001 people all over the world could watch the live reportage about terrorist attack. So could the Ukrainians. Satellite TV has spread. It gave great opportunities for people to know about international events immediately. Today a lot of Ukrainians have a cable TV at their homes, sometimes satellite dishes. Watching international TV channels means understanding at least one foreign language, mainly English.
And here one question arises: does colloquial English differ from the language of radio and TV? Since media writing is more than a matter of gathering facts and putting words together, we would answer `yes, it does`. But on the other hand, writers must work within the opportunities and limits provided by not only technology, society, the demands of the business, but also by the communication process and the needs of their audience. So, it is logical to say that in order for media messages to be successful, they must be designed and delivered in ways that gain attention, using language commonly understood by communicator and audience. But of course, it is considered incorrect to use jargonisms, vulgar English and cuttings like `watta`, `gonna`, etc. A bright example of standard English is BBC World channel, the language and style of which will be our main interest during this course.
Purpose
One of the early communication researches, Harold Lasswell, identified three functions of the mass media: 1) surveillance of the environment; 2) correlation of the parts of society in responding to that environment (explaining to various publics what the news and information being transmitted mean to them); and 3) transmission of the cultural heritage from one generation to the next. Another prominent researcher, Wilbur Schramm, said that the message must arouse needs and present ways to meet them, and the language used must be commonly understood by both communicator and audience. Although these propositions were first offered quite long ago, they remain a valid description of the task facing today`s media writers. A reporter`s job, as everybody knows, is to look around and see what is happening, then communicate those happenings he or she deems important to the reading, listening or viewing public. Clarity in presenting the message is extremely important, because if audience members don`t understand what is being communicated, they will turn away from or misinterpret the message.
Challenges
In many respects, Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan was right when he said, ``The medium is the message``, meaning that societies have always been more influenced by the form of communication than by its content. Ironically, with all of the various information resources available today, people often don`t give their exclusive attention to the media, particularly the news media. They read superficially or listen only with one ear to a television report. This inattention contributes to what is known as perceptual distortion,or the tendency to introduce inaccuracies in perceiving what the writer or announcer said. A cardinal rule of news writing is that what the communicator sends by way of a message is less important than what the audience receives and perceives. Often, these two are quite different. And such a misinterpretation happens more often in case of not native speakers. One reason why people of different ages, genders, races, nations or religions sometimes receive the same information but take from it different meanings is addressed by the theory of denotative and connotative meanings. Communication research recognizes denotative and connotative meanings of words and symbols, which complicate the communication process. People attach denotative labels (standard, descriptive means) to things, concepts and ideas, but they also put their own connotations (interpretations of meaning or value) on those things, concepts and ideas based on their experiences, attitudes, opinions and beliefs. For instance, the denotative meaning of No Smoking sign outside your classroom building is that no smoking is permitted inside. Even that simple message has connotations. If you have trouble making it through a 50-minute class without a cigarette, you might feel `they` are abridging your rights by prohibiting smoking. A nonsmoker, on the other hand, might interpret the sign as protecting the health of students and faculty. Another source of message distortion is audience reaction to cognitive dissonance. The theory of cognitive dissonance says people can tolerate only so much emotional upset and, when information we receive is different from that which we accept or are comfortable with, our mind seeks a balance by rejecting the dissonant information or modifying it. For example, at times a news report is so emotionally jarring that people set up internal psychological defenses to deal with the message. Finally, two types of communication interference, called noise, are present in the process of message transmission physical noise and semantic noise. Physical noise is anything that distorts the reception of the message - background sounds that drown out a speaker, static or similar problems. In theory, it can be corrected. Semantic noise is confusion caused by using words of phrases that the audience can`t understand or might misinterpret. It is much harder to deal with, but effective media writing can eliminate most semantic problems.
BBC language
The language situation in Great Britain has changed for the last decades. The changes concern lexicon, grammar and slightly pronunciation. Due to the rejection of Received Pronunciation standards accepted in the 16thcentury and the processes happening in the language nowadays, we would define the present language situation as democratization of language. This process is especially burning when talking of BBC because it is well known that the channel popularizes classic English, but on the other hand, all the reporters and newsreaders are mainly Estuary English speakers. Here we have to clarify what we mean by saying `classic` and `Estuary`. Firstly, we would stress that democratization of language doesn`t mean we have to exclude standard English, or vice versa. In the middle of the 20th century it was considered normal and desirable for a person to speak Queen`s English (King`s English, Standard English), i.e. national literary language with orthoepic norms of Received Pronunciation. It meant this person was of high social class with brilliant education. But in the 1980s the situation changed. It was connected with society`s attitude to `normal language`. Partially it can be explained by changing attitude to the royal family which still uses Received Pronunciation standard. But even the youngest of the royal family have already gained some elements of Estuary English. So a very common term for the language now is a `modified language` – a combination of Received Pronunciation standards and Estuary English. Such situation strengthened in the beginning of the 1990s. What is Estuary English? Estuary means `river delta`. It is a regional kind of British English which first appeared in the lower areas of the river Thames. It is polyfunctional and overdialectic. The society`s attitude to the language is very positive because it is believed not to be connected with class background. The prominent feature of Estuary English is the loss of the preposition `of`: car keys, table leg. While in the literary language the relations between the words have a morphological character, in Estuary English only the word order remains the way of semantic and grammatical expression of components correlation (baker`s shop – baker shop; parents` house – parents house; working week – work week). It should be stressed that unlike colloquial speech, which took all the changes, BBC language left apart most of the changes in pronunciation.
So, the present day English is a modified language and BBC channel presents this very variant.
Questions
- What is media writing?
- What are the three functions of the mass media? Comment on the each one.
- What do you think M. McLuhan meant saying ``the medium is the message``?
- Comment on the main theses of the theory of denotative and connotative meanings.
- What is democratization of language?
TELEVISION NEWS
News in the television schedule
News has a significant role in the broadcast output of television channels. Satellite and cable offer all-day news channels, and all terrestrial television stations in Britain broadcast news several times each day. The longest news bulletins are in the early evening, the time when people return from work, and at the end of the `prime-time` mid-evening period when family entertainment programmes give way to programmes aimed at a more adult audience. From the point of view of television stations, news not only serves to fulfill the requirement that they inform their audience about contemporary events, but is also used to manage the TV audience`s patterns of viewing. A popular early-evening news programme may encourage viewers to remain watching that channel for subsequent entertainment programmes in the prime time which follows the news. Late-evening news bulletins occur at times when adult-oriented programmes are shown, after the 9.00 p.m. `watershed`, when children are presumed not to be watching, and watching the long late-evening news bulletin may encourage viewers to remain on that channel for subsequent programmes. BBC News at ten o`clock began in October 2000, replacing the former Nine O`clock News, and usually draws about five million viewers. On 7 February 2001, BBC1`s evening news at 10.00 p.m. occurred after a popular factual programme, Thief Catchers: A Car Wars Special (about police units which target car crime) and the National Lottery Update revealing the winning numbers for that day`s draw. About 80 per cent of news viewers have watched the preceding programme (Bignell, J., 2002).
TV news is usually regarded as authoritative, with most people in Britain gaining their knowledge of news through TV rather than newspapers. The dominance of TV as a news medium comes in part from the perceived impartiality of news broadcasting. There are rules of `balance` and `objectivity` in the regulations governing television broadcasting. The increasing dominance of TV as a news medium has been reinforced by a shift in newspaper coverage to other kinds of material, like lifestyle features or sensational stories, or to greater coverage of areas not extensively covered by TV news, like sport. The dominance of TV news derives also from its immediacy, since newspapers must be produced several hours before being distributed, while TV news can incorporate new reports even during the programme broadcast.
In Britain, the BBC`s two terrestrial channels are funded by a licence fee which must be paid by all owners of television sets. The regional TV companies broadcasting on the ITV channel, and the other terrestrial channels Channel Four and Channel Five gain their income from advertisements.
Defining television news
News is a mediator of events, defining, shaping and representing the real by the use of linguistic and visual codes. The discourse of TV news is composed of language and visual images, organised by codes and conventions which the news viewer has to perceive and recognise in order for the viewer to construct sense. This competence in decoding news derives in part from the viewer`s competence in the discourses which the news borrows from society at large. For instance, the presenters of TV news programmes adopt a formal dress code. Men wear suits, and women wear business clothes (blouses, jackets, unobtrusive jewellery). Viewers of TV news will also make use of their knowledge of codes specific to the medium in which the news is broadcast. Like all other TV programmes, TV news is separated from other programmes and commercials by title sequences. Title sequences are syntagms of signs which signify boundaries between one part of the continual flow of TV material and the rest of it. News programmes contain interviews which are visually coded in similar ways to current affairs programmes and some sports programmes. Camera shots alternate back and forth between speakers, signifying the to and fro of conversation, or unseen speakers put questions to people denoted in studio or outside locations. The news presenter`s head-on address to the camera is also found in current affairs, sports, and quiz programmes, signifying the presenter`s role in mediating between the viewer and the other components of the programme. News programmes feature actuality film with voice-over, which is also found in documentary programmes and signifies `observed reality`. These examples show that TV news is not a unique television form, but rather a genre of television whose codes draw on the viewer`s knowledge of the codes of other genres of programme. The meanings of TV news derive from some codes which are borrowed from social life in general, and from codes used in the TV medium.
As in the case of newspaper discourse, TV news does not consist of list of facts, but of narrative reports of events. Like newspapers, TV news makes use of criteria of news value, where the set of priorities and assumptions shared by news broadcasters determines which news reports are given greatest significance within the news bulletin. In general, reports with high news value are those which appear near the beginning of the bulletin, just as the front pages of newspapers present stories with high perceived news value to readers. The presentation of reality offered by TV news is not reality itself, but reality mediated by the signs, codes, myths and ideologies of news. News both shapes and reflects the dominant common sense notion of what is significant (because what is significant is what is in the news), and also therefore contributes to the ongoing process of constructing a dominant ideology through which we perceive our reality. One obvious example of this ideological function of TV news is to naturalise the myth that what is significant is what happens from day to day in the public arenas of politics, business, and international affairs. Four of the nine stories in the 7 February 2001 News At Ten, and seven of the thirteen stories in the BBC News concerned politics, business, or international affairs. Several of the other stories concerned court cases. This encoding of events as of high news value in TV news is closer to the discourse of `quality` newspapers than to `popular` tabloid newspapers, particularly in the scarcity of news about celebrities in TV news.
Mythic meanings in television news
Immediacy is a key mythic meaning of TV news. While newspapers have to be printed and distributed several hours before they can be read, electronic news gathering (ENG) techniques like the use of satellite links allow images and sound to be almost instantaneously incorporated into TV news programmes. Immediacy is connoted by the use of signs like on-screen caption `live` denoting the simultaneous occurrence and broadcast of an event, or by a spoken linguistic syntagm from the news presenter introducing a live satellite link: `And John Simpson is in Jerusalem now. John, as we`ve heard…` (BBC News, 7 February, 2001). The organisational chaos potentially caused by the incorporation of immediately occurring events makes broadcasters use it sparingly. News programmes have to be meticulously planned and operate under powerful constraints of timing, so that there must always be a conflict between the desire to connote immediacy and the desire to connote orderliness and authority. Compromises between these two impulses include the use of `packages`, where distant reporters beam pre-made sequences of pictures with voice-over reports to the news organisation just in time for broadcasting in a pre-arranged timeslot, and live interviews in which a certain time is allowed for live discussion of a news story.
The mythic meaning `authority` in TV news is connoted by a variety of means. One of these is the structuring of news stories. Another coded use of signs connoting authority is the title sequence of the news programme itself. TV news programmes tend to use music featuring loud major chords, often played on brass instruments, with connotations of importance, dignity and drama. Visually, title sequences often use computer graphics in fast-moving syntagms which connote technological sophistication and contemporaneity. Each news programme`s title sequence establishes the mythic status of news as significant and authoritative, while simultaneously giving each channel`s news programmes a recognisable `brand image` which differentiates it from its competitors. BBC News begins as a clock graphic`s second-hand reaches 10.00 p.m. precisely. First Peter Sissons is shown at his desk, with the large figure 10 and the BBC News logo on the screen to his right. He outlines four main news stories, each anchored by brief actuality footage.This is followed by another news presenter introducing the headlines in the viewer`s local BBC region. At the end of this syntagm, an animated graphic sequence begins showing dark red concentric rings over a yellow background. These rings merge and expand while maps of Britain and Europe fade in and out of view, with the rings sometimes centering in London, Cardiff and Edinburgh. The names of world capital cities appear and disappear, until a clock face showing ten o`clock occupies the centre of the rings. Finally a large figure 10 appears in the centre of the image and revolves, with the logo of BBC News underneath it. Brass and percussion music accompany the entire sequence, having been heard accompanying the presenters` introductions and the brief headline sequences, and during the title animation the sound of an electronic time signal is also heard.