Page 214 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE GLOBAL NEWSROOM 203

Table 9.3 EVN dependency for selected main evening bulletins

a
Notes: EVN dependency 1: Number of EVN stories aired/Total number of
stories aired.
b EVN dependency 2: Number of EVN stories aired/Total number of foreign
stories aired.
* Data for the Israel Broadcasting Authority are based on only three days’
reports, since the network was shut down for two days during the sample week
by a strike.

number of foreign news items aired. Thus, EVN Dependency 1 is a
measure across the entire newshole, while EVN Dependency 2 assesses
the impact of EVN materials for all foreign news coverage.
At the level of main evening bulletin there is considerable variation in
EVN dependency by national broadcast service. The French-language
service in Belgium, for example, depends on EVN materials for three-
sevenths (42.5 per cent) of its total newshole and a very substantial 88.3
per cent of its foreign news coverage. By contrast, none of the
remaining four main bulletins examined depended on EVN for more
than one-sixth of their total stories, but all did depend on the Eurovision
News Exchange for roughly half of their foreign reports, a significant
degree of dependence.

THE PRODUCTION OF MEANINGS: VISUAL
VS. VERBAL TEXTS

The second major theme of this chapter is based on assumptions about
the relative ‘openness’ or closure of visual and verbal texts. By
‘openness’ we mean the extent to which these different kinds of texts
constrain the meanings embedded in them or, alternatively, allow for
multiple decodings of their meanings. Thus, it can be argued that verbal
texts (e.g. news stories in the printed press) are relatively ‘closed’ (i.e.
they constrain the range of interpretations or meanings of the events
they report) since any account of an event necessarily defines its
meaning. On the other hand, ‘pure’ visuals (i.e. visuals unaccompanied