Page 215 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

204 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

by a verbal caption or text) are relatively ‘open’, as they are susceptible
to a wider range of interpretations or ‘stories’ based upon them. Let us
illustrate with an anecdote (albeit perhaps not of a typical incident),
related to us by a member of WTN’s bureau in Tel Aviv. During an
especially cold winter spell in Europe a few years ago, a cameraman on
the bureau’s staff suggested a story that could appeal to freezing
European television viewers. He went to the Tel Aviv waterfront and
shot some footage of bathers splashing in the sea (thus attempting to
illustrate the different, milder climate). The footage was duly sent to
WTN’s headquarters in London, and from there was transmitted to
WTN’s clients. WTN’s bureau chief in Tel Aviv, who regularly
monitored the news on Jordanian Television, was surprised the
following evening to see their footage on Jordan Television’s news
broadcast, used to illustrate a story about the decline of tourism to
Israel. The pictures did, indeed, show a rather sparsely populated beach.
Intriguingly, the visuals exchanged through the Eurovision news
exchange system are sent primarily in the form of ‘raw materials’, that
is, unedited footage, including only ‘natural sound’. The task of editing
and shaping these materials into news stories remains in the hands of
news editors in the different broadcasting organizations. Thus, while the
same visual materials might be used by editors in different countries,
the final shape of the stories they are telling, their narrative and thematic
structures, and the meanings embedded in them remain in the hands of
editors working with different national audiences in mind.
For students of television news this offers a very useful opportunity
to compare the meanings in stories of the ‘same’ event, and thus to
examine comparatively whether and how such diverse meanings are
constructed. Indeed, we are thus provided with a ‘live laboratory’ in
which to explore the process of television’s ‘construction of reality’.
Such comparative analysis is especially important in an era
characterized by increasing globalization of television news, for it offers
an important antidote to ‘naïve universalism’—that is, to the assumption
that events reported in the news carry their own meanings, and that the
meanings embedded in news stories produced in one country can
therefore be generalized to news stories told in other societies.
Our basic assumption, then, is that different societies tell themselves
—on television and elsewhere—different stories, coherent narratives
that serve particular purposes, and that particular cultural settings would
account for this diversity. Note that the diversity of the stories told, even
about the ‘same’ events, is our point of departure, rather than a
‘finding’. It is precisely the richness of the spectrum of narrative