Page 145 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

134 MEDIA STUDIES

I actuality ‘piece to camera’
J actuality report
K actuality interview
L graphics with commentary over
M stills with voice/captions over
N credits/titles with music over
The repertoire of communicative roles in journalistic television includes: (1)
presenter; (2) commentator; (3) reporter; (4) chairperson; (5) interviewer; (6)
interviewee; (7) expert; (8) protagonist in debate; (9) man/woman-in-street
(ordinary person). These roles are not abstract essences; they exist and are
differentiated only in and through discursive practice. The elementary forms can,
of course, be broken down into smaller units. The live studio debate, for example,
a form used throughout the field but only within the speculative stages, can be
broken down into lower units of ‘transaction’, ‘exchange’, ‘move’ and ‘act’.
However, it can be regarded as elementary in the sense that each mobilization of
this form contains certain necessarily fixed syntagms at each level of
organization.
Not all the forms and roles I have mentioned are mobilized in the ‘informational’
stage of journalistic story-telling. News bulletins do not, for example, employ
live studio debate. Though the selections and combinations vary with the nature
of the primary definitions, any item in a news bulletin would include, at the very
least, A and B (live studio report). A not-infrequent combination is: A-B-E-F-K-A.
This combination gives to the work of appropriation its manifest informational
cast. There is a dialectical relation between the elements A, B (live studio ‘piece
to camera’, live studio report) and E, F, K (live studio report, interview, debate)
in which the latter appear to ground, license and authenticate the former.
Conversely, the statements made in A and B function as metalanguage; they
appear to highlight, to set in place for the audience, the ‘truth’ of statements
made in K especially. Although manifestly informational, the work of
establishing topics is not ideologically inert. The heavy reliance on ‘actuality’
forms, particularly when pre-definitions of an issue have already constituted it as
having ‘grave-consequences-for-the-nation-as-a-whole’, masks the extent to
which the issue is framed and focused by the broadcasters themselves. The work
of framing and focusing accomplished by the discourse of A, B and the
commentary over in F establishes, for the audience, a certain orientation or
‘point of view’. But this is grounded in the events and statements depicted in the
actuality forms—‘the real events out there’. The use of the actuality forms
sustains a ‘transparency-to-reality’ effect which makes the constructed
orientation appear ‘natural’—the only one possible.
To begin to demonstrate how this part of the process works and the nature of
the orientations constructed, here are two examples from television news
coverage of certain key moments in the proceedings of TUC Conferences. The
first example is taken from the coverage of the TUC Conference in September