Page 156 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

TELEVISION NEWS AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 145

1974 to the present, is such that it produces this effect. Newsreaders and
correspondents are always to be seen talking direct to camera (seemingly ‘to
us’), while those placed in the drama of news as protagonists are always to be
seen talking at an angle to the line of vision of the camera (seemingly ‘to
others’). The depiction of protagonists in this manner constructs a potential sense
of distance between them and viewers. This is a sense of witnessing (that is, of
being present at, but not directly involved in) a ‘reality’ which is, in and through
this visual mode, made to seem ‘out there’, separate from and independent of those
positioned as witnesses. The relation in which the ‘audience’ is cast by this
visual mode is that of onlooker: the proceedings of protagonists are ‘looked in
on’. Whether the social beings who watch television news programmes, who are
themselves sites of intersection of a multiplicity of discursive practices, actually
assume this position is, of course, another matter. The point to be stressed here,
however, is that the mode of vision currently in dominance presents the relation
in this form— that is, as a relation between the ‘involved’ and the ‘uninvolved’.
The exposition and interpretation of the actions of those cast as the ‘involved’
falls to the narrators, newsreaders or specialist correspondents. Their direct
address is a posture which recreates certain of the conditions of interpersonal
communication. Often, following their initial exposition of the pro-televisual
action of the involved, newsreaders will turn from the camera to look at the
monitor in the studio, signifying that they, like the viewer, are similarly detached,
uninvolved onlookers. The direct address has, then, the potential effect of
including the viewer in the process of communication. The viewer is positioned
as a partner in the exchange: the direct look of the newsreader/reporter/specialist
correspondent implicates the audience. So while the audience is set apart from
the protagonists, it is lined up with the media personnel in the studio.
These forms of vision of television news bulletins are based on, and contribute
to the reproduction of, an already given political ideology. The visual disposition
of the role of audience as onlookers in relation to what is shown of protagonists
by actuality sequences and as partners to the exchanges initiated by media
personnel reproduces the notion that the ‘nation as a whole’ is divisible into
‘activists’ and the ‘rest’, who are involved in problematic situations only in as
much as they are affected by them. Within this lived view of the polity, with its
assumption of a fundamental division between those who ‘do’ and those who are
‘done by’, the studio appears as the vantage point of the latter. It seems the site
upon which those who are ‘done by’ —‘the public’, ‘the majority’, ‘most
people’, ‘consumers’, ‘taxpayers’ and so on—gain an insight into the actions of
‘doers’—‘the unions’, ‘politicians’, ‘militants’.
This apparently fundamental division is further refined in what is said of the
issues and activists featured. It is clear from the extracts above that not all those
signified by television as ‘activists’ are spoken of in the same way. Some are
verbally defined as ‘representative individuals’; they are not only named but
have the authority to speak, their ‘representative’ credentials presented: ‘The
Prime Minister, Mr Callaghan…’; ‘the union’s General Secretary, Mr Jones…’.