Page 41 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

1403975191ts02.qxd 19-2-07 04:59 PM Page 16
16
THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
61
Greater
viewers “a greater sense of attachment to the issues.”
emotional reaction and attachment to issues as a result of gripping and
powerful images and information are a qualitative improvement over
other media in which news seems more remote.
The second trend relates to improvements in television quality.
This began with a shift from black and white to color television that in
the United States grew from 10 percent of the total number in 1965
to 95 percent in the 1990s. More recently, sharper image quality,
measured by the number of pixels (picture elements) per square inch,
has significantly improved the quality of television images. Recent
innovations by IBM have created monitors that provide 200 pixels per
square inch, making images that are indistinguishable from the real
62
There have also been
thing to the human eye 18 inches away.
significant sound quality improvements accompanying television
images. These factors have made television look and sound more
lifelike, narrowing the gap between television and real life.
The third qualitative trend has been a shift in news delivery from
daily, taped, and institutionally initiated formats to 24-hour news that
63
is often events-driven and presented in real-time.
Until CNN’s
explosive growth to prominence during the Gulf War, American
networks and their European counterparts, like newspapers, worked
on a daily news cycle in which all the news gathered over the previous
24 hours was collated for the evening news. Apart from exceptional
circumstances, news was taped, edited, and presented as part of a daily
package. The CNN format and its growing popularity, however,
changed the rules by making news always available, up to date, and
often events-driven and live. 64
While the emergence of CNN was significant in shifting interna-
tional coverage toward events-driven news, the trend actually began
with local television news in the United States. In the 1950s, when
television news first began, only basic visual aids such as photographs,
charts, and maps were presented to the viewers. 65 Television news,
mimicking the radio and newspaper, aimed to inform citizens and
largely presented institutionally initiated stories from the studio. By
the 1980s, however, competition led television stations to experiment
with “eyewitness” and “action” news formats, which brought viewers
closer to events and added a greater sense of immediacy and drama to
news. 66 The proliferation of this trend to international news, thus,
brought viewers closer to the locations around the globe from which
the stories initiated and allowed a qualitative and even emotive
connection that had hitherto not been possible.