‘Maza Nahin Aya’: Negotiating Sensationalism in Pakistani Television News Practices

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-224
Author(s):  
Ayesha Mulla

Over the course of the last 18 years, privatised television news channels have transformed the nature of the national news culture in Pakistan. In addition to sensational news packaging, leading current affairs talk-show hosts routinely capitalise on aggressive interrogative tactics to antagonise politicians on air, producing a dramatised performance that feeds a politics of publicity. Within this context, the emancipatory potential of television once celebrated through media deregulation in the early 2000s has since been replaced with a disdainful liberal discourse on the lack of critical-rational debate. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of television news professionals in Karachi, I explore how Pakistani news media professionals negotiate the tension between a principled commitment to protecting the ‘independence’ of mass media and a cynical disavowal of its existing forms. Sensationalist media programming is certainly not unique to Pakistani television, and an increasing interest in postcolonial news publics continues to provide much needed perspectives from non-Western models of journalism, yet I believe a scholarly focus on media sensationalism remains impoverished without an understanding of the contextual constraints within which television news producers mediate their livelihood. In this article, I argue that the prevailing discourse on the ethics of journalism in Pakistan becomes a productive site through which the differences between privileged and vulnerable media labour emerge as most apparent.

1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (11) ◽  
pp. 673-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard C. Barnes ◽  
Stephen Earnshaw

The main source of topical information in most parts of the world is through the mass media – principally newspapers and television. Television news and current affairs have a duty to remain impartial, as they provide a service for the whole population. Newspapers, on the other hand, have a greater journalistic and editorial freedom as they target subgroups. British newspapers are currently being scrutinised as to how they report both factual and speculative information of a general kind. At the same time there seems to be an increase in their interest in psychological matters. However, work on newspaper reporting of psychiatric disorders (Day & Page, 1986; Matas et al, 1986) has shown that the mentally ill are usually portrayed in a rather negative light with few positive images.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 635-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Murray

This article uses an extant collection of television news inserts and other television ephemera to examine women's employment at Midlands ATV. Focusing on the years between the first Midlands News broadcasts in 1956 until major contract changes across the ITV network in 1968, it examines the jobs women did during this formative period and their chances for promotion. In particular it suggests that contemporary ideas of glamour and their influence in screen culture maintained a significant influence in shaping women's employment. This connection between glamorous television aesthetics and female employees as the embodiment of glamour, especially on screen, did leave women vulnerable to redundancy as ‘frivolity’ in television was increasingly criticised in the mid-1960s. However, this article argues that the precarious status of women in the industry should not undermine historical appreciation of the value of their work in the establishing of television in Britain. Setting this study of Midlands ATV within the growing number of studies into women's employment in television, there are certain points of comparison with women's experience at the BBC and in networked ITV current affairs programmes. However, while the historical contours of television production are broadly comparable, there are clear distinctions, such as the employment of a female newscaster, Pat Cox, between 1956 and 1965. Such distinctions also suggest that regional news teams were experimenting with the development of a vernacular television news style that requires further study.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Smith Dahmen ◽  
Erin K. Coyle

Through surveys and in-depth interviews with members of the White House News Photographers Association, this study indicates that visual journalists understand the value of the watchdog role and that current White House practices interfere with this critical function. Limiting news media access and attempting to control the visual narrative undermines the ability of the press to perform the watchdog function that is critical for democratic self-governance.


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-40
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Wheeler

For the Past Five Decades, media texts, broadcast over television air waves, have created a shared identity among viewing audiences. John B. Thompson notes that if culture is understood as “the ways in which meaningful expressions of various kinds are produced, constructed and received by individuals”, then mass media can be understood as central to the creation and maintenance of culture (pp. 122-23). The words and images that construct a media culture are the very building blocks of collective identity. As Michael Schudson observes, “news is part of the background through which and with which people think” (p. 16).


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Maurer ◽  
Jörg Haßler ◽  
Simon Kruschinski ◽  
Pablo Jost

Abstract This study compares the balance of newspaper and television news coverage about migration in two countries that were differently affected by the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 in terms of the geopolitical involvement and numbers of migrants being admitted. Based on a broad consensus among political elites, Germany left its borders open and received about one million migrants mainly from Syria during 2015. In contrast, the conservative British government was heavily attacked by oppositional parties for closing Britain’s borders and, thus, restricting immigration. These different initial situations led to remarkable differences between the news coverage in both countries. In line with news value theory, German media outlets reported much more on migration than did their British counterparts. In line with indexing theory, German news coverage consonantly reflected the consensual view of German political elites, while British news media reported along their general editorial lines.


2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Van Cauwenberge ◽  
Hans Beentjes ◽  
Leen d’Haenens

A typology of young news users in the Low Countries A typology of young news users in the Low Countries This article investigates different types of young news users (15-34 years) in the Low Countries. Therefore a survey among 1200 Flemish and Dutch youngsters and adolescents was conducted, analyzing the combined use of media platforms for news consumption and time spent with these news carriers. The cluster analysis identified five types of news users: the sound and vision group, characterized by the use of mainly audiovisual news platforms, combined with online news sites; the e-news users, who give most prominence to online news sites but also rely on traditional news platforms, the all rounders, depending on a range of off- and online news channels; the traditionalists, who spent most time with offline news media; and the dabblers, a group with an overall low level of news consumption. Our results indicate that Flemish and Dutch youngsters combine online and traditional news platforms for their news gathering, giving most prominence to traditional news media, especially television news.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Greg Michael Stutchbury

<p>This thesis examined through a political economy framework how New Zealand’s two largest newspaper chains, Fairfax and NZME, have been impacted by the advent of digital technologies and the effects these have had on the practice of sports journalism. Digital technology, falling revenue and increasing pressure from financial owners have all played a part in the restructuring of both Fairfax and NZME’s editorial news operations, especially in the last five years as both companies transitioned to a ‘digital-first’ environment.  Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 senior journalists who had knowledge of the transition from a print to a digital focus. These interviews highlighted the strategies adopted by both companies as they faced a challenging and evolving marketplace. They also underlined the internal tensions within newsrooms between not only journalists and editorial news managers but also the digital and print operations.  Despite the belief that digital technologies would make the print news media more collaborative and provide greater diversity and plurality, the opposite has occurred. Sports reporting remains highly routinised, coverage diversity is shrinking, and greater control is now exerted by editorial managers over the production of journalistic content. Digital technologies have also impacted the forms of content, with decision making on editorial content and resourcing now strongly influenced by data analytics, although there was still strong resistance to greater interactivity with readers. The relationship between sports organisations and print news media organisations, while considered in theory to be a symbiotic one but in reality, is an area of conflict, has also further deteriorated as sports organisations introduce significantly greater control over the media agenda. An element of this control has also heightened tensions with sports organisations moving into the digital space and competing directly with print news media organisations.</p>


Author(s):  
Pamela Shoemaker

Simply put, gatekeeping involves deciding which messages to send to others and how to shape them. Billions of events occur each day, many with political ramifications, but there are more events than the news media can cover or even know about. Political information competes with all other topics to pass through source and media gates. Politicians create forces that constrain or facilitate this passage, but making it through one gate is usually not sufficient. Multiple gates in source, media, and audience channels winnow messages until we have those few that become television news stories or blog posts. To explain this process, gatekeeping theory was proposed in the late 1940s by Kurt Lewin; it is one of the older theories applied to the study of mass communication.


Sexualities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Apoorva Ghosh

Through in-depth interviews, this study aimed to show how lesbians and gay men in India may construct their sexuality as a result of being globally connected through accessing “transnational pathways," such as the global mass media, diasporic experiences, and transnational workplaces. This study indicates that these pathways aid the interaction between externally derived sexual schemas and pre-existing sexual schemas, which may in turn lead to a configuration of “differential congruence” whereby competing sexual schemas may coexist rather than fuse or replace each other in an individual’s life, albeit in different spheres.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Gábor Kovács ◽  
Petra Aczél ◽  
Tamás Bokor

Abstract Mass media research on the portrayal of older people has primarily focused on television series and advertisements. News programmes on television have received little attention. We argue that viewers perceive characters on the news as more direct and more accurate representations of social reality than fictional characters, and therefore portrayals on the news are more likely to be integrated in viewers’ stereotypes about elderly people or used as standards of comparison. In order to explore potential differences in the representation of senior men and women, we conducted a quantitative content analysis on a sample of 754 elderly people who appeared on the evening news programmes of four major Hungarian television channels with high viewership. Each character was coded in terms of 115 qualitative variables. Our results indicate that older men are portrayed significantly more often than women as affluent, elegant, knowledgeable, powerful and actively working. By contrast, women are more commonly shown as kind, family-oriented, in ordinary roles (e.g. as the ‘woman in the street’) and engaged in less-productive activities such as shopping. Based on previous research on the role of mass media in the socialisation process as well as social comparison theory, we discuss how these imbalances in the representation of older men and women may affect viewers of different age groups, genders and social status.


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