Media culture and television news: a review of five recent books and their implications for future research

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to explore and examine the usefulness of five fairly recent books in television news production in organizations such as the BBC and CNN, and to show how issues highlighted in the review could inform further research. The review brings to light four key issues. The foremost is that the internal news epistemes of a given media culture heavily influence its news framing. Second, different media organizations proffer and live by different media cultures. Third, the reading reveals that normative standards and universal definitions of objectivity are problematic. Certainly, they are overtly Anglo-American, and reinforce Western hegemonies. Further, such criteria hardly account for cultural dependent factors that shape and constrain the production of news in cultures outside of the West. Finally, the literature shows that research in newsroom is usually ethnographic in nature, drawing on coterminous instruments such as interviews, participant observations and recording. Interestingly, however, the influence of the culture of television stations on news framing has been under-studied, especially in the African context. Prior research, nonetheless, stresses too much content such that empirical knowledge of how variation in news cultures emerges through framing is blurred