Suchergebnisse

This brief essay deals with an attempt to teach students how to watch a network news show. It is a somewhat painstaking but entertaining experiment which allows the teacher to demonstrate that televised news has unique properties that can be distinguished from those of the print media. It avoids the ideological debate that televised news is biased—left or right—and focuses attention on the adversarial and dramatic properties that inhere in the visual media as practices by networks that are competing for ratings. And it has a modest goal, minimizing such important but ultimately judgmental inquiries as to whether the networks should have allowed live interviews with American hostages who were menaced by off-camera terrorists, or whether their coverage of Hanoi's celebration of the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon took sufficient note of the boat people.

In a recent issue of NEWS, Professor G. Alan Tarr reminded us of how the feature film Nashville (1975) could be used as a springboard for thoughtful classroom discussion of American politics. While that film is ostensibly about country-music and its performers, Tarr makes a strong case that the Robert Altman film is "above all a commentary on political life." Nashville can be seen as an insight into a view of the voters and their indifference, indeed hostility to politics. The advance man of a presidential candidate is seeking to enlist big name performers for a rally but the candidate is never seen and the sound truck that advertises his campaign blares out the vague populist homilies which reminded many viewers of the then flowering Jimmy Carter speeches.

It's an evening network news show. The camera zooms in on Ted Kennedy speaking to an enthusiastic crowd in San Diego, while the voiceover sonorously ends a brief report with, "Can the Senator get the voters to forget about Chappaquidick?" It is a 30-second news item. Question: have we just seen a piece of nonfiction film or a mini-documentary? The Kennedy staffers will be outraged; others will insist that the coverage merely told it like it is. Yet those same staffers will be pleased several months later when the networks cover the Senator's speech to the Democratic convention by showing wildly cheering partisans, while the cameras pass over the many delegates who are either sitting on their hands or just chatting with each other. Others will claim that the coverage of the speech was visually distorted. They may all be right, but they may not be