Figure 14.1 The structure of television genres: a typology (Berger, 1992: 7)

• Contests are programmes with competition involving real players, including game shows, quizzes and sports. They are both real and emotionally involv­ing (in intention).

• Actualities include all news, documentary and reality programming. They are objective and unemotional in principle.

• Persuasions are low on both dimensions and reflect an intention by the sender to persuade, especially by advertising or some form of advocacy or propaganda.

• Dramas cover almost all fictional storytelling and a wide range of genres.

As Berger notes, the application of this scheme is complicated by the fact that new and mixed genres are continually being created that do not belong to a unique category. Familiar examples are those of 'docudrama' and other kinds of 'infotainment'. But this is also a feature of individual genres and can be helpful in tracking and analysing what is happening.

While genre is a useful concept for finding one's way in the luxuriant abundance of media output and for helping to describe and categorize content, it is not a very powerful tool of analysis, since there are simply too many possibilities for apply­ing it. The distinction between one genre and another is not easy to ascertain objec­tively, and the correspondence of recognition and understanding by producers and audience, named above as a characteristic of a genre, is not easy to demon­strate. It may be a more useful term in relation to films and books, where individ­ual acts of choice are made and paid for, guided by experience, taste and publicity, and lead to established preference. It has also been shown that inter-genre differ­ences can be used to differentiate types of television producer (Tunstall, 1993).

Box 14.1 Mass media genres

• Genres are defined equally by producers and readers of media content

• Genres are identified by function, form and content

• Genres both preserve and help to develop textual forms

• Genres are aids to production and to reading of texts

• Genres are characterized by their own logics, formats and language

Media format

The genre concept has also been useful in a somewhat adapted form for analysing media formats. Altheide and Snow (1979), for instance, developed a mode of analysis of media content, employing the terms media logic and media format. The first refers essentially to a set of implicit rules and norms that govern how content should be processed and presented in order to take most advantage of the char­acteristics of a given medium. This includes fitting the needs of the media organi­zation (including the media's perception of the needs of the audience). Altheide sees content as tailored to fit media formats, and formats as tailored to fit listener/ viewer preferences and assumed capacities. Formats are essentially subroutines for dealing with specific themes within a genre. For instance, Altheide (1985) describes a 'format for crisis' in television news, which transcends the particular­ities of events and gives a common shape to the handling of different news stories. The main conditions necessary for the news handling of a crisis on a continuing basis are accessibility (to information or to the site of the crisis), visual quality (of film or tape), drama and action, relevance to the audience and thematic unity. There is some affinity with the concept of framing (see pp. 378-80).

Graber (1981) has made notable contributions to the study of political lan­guages in general and its television versions in particular. She confirms the points made by Altheide in her comment that 'television journalists have developed repertoires - another possible term for frames, logics or sub-genre formats of highly stereotyped cues for many specific situations in polities'. She argues con­vincingly that the encoding and decoding of audiovisual languages is essentially different from that of verbal languages in being more associational, connotative and unstructured and less logical, clearly defined and delimited. The systematic analysis of audiovisual languages is, nevertheless, still at an early stage.

Before leaving the subject of genres, formats and related concepts, it is worth emphasizing that they can, in principle, cut across the conventional content cat­egories of media output, including the divide between fiction and non-fiction. Fiske (1987) underlines the essential intertextuality of genres. This is not too sur­prising, given the long tradition that allows fiction to draw on real-life situations or historical events for its subject matter, although it may undermine the reality claims of media news and information.

The News Genre

In the following sections, attention focuses on the news genre, partly because it has such a long history and is so central in accounting for the position of the media as a privileged social institution. The newspaper is, arguably, the archetype as well as the prototype of all modern mass media (Tunstall, 1977: 23), and 'news' is the central ingredient of the newspaper (though far from the only one). To some extent, radio and television were modelled on the newspaper, with regular news as their chief anchor point. News merits special attention in a discussion of media content just because it is one of the few original contributions by the mass media to the range of cultural forms of expression. It is also the core activity according to which a large part of the journalistic (and thus media) occupation defines itself.

News provides the component that distinguishes something called a news­paper from other kinds of print media and often earns it a special status or pro­tection in society, allowing it to express opinion in the name of the public. Media institutions could barely exist without news, and news could not exist without media institutions. Unlike almost all other forms of authorship or cultural creation, news-making cannot be done privately or even individually. The institution pro­vides both the machinery for distribution and the guarantee of credibility and authority.

What is news?

Despite the central position of news in the media, the question 'What is news?' is one which journalists themselves find distinctly metaphysical and difficult to answer except in terms of their intuition, 'feel' and innate judgement. Attempts to answer it by analysis of media content have not been very revealing. It hap­pens that the two 'founding fathers' of the sociology of news were both former or practising journalists and drew on their own experience in tackling the ques­tion of the nature of the news. Walter Lippmann (1922: 216) focused on the process of news gathering, which he saw as a search for the 'objective clear signal which signifies an event'. Hence, 'news is not a mirror of social condi­tions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.

The second early commentator on news, Robert Park (1940), paid more atten­tion to the essential properties of the news report. His starting point was to com­pare it with another 'form of knowledge', history, which is also a record of past events, and to place news on a continuum that ranges from 'acquaintance with' to 'knowledge about'. News is located somewhere in the middle of this continuum. The result of Park's comparison of news with history can be distilled into a few main points, as follows:

• News is timely: it is about very recent or recurrent events.

• News is unsystematic: it deals with discrete events and happenings, and the world seen through news alone consists of unrelated happenings.

• News is perishable: it lives only when the events themselves are current, and for purposes of record and later reference other forms of knowledge will replace news.

• Events reported as news should be unusual or at least unexpected, qualities that are more important than their 'real significance'.

• Apart from unexpectedness, news events are characterized by other 'news values' that are always relative and involve subjective judgements about likely audience interest.

• News is mainly for orientation and attention direction and not a substitute for knowledge.

• News is predictable.

The paradoxical and provocative final statement that news is predictable was explained by Park as follows:

if it is the unexpected that happens it is not the wholly unexpected which gets into the news. The events that have made news in the past, as in the present, are actu­ally the expected things ... it is on the whole the accidents and incidents that the public is prepared for... the things that one fears and that one hopes for that make news. (1940: 45)

Apart from this, as we have seen, much news consists of diary events, known well in advance. A similar point was put more succinctly by Galtung and Ruge (1965) in the remark that 'news' are actually 'olds'. Warren Breed (1956) listed the following terms as descriptive of news: 'saleable', 'superficial', 'simple', 'objective', 'action centred', 'interesting' (as distinct from significant), 'stylized' and 'prudent'. He also suggested dimensions along which an item of news might be placed: news versus truth; difficult versus routine (in terms of news gather­ing); and information versus human interest.