British television news in the 1990s : newsworthiness in a multi-organisational and multi-programme environment.

This study is concerned with the constituent features of television
news in Britain in the 1990s. It examines both the content of
television news and production strategies employed by television
journalists in the context of the changing structural and cultural
relations of British television during the 1980s and 1990s. An
underlying theme of this thesis is the important role that television
news has to play in relation to citizenship rights and as an important
institution of the public sphere in Britain. A process of
fragmentation of the television news genre has in recent years,
resulted in the evolution of a variety of different news programmes
which exhibit different concepts of newsworthiness and public
interest journalism. Such fragmentation is challenging long
established notions of quality and public interest progranmiing and
replacing them with a more populist approach emphasing
entertainment. In addition the ability of televison news to play an
important role in enabling the public to play an active part in a
democracy is being further restricted and undermined in the mid-
1990s through the increasing commercialization of broadcasting
institutions.
To date analyses of news content and news production have tended
to ignore the complexity of the news genre itself and have assumed
that television journalism can be analysed as a unitary practice,
neglecting the competitive diversity and dynamic technological
change occurring in British broadcasting. However it is a theme of this thesis that the critical analysis and interpretation of television
news remains incomplete without an in-depth study of the
multiplicity of news programmes and news orgamsations which exist
in Britain in the 1990s.
This thesis shows, using content analysis and observational analysis,
that television news in the 1990s has reached a critical juncture. Key
vectors of change, politico-economic (including the new wave of
commercialization of television news in the 1990s), technological
and transnational influences have strongly affected the broadcasting
environment in Britain over the last decade and increased the
pressure on news providers. News values are becoming more tied to
particular contractual specifications made upon news programmes.
Newsworthiness itself is constructed within journalistic professional
culture, by the journalist's zone and mode of operation, and is
adapted to the designated style of an organisation or programme.
The variety and diversity of "mid-ranking stories" and the differences
in treatment of "big news stories" by different news programmes -
processes which are revealed in the empirical studies in this thesis -
illustrate clearly how newsworthiness can be adapted and changed to
fit particular programme epistemologies.