The Absence of Narrative: Boredom and the Residual Power of Television News
Justin Lewis | University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Abstract
The article begins by arguing—against conventional wisdom—that one of the defining features of television news is the absence of narrative codes in its structure. Rather than raising the questions that it later resolves, television news has a disjointed structure that makes it hard to follow or comprehend. Viewers find it much more difficult, for this reason, to retain information from the news than from almost any other form of television. To understand the influence of television news, we must understand which elements this disjointed narrative encourages us to retain. These elements tend to involve oft-repeated sets of simple associations rather than any more complex histories. Indeed, the failure of news to communicate historical connections impoverishes the quality of decision making and public understanding by citizens who increasingly rely upon television news to provide information about the world.
(1973) Heart of darkness. London: Penguin. (Original work published 1902)
Dahlgren, P.
(1985) The modes of reception: Towards a hermeneutics of TV news. In P. Drummond & R. Paterson (Eds.) Television in transition. London: British Film Institute.
Driver, S. (Producer) & Jarmusch, J. (Director)
(1985) Stranger than paradise [Film]. Hollywood: Samuel Goldwyn.
Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N.
(1986) The dynamics of the cultivation process. In J. Bryant & D. Zillman (Eds.), Perspectives in media effects. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., & Roberts, B.
(1978) Policing the crisis. London: Macmillan.
Hartley, J.
(1982) Understanding news. London: Methuen.
Heller, J.
(1963) Catch 22. London: Jonathan Cape.
Levine, S. (Producer) & Brooks, M. (Director)
(1968) The Producers [Film]. Los Angeles: Embassy Home Entertainment.
Lewis, J.
(1991) The ideological octopus: An exploration of television and its audience. New York: Routledge.
Lewis, J., Jhally, S., & Morgan, M.
(1991) The Gulf War: A study of the media, public opinion and public knowledge. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Center for the Study of Communication.
Lewis, J., Morgan, M., & Ruddock, A.
(1992) Image/issues/impact: The media and campaign ’92. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Center for the Study of Communication.
Lull, J. (Ed.)
(1988) World families watch television. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Patterson, T.
(1980) The mass media election. London: Praeger.
Seiter, E.
(1987) Semiotics and television. In R. Allen (Ed.) Channels of discourse. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Cited by
Cited by 7 other publications
Eriksson, Göran
2011. Adversarial moments: A study of short-form interviews in the news. Journalism 12:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Hardy, Bruce W., Jeffrey A. Gottfried, Kenneth M. Winneg & Kathleen Hall Jamieson
2014. Stephen Colbert's Civics Lesson: How Colbert Super PAC Taught Viewers About Campaign Finance. Mass Communication and Society 17:3 ► pp. 329 ff.
Harris, Janet & James Taylor
2021. Narrative in VR journalism: research into practice. Media Practice and Education 22:3 ► pp. 211 ff.
Kulkarni, Shirish, Richard Thomas, Marlen Komorowski & Justin Lewis
2023. Innovating Online Journalism: New Ways of Storytelling. Journalism Practice 17:9 ► pp. 1845 ff.
Köhler, Sebastian
2019. Sieh an – (was für) eine Geschichte!. In Storytelling in Journalismus, Organisations- und Marketingkommunikation, ► pp. 73 ff.
Machill, Marcel, Sebastian Köhler & Markus Waldhauser
2007. The Use of Narrative Structures in Television News. European Journal of Communication 22:2 ► pp. 185 ff.
Piazza, Roberta & Louann Haarman
2011. Toward a definition and classification of human interest narratives in television war reporting. Journal of Pragmatics 43:6 ► pp. 1540 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.