Analysing a TV news broadcast: News at Ten

Abstract

Our aim in this chapter is to analyse television news, concentrating our analysis on a single News at Ten broadcast (TX: 7 July 1992). A few months after this broadcast there were a number of changes to the format of the programme which we will be discussing later in this chapter. The nature of these changes served to highlight one of the key issues that we will return to again and again in this chapter; that the news is not simply a summation of the day’s events but is, like any other media text, a constructed product. In consequence, the format and scheduling of news programmes tend to change fairly rapidly, to meet the changing nature of the news itself.