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Values and Choices in Television Discourse pp 31–58Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Evaluation as Positioning in English Language World News Channels

CCTV, France 24, Russia Today, Al Jazeera

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Abstract

When asked to identify world television news channels, most people mention CNN (1980), the first provider to pioneer rolling news, and familiar to any traveller who might want to find news bulletins on the hour every hour. BBC World started broadcasting regular news bulletins and other programmes of general interest in 1991 as part of the World Service and launched its dedicated news-only channel, BBC News 24, in 1997. Sky News started its dedicated channel in 1989. Like national news broadcasters they claim objectivity, impartiality and neutrality, though such notions are challenged by a range of scholars (van Dijk 1985, 1988; Biber and Finegan 1989; Bell 1991; Fowler 1991; Iedema et al. 1994; Ungerer 1997; White 1997, 1998, 2004, 2005). National news involves broadcasters addressing a geographically defined imagined community to which news items may be considered to have relevance, with local references and proximity news values, and with prime-time synchrony dictating what gets into the bulletin. In national news, the ethnocentric lens through which the world is viewed is shared between broadcaster and audience, the time frame is the same, the recency value being defined by the day (as Jon Snow makes clear in his account of how the news is planned, in Chapter 8 in this volume). When this time frame changes, as it must in the case of transnational world news, the constant, cyclical repetition suggests also that a different pattern of consumption is expected: checking-in for updates, sampling rather than watching a complete bulletin at a certain time of day; and as Montgomery says (2007: 67), ‘a different relationship between discourse and the audience and discourse and the event‘.

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Authors
  1. Alison Duguid
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sussex, UK

    Roberta Piazza

  2. University of Bologna, Italy

    Louann Haarman

  3. The Content Lab, UK

    Anne Caborn

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© 2015 Alison Duguid

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Duguid, A. (2015). Evaluation as Positioning in English Language World News Channels. In: Piazza, R., Haarman, L., Caborn, A. (eds) Values and Choices in Television Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478474_2

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