Watching news : a study of television news reception

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is an investigation of the relationship that exists between viewers and television news. As an inherently reflexive thesis, the research process itself is also critically examined. This duality is reflected in the basic structure of the thesis, with Part One - Praxis - focusing on various aspects of the research process itself, and Part Two - Analysis - dealing with the nature of the viewer-news relationship. Adopting a discourse-oriented approach, the analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with eleven individual viewers. Originally conceived as an exercise in elicitation, the introduction of feminist research perspective’s in conjunction with a growing sense of reflexivity led to a transformation whereby the interviews were reconfigured instead as sites of meaning construction. As discourses of reception, the interviews showed the news-viewer relationship to be characterised by a dynamic tension between being pulled into the encounter and pushed away from it. A bi-dimensional framework of analysis is employed, with one dimension focusing on the relational aspect of the viewer-news relationship and the other on the interpretive aspect. Using this framework, the discourses of reception are then contextually (i.e. as specific case studies in reception) and thematically analysed. The thesis concludes by suggesting that reception, as a specific example of cultural consumption, can be seen as a form of guerrilla warfare where the strategies of news producers are confronted by the tactics of viewers.