From the archives - the decoding of a narrative

Barthes´ Codes

Roland Barthes describes a text as
"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (S/Z - 1974 translation)
What he is basically saying is that a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to.

Barthes wanted to - he was a semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so. All you need to know, again, very basically, is that texts may be ´open´ (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or ´closed´ (there is only one obvious thread to pull on).

Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following five ways:

Narrative Structures

There are many ways of breaking down narrative structure. You may hear a movie described as a "classic Hollywood narrative", meaning it has three acts. News stories have their own structure. A lot of work has been done by literary theorists to develop ways of deconstructing a narrative.
  • Tvzetan Todorov - suggests narrative is simply equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium
  • Vladimir Propp - characters and actions (31 functions of character types)
  • Claude Levi-Strauss - constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic), and to do with soundtrack. Binary oppositions.

Deconstructing Narratives

Separating Plot And Story

Think of a feature film, and jot down a) the strict chronological order in which events occur b) the order in which each of the main characters finds out about these events a) shows story, b) shows plot construction. Plot keeps audiences interested eg) in whether the children will discover Mrs Doubtfire is really their father, or shocks them, eg) the 'twist in the tale" at the end of The Sixth Sense. Identifying Narrator Who is telling this story is a vital question to be asked when analysing any media text. Stories may be related in the first or third person, POVs may change, but the narrator will always
  • reveal the events which make up the story
  • mediate those events for the audience
  • evaluate those events for the audience
The narrator also tends to POSITION the audience into a particular relationship with the characters on the screen.

Comprehending Time

Very few screen stories take place in real time. Whole lives can be dealt with in the 90 minutes of a feature film, an 8 month siege be encompassed within a 60 minute TV documentary. There are many conventions to denote time passing, from the time/date information typed up on each new scene of The X-Files to the aeroplane passing over a map of a continent in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Other devices to manipulate time include
  • flashbacks
  • dream sequences
  • repetition
  • different characters' POV
  • flash forwards
  • real time interludes
  • pre-figuring of events that have not yet taken place

Locating the Narrative

Each story has a location. This may be physical and geographical (eg a war zone) or it may be mythic (eg the Wild West). Virtual locations are now a feature of many newsrooms (eg the computers and holograms of the BBC's Nine O'Clock News). There are sets of conventions to do with that location, often associated with genre and form (eg all space ships seem to look the same inside).

 

 

Creating sensationalism 

A Semiotic Analysis of a Newspaper Story


Helen Gambles

A logical place to start may be to ask ‘what is news?’ Bignell (1997:81) suggests that ‘news is not just facts, but representations produced in language and other signs like photographs. The newspaper is just one medium of news communication; other media include television, radio, magazines, and the Internet. This essay will concentrate on a particular news item as covered in three different British daily newspapers, namely The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times. The story which is being covered is that of the death of a female police officer who was stabbed by a man whilst she was on duty. The medium of the newspaper is particularly interesting as signifiers are presented simultaneously thus offering a concrete display of signs which the reader can consume at his/her own pace and can also be re-read, as opposed to television or radio news which can only be watched or listened to at particular times. 

The process of selection is central to the production of all newspapers. This involves selecting events which are considered to be worthy of being printed as news, and excluding news which is considered to be irrelevant, insignificant or unworthy of news coverage. Thus news is a social construct dependent on what is deemed to be important by those who work in the news industry based on certain codes of behaviour which have been learned by news workers in order to do their job. The codes of behaviour which have been learnt by news workers undoubtedly depend on the particular newspaper for which they are working. 

It could be suggested that in British society most adults would be aware of the conventions of different newspapers. This essay will attempt to examine the types of sign systems within which a particular news story is encoded in a selection of newspapers, and how these different sign systems may affect meaning. It is clear when looking at The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times, which were all published on Saturday, April 18th, 1998 that each newspaper attaches significance to different news items. This is made clear by looking at the front pages of each newspaper, with The Sun's main front page story concentrating on the relationship of Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher, compared to The Telegraph's main story which concentrates on a shake-up of scientific committees that advise government ministers on food safety; and The Times main front page story which covers the story of the new National Lottery Big Ticket show which is facing the BBC axe

Although I will not be concentrating on the comparison of the front pages of the newspapers in this essay, these examples demonstrate how drastically the different newspapers differ in what constitutes front-page news. The examples also demonstrate my interpretation of newspaper conventions, as I have selected the stories which I deem to be the intended main news of the front-page. As can be seen with the front page of The Sun the main story is clear as it dominates most of the available space on the front-page. However, with the other newspapers the distinction is not quite as clear. I have decoded the signs on the front pages according to my own ideological assumptions and by what I have come to understand by certain codes which are present within the medium of the newspaper, and within different newspapers. I found that the main criteria when deciding on which was the main story of the front-pages of The Telegraph and The Times was the size of the typeface of the headline. However, another person may have chosen the story with the biggest picture. This emphasises that the reader comes to the newspaper with a set of codes with which to decode the text, and these codes may differ from individual to individual. This leads to the point that the text is open to a variety of interpretations depending on the ideological standpoint of the reader, and whether the reader is familiar with the newspaper and the codes which. it employs to communicate the news which it has selected. 

Connotations of the linguistic and visual signs which are presented by newspapers are central to the meaning of the news item to the reader. The connotations of the news item are perceived within a coded framework and there are recognisable codes within different newspapers. It is clear that different newspapers use particular narrative codes when representing the same item of news. This can be seen in the three headlines which refer to the particular news item which I have chosen to examine. The Sun headline states SCANDAL OF PSYCHO FREED TO KILL HERO COP NINN', The Telegraph - WPc was knifed to death after removing armour, and The Times - WPc paid with her life for dedication to duty. Each of these narrative codes used in the headlines instantly provide a framework on which to build the meaning of the news item. The headlines are linguistic syntagms which aim to attract the attention of the reader to the topic of the news story, and the linguistic signs which are employed in the headline suggest to the reader the appropriate codes which are needed to understand or decode the news item. 

It is clear that the newspapers use different linguistic codes as a means of representing the news item. The Times and The Telegraph are similar in their use of language. However, both differ dramatically with The Sun. It is clear that The Sun uses orally based vocabulary, and dramatic and sensational language. This can be seen in the first sentence of the news item, which reads A. violent cop-hating nut killed brave WPC Nina Mackay after a catastrophic catalogue of blunders by Crown prosecutors and police allowed him to roam free. The article also employs alliteration for emphasis , as in catastrophic catalogue and scandal of psycho. The linguistic codes of the news item certainly connote speech which in turn connotes familiarity, informality, and camaraderie. The article also implies familiarity with the victim (We Nina Mackay) who is referred to throughout as Nina where as a distance is created between the reader and the offender who is referred to throughout by his surname, Elgizouli. This code of familiarity is significantly different to that which is employed by The Telegraph and The Times who refer to the victim either in her professional capacity (WPc Nina Mackay) or by her full name. However, it is perhaps significant that the offender is referred to by his surname in all of the different representations of the news items. This strategy of distancing the reader from the criminal is blatantly employed by all three of the newspapers, clearly suggesting that the preferred reading of the texts should involve no sympathy with the offender. 

Another drastic difference between the newspaper representations of the news item are the typographic devices used to break up the text. Again, The Sun differs dramatically to The Telegraph and The Times using bold text to start the article, serving to extend the role of the headline in attracting the attention of the reader to the topic of the news story. The use of bold and one word sub-headings which are employed throughout the text serve to direct the reader in making meaning of the text and make blatantly obvious the points which the newspaper deem to be of particular significance to the understanding of the news item. The Telegraph and The Times do not employ the same typographic codes as The Sun, apart from bold type which is used for the headline, and the bold type used to name the journalist/s of the article. The narrative of the news story uses the same type and size of font throughout the item. Arguably, this connotes authority and formality to the reader which is also demonstrated by the fairly long sentences, the correct spellings and the lack of colloquial language such as cop which is used in The Sun. This perhaps implies that the quality press such as The Times and The Telegraph provide better news than tabloids such as The Sun. However, this kind of value judgement is inappropriate as both types of newspaper are constructions of the news with the ‘quality’ newspapers aiming to connote authority and formality and the popular tabloids aiming to connote an attitude of telling it how it is. Thus both types of representation of the news items present mythic meanings.
Linguistic and typographic codes are not the only codes employed in news discourse. Graphic codes must also be considered. The photographs used in the press have also undergone a process of selection. One image will be chosen over another as it connotes a message that the selectors of the photograph want to communicate. Barthes (cited in Bagnell, 1977:98) suggests that the newspaper photograph is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many factors of connotation. The treatment of photographs which is referred to by Barthes can be seen in the different newspapers which I have chosen. Interestingly, each version of the news item has used the same photographs, but treated them differently according to the required connotation. Each representation uses the same picture of the victim in her police uniform looking directly at the camera, and the same picture of the offender looking vacant and away from the camera. Again, The Times and The Telegraph use similar codes, and The Sun employs a drastically different strategy despite using the same original photographs. The most drastic difference is that The Sun presents the photographs in colour, connoting realism and the dangerousness of the offender. This is also connoted by the size of the photographs, with the graphic representation dominating a large proportion of the overall available space on the page, which is another drastic difference between The Sun's representation of the news item and the other two newspapers. Despite these major differences it is significant that the newspapers have all used the same photographs, and it is interesting to look at why these particular photographs might have been chosen. Paradigmatically, photographs involve connotations, and thus the significance of the particular photographs which have been chosen can be seen more clearly when considering what other paradigmatic connotations might have appeared in their place. For example the connotations of the picture of the police officer would change considerably if she was not in uniform. Likewise, the connotations of the picture would change if the offender was looking directly at the camera and smiling, instead he is pictured looking away from the camera with a blank expression, connoting lack of emotion. 

The contrasted pairs which seem to be involved in the paradigms are innocence and guilt, justice and injustice. These contrasted pairs are made more clear by the way in which the meanings of the photographs are anchored in a small amount of text beneath the photographs. The Times offers its own contrasted pair in the text beneath the pictures, namely killer and killed. As Bignell (1997:99) suggests, the caption underneath the picture enables the reader to load down the image with particular cultural meanings and the photograph functions as the proof that the text's message is true. The pictures are also shown in different contexts in the three newspapers with The Sun using a different strategy to The Telegraph and The Times. The Telegraph and The Times use similar sized pictures of the individuals involved. In The Sun the size of the photographs of the individuals differ considerably with the killer being represented as significantly bigger than the killed. Also, the photograph of the police officer is presented in a photograph-like frame connoting sentimentality, and elevating her position in comparison to the killer. This emotionalism is carried over into the other picture which The Sun represents which shows the coffin of the police officer being carried by her colleagues. This is a cultural sign which most readers will be able to relate to, and connotes sympathy, tragedy and injustice. 

This discussion of several newspapers' representations of the same news item show how semiotic analysis can determine the meanings of such news items, as a result of the linguistic and visual signs used within the texts. However, semiotic analysis cannot determine how an individual reader might interpret the representations of the news items in a real social context. Semiotic analysis does offer an insight into the factors at work in the production of a news item and distinguishes the various codes which are employed by different types of newspaper when representing a particular news item.

Bibliography

  • Bignell, J (1997): Media Semiotics: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press 


The creation of Villains and Heroes How the media and the American public value narrative over news

the public’s role in shaping the news coverage? Do consumers bear some responsibility for the media frenzy? Joel Smith, a Duke University professor emeritus of sociology, thinks so. According to Smith, the media and viewers are “engaged in an interactive process in which each shapes and influences the other, albeit imperfectly.”
 
"One of our major errors in how we think about the media is to treat them as though they were separate from, rather than an integral part, of society," says Smith, author of Understanding the Media: A Sociology of Mass Communication. "To have an impact, coverage must resonate with themes that already are matters of general interest. The interests of the American public are already heavily invested in sex, crime and the ephemera of politics." In other words, those interests may be sustained or intensified by the media, but they’re not created by the media.

Smith suspects the media affects public perception of blame not with its quantity of coverage, but with the presentation. "It isn’t by accident that the term for an item being covered as news is a ’story,”" he says. “Stories explicitly or implicitly place their characters in roles, and that is why the media seem to be implicated in the construction of presumptive guilt.

“Once the story is framed, it becomes very difficult to make major changes in the roles of the participants and still maintain credibility with the public without new and discordant ‘facts,’" he adds.

Framing a story, providing information amidst a landscape of villains and heroes, is nothing new. It’s how news has been delivered for decades: break down the complex into the personal. We’ve come to rely on the formula. Consider the daily transformation of complex political debate into partisan tales of conquest, or even coverage of the Olympics, reduced to “How Athlete X overcame (insert hardship here) to become a champion.”

So are we just watching a real-life soap opera, with the same media-programmed characters showing up every 15 minutes on cable news channels? Are we merely extrapolating in our minds the course of events that we’d expect were this fiction?

A successful news story needs a narrative, but Thompson notes that going by the straight facts of Condit-Levy case, there isn’t one narrative — there’s two: "There’s a woman gone missing, and no evidence as to her whereabouts. And there’s a congressman with whom she was romantically involved. So far, no evidence links the two stories. But, present the two together, and there will be a natural tendency in people’s minds to link them."

Of course, not everyone links the narratives. Out of curiosity, I asked a handful of friends for their thoughts on Levy’s fate. Less than half faulted Condit; some cooked up elaborate plots: Chandra hidden away in a South Malibu bungalow, pregnant with Gary Jr.; Chandra joining a circus; Chandra felled by a serial killer (most believe she is dead).

One friend, Linda, took creative liberties: "Ever since the election, things have been just plain weird in Washington," she said. As a sequel to Sen. Jim Jeffords leaving the Republican party, shifting control of the Senate, "[Condit] will eventually get booted out, a Republican will end up in [his seat] and the media can have another field day. Yes, I realize he’s a [representative], not a senator, but it makes a better plot point my way. You should never ask a writer these questions."

Of course, we are all writers in a sense — it’s just that most of us only exercise our imaginations inside our own minds. As we "write" the rest of the Levy story in our heads, perhaps we are simply following our storytelling instincts, gleaned from countless books and films — Condit’s the "bad guy," he’s acting as if he has something to hide, so why not pin it all on him? We’re all ready to stand in for Jessica Fletcher.

But this Murder, She Wrote syndrome aside, actual fiction writers do have the advantage of creation. "In a sense, they tell a story how we’re most comfortable hearing it," Thompson says. That is, one with a clear structure, closure, and often a happy ending, with justice served.

"The real world doesn’t have that,” he adds, “But the tendency is to watch news [and expect it] to supply the same closure."

Recent events have supplied us with just that: exposition, rising action, crisis, climax and denouement. It’s as if we’re collectively reliving ninth-grade English. O.J., Monica, and last year’s twin Florida titans, Elian and the recount, are perfect examples of what Thompson calls "news cooperating so well in being great fiction."

With Simpson, says Thompson, we had the long trial, culminating in the "climactic, unexpected not-guilty verdict. It behaved like a brilliantly crafted mystery." And as for Election Night and its aftermath? More incredulous than a John Le Carre novel. "Nobody would have believed that," Thompson says.

"There’s an oppressive force that [makes us] want news stories to be like the ones our mother read us," albeit with more blood and sex, Thompson says. And hence, as Smith argues, the characters in them fill certain roles. Does the public think Condit is guilty because of his status as the “villain,” or is it a consequence of the media’s portrayal of the congressman? Some of both, most likely.

Maybe Condit is just a scoundrel, a most unlucky scoundrel, who unexpectedly found himself in the midst of a missing person investigation. “It is so tempting to go to the idea of where there’s smoke, there must be a fire," Thompson says.

A raging fire, of course, makes a much better story.


News Forms
 
 
Every now and then, television will cut away from normal programming to show an event that is deemed to be of public significance or dramatic value, unfolding live on the screen. At times, during these exercises in reality, the television journalists are silent, watching along with the rest of us, rather than expressing what they have to say. At other times, they "frame" the events with spontaneous descriptions, sometimes explaining with great drama and moment what we are watching or what it might mean.

Such televised events are as close as news comes to anything resembling "reality" - unedited, unpackaged, with all the loose ends dangling. Television has the capacity to do a great deal of this but with the partial exception of C-Span, it doesn't and for a good reason - most events in their raw form aren't all that interesting to most people, and can't hold the attention of most audiences. They hold our attention when we live them mostly because they are happening to us and because they are something we have to go through to reach goals we have set or to find out what will happen in the unfolding of events that will affect our lives.
 
When we turn on the television or open a newspaper, it is precisely to avoid this mundane world of unpackaged life – of waiting for the water to boil or waiting on hold, trying to figure out directions or filing our bills. And so, instead of life, what the news media gives us is what fiction gives us -- stories, packaging, orchestration. It takes raw events (and a great many events staged for its benefit) and coverts them into narratives, brief and fast-moving narratives, that use techniques of literature, poetry, rhetoric, theater and film to create a sense of drama and excitement for audiences.

These stories typically have one or more narrators who may or may not be directly represented themselves inside the story. In most print stories, the narrator is the reporter who introduces him or herself with a byline and then politely disappears from the text, which may, however, still betray hints of his participation in the events described. In the case of television, the news is spoken by narrators who usually appear on screen at various points, and who are, themselves, very obviously narrator-characters in the story, although they may or may not have originated the words in the story they tell and rarely have taken or edited the pictures.

News, than, is something that is told to us, by journalist-narrators, like stories repeated around the proverbial dying embers of the campfire, and like most works of fiction, but unlike most television dramas, films and plays, which are made to appear to unfold before our eyes, without extraneous comment, as if we were looking in, unannounced, on life. It is this explicit narration or telling that ties the parts of news narratives or stories together, and gives them their meaning. Even when events do unfold before our eyes, as in the televising of live events, the journalists will, as noted, frame what we see and hear, at one point or another, with this same kind of narration.

There are also other elements that appear as part of news stories, of course – spoken or written quotes, photographs, videotapes, illustrations, recordings. Typically, these are intended to create a sense that the story contains "windows," which allow the audience to directly see into the events described, instead of merely being told about them. To create such a window, a written news story will typically refer to some situation, and to those involved, and then include a quote from the various parties or from other observers, to create a sense that the reader has now heard directly from the parties to the dispute or from others with some special knowledge. Similarly, a photograph accompanying a news story will create a sense that the reader has a visual porthole to some element referred to in the story - the scene of conflict, the prize being fought over, one or more of the players involved, and so forth.

This sense of peering directly at events has some truth to it, at least to the degree that quotes and photographs and videotapes are unretouched and unimproved, by the story's creators. But, in the end, these elements are really only more narrative - they are embedded in the verbal narration, explicitly or implicitly referred to by the narration, given their meaning by the narration, and used to illustrate and support the claims of the narration. Like the narration, they are abstracted from the stream of events, cropped and cut; and as with any narrative element, they can be given a different meaning, when other parts of the story are changed. Thus, the same quote can be made to seem to be a lie, a confession, or a disinterested observation, depending on how it is framed or referred to by other parts of the story. And the same series of events can provide very different photographs and quotes, depending on what the journalist chooses to abstract from events, to fit the news account.

In the case of print stories, narration and quotes seem to unfold along a single track, alternating with each other in a linear sequence. If there is a second track, of photographs or illustrations, it is usually spare and consists of one or a few visual elements, next to the verbal narrative.
In the case of television news, things are more complicated. Like print stories, television news is dominated by verbal narration - with journalist narrators, speaking to us directly, so the story unfolds in time as we listen to it, rather than being laid out on a page that we can take in, as a whole, in one or a few glances. When the journalist-narrator appears in video, which alternates with other videos that show elements of the story, it feels as if we are seeing the story unfold on a single track, not unlike print stories, in which narration alternates with quotes.

But here, the narration can also overlap the video, in which case the sound on the video may be reduced or suppressed, so the two elements are presented at the same time, or two pictures can be shown on the same screen, perhaps even with a spoken narration, moving us, so to speak, along two or more tracks at once, which weave around each other and overlap in interesting ways.

There is a far greater sense here than in print stories that the news is providing windows onto the world, allowing us to peer in on events and situations. As in the case of photographs in the print media, this has some truth to it. But, for the most part, once again, all these pictures and words are just more narrative. Whether the videos overlap with the narration or alternate with it, or any combination therein, there is still a constant crossover: it is the spoken narration that gives the pictures and sounds their meaning and these exist to illustrate what is being told in the spoken narration.

So, despite their differences, print and television news have certain similarities in form, although television has more possibilities to play with.* Both narrate a story that unfolds in a sequence, and that sequence often conveys information about one or more other sequences of events, some of which may be shown. Both use quotes from participants, witnesses and experts, any of whom may act as additional narrators, commenting on the story and saying things or adding believability in ways the journalistic narrator can't, not unlike the way an author telling a story will have characters tell parts of the story about other characters, inside the narrative. And both use pictures, although print stories will mostly use verbal descriptions.
 
In telling their stories, news stories also make use of an important form of point of view, which defines much of what they are. In essence, they allow audiences to see events as a whole, even if it is a whole partly constructed by journalists. News stories are a summary, a synthesis; they convey an illusory sense of omniscience, as if we see some segment of events in their totality, with all the parts brought together, so we can perceive the total pattern, including its meaning.

They create these wholes by describing and showing us events separated from us by time and space - events that are far away; that are blocked by physical barriers; that are too large or small, to slow or fast, for us to see, or that happened in the past. These same objects, places and events are, often, also separated from each other, so the story brings them together and weaves them into a single narrative. News stories similarly use speculation and illustrations, including fabricated computer images, to show us events as they have happened in the past or might be happening elsewhere or might happen in the future, to fulfill this same function of bringing information to us that we could not get otherwise.
 
And they allow us to understand events separated from us by differences of culture and language. They may even claim to give us a sense of what goes on in the minds of participants, through quotes, paraphrases and speculation. Thus, news allows audiences to peer into places that otherwise would be blocked from view, taking audiences to many locations, on a kind of journey through time and space, as they perpetually explain what events have to do with us and each other.
 
Putting these characteristics together, it is obvious that news offers a kind of mundane transcendence, allowing us to escape, at least in our thoughts and perceptions, from our physical limits, and surpass the normal obstacles of life. But it does so only to bring all these disparate elements together into the unity of the story. Everything serves the story and it is the story that ultimately conveys this sense of omniscience, by giving what is shown and described a meaning.

Thus, events will be abstracted from the flow of time and arranged in sequences, in and out of actual chronology, in ways designed to tell the story. A television news story, for example, may begin by showing the reporter-performer live, in "real" time. He or she may then introduce a video of a past event; then an illustration of an event in the more distant past and then a video of a more recent event in another part of the world. We are taken for a ride, but, as in roller coaster rides, it is very well orchestrated, and much of the experience is in the interrelation of the different moments.

Similarly, the news story weaves together scenes separated from each other by space; it globe trots, but always reveals how these scenes relate to each other. It shows us these scenes with a number of different kinds of physical perspectives, showing us events from a great distance, so we take it all in in a single gaze; and showing us events at close range or showing us what it is like to be immersed in the events in question. News stories constantly tack back and forth between these perspectives, with a great many gradations in between.
Each time the perspective jumps to a higher level, we lose a degree of detail. The ultimate overview, presumably, is of the known (or possible) universe, which can be provided not only by descriptions but by simulations. Of course, it is almost never provided to audiences, in part, because we have so little detail on it and because it seems to have so little relevance to our lives, given that the details we are centrally concerned with can be found at a level many scales down in magnitude. Views of the earth are similarly uncommon. Relatively common are views of events taken from the air or as if they are taken from the air, showing us events from a certain height, so that much or all of the event can be encompassed in a single scan or gaze. Television does this all the time, giving audiences an aerial view of the disaster or some part of the war, and print does it using photographs. Print and television can also provide maps, models and other renderings, which display the layout and setting of events. And print and television can also provide a description of scenes and settings with words.
 
In any case, news stories often tack back and forth between overviews and closer range views of events, frequently switching back and forth a number of times in the course of the story, providing audiences with a sense of great freedom and power, as they vicariously sweep in and out of events and gather their meaning. At close range, we are given what the war looks like on the ground: the crumbling cities; the people fleeing on the road; the soldiers dug in to their positions . At times, we seem to see things through the eyes of participants, not unlike the Humphrey Bogart movie that created the illusion audiences were seeing everything through the eyes of the protagonist.

But even here, there is a sense, often conveyed in accompanying narrative, that we are outside looking in, coming in for a sample only so we can appreciate the larger view, like the mythological Greek Gods who appeared in Earthly form but remained in another, higher dimension.
 
But, ultimately, the ability to offer us a sense of mundane transcendence is made possible by the story. It is the story that gives everything else presented and described its meaning shows the connection between the things. The story creates a framework of meaning, a model, that allows us, to perceive (or believe we perceive) larger situations, and not merely scenes and actions.
 
This ability to tack back and forth between near and far perspectives, to show the links connecting events across time and space, and to reveal events at great distances, is by no means something limited to news, nor is it something new. Television, film and literature tell their stories the same way, but with fictional events, settings, characters. This ability is ultimately based on basic faculties of cognition and imagination, which do the same things with the ghostlike pictures of the mind. Indeed, an historical study might well trace the emergence of our ability to think in this mode, in texts and pictures. Of course, in all previous ages, story-tellers who were describing actual events were limited by their own lack of mobility. Today, forms of transportation, communications, long distance sensing devices and recording technologies provide a technological infrastructure for our ever-expanding ability to engage in mundane transcendence.

In fact, this ability to engage in mundane transcendence is increasingly becoming a basic mode of everyday existence. Today, it relies on the news media and entertainment, which is to say it relies mostly on television, as well as film, and secondarily on newspapers, magazines and radio. It is also an important feature of computers which will increasingly gives us the ability to choose what we watch, and manipulate the images and perspectives, even as we are connected to a vast network of information. It seems likely that in the not-too-distant future, we will choose our perspective on computer screens as we look at our own homes and property, look at other locations, and view events through new forms of computer news.
 
It should also be noted that news stories don’t bring together all these elements merely by putting them together in a single story. Rather, they must be artfully woven together into a story, a goal that journalists (and other story tellers) achieve through the use of "connectives." Connectives are devices of both form and medium and content, that are used, as the name implies, to turn various parts into a whole. One kind of connective that is in the realm of content, are all the statements made explaining to audiences and readers what the subject of the story is, that ties all the information together. Some will typically appear at the beginning, which are used to define and delimit the story -- it is about this, but not that -- but stories may have various explanations like this sprinkled throughout. These may also be used to explain the connection of a quote or photograph or illustration to a text. Thus, a caption may be used to explain the connection of a photo to a story. Just before a quote, a transitional sentence may explain that we are about to hear the view of Senator So and So, who represents one side in the ongoing litigation just described. Here, we are viewing efforts to weave a story together, to create a coherent whole, by ensuring that audiences understand the connection between elements.
 
Another "connective" that provides this sense of continuity for the reader, is simply the use of the same elements - the same events, characters, and so on, this being the actual continuity of the story itself, at least as perceived by the journalist. But, in addition, journalists (and other communicators) also use a degree of verbal artifice to smooth transitions and create a constant bridge. They may start off a sentence with all kinds of "linking" words and phrases, whose primary purpose is to appear to join it to the sentence above it, as in the use of such phrases as: "In any case...," "But...," or "Then again..." The journalist may use same key word in two sequential sentences or use parallel structure in sentences, to create a sense of unity. Quotes may also be chosen (and altered) so that they link up with the earlier narrative, through the repetition of words and subject, without explicitly announcing to the reader that a relevant quote is about to be provided.

Many "straight" news stories may actually be spare in the use of such connective, compared to some other kinds of rhetoric, because they give the audience a pared down account of events, frequently with an austere style. Often, one of the elements we refer to when we say writing is done with style is precisely the use of these elements to smooth the flow and carry the reader along, effortlessly and without sharp breaks that cause the reader to try to figure out what connection one element has to those that have gone before, pulling him or her out of the immersion in the story and the world it creates...

In the case of television, in which communications may take place on more than one track, there are all kinds of possibilities for linking parts. Anchors may provide lead-ins that provide an overall frame, defining what the story is about; spoken words may overlap with the images they describe; similar images may follow each other, and so on, creating a more dynamic linkage that fits the more complex story form possible with the interaction of moving pictures, other visual elements, sounds, and words.

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