I was channel surfing this morning and inadvertently stopped on Fox News just as they began a story on the arrest of a Russian man caught trying to sell highly enriched uranium in Georgia during a string operation. During the broadcast they ran footage from one of TV show “24”’s most recent episodes, in which a nuclear bomb went of in Los Angeles. They aired this footage and then cut to a picture of Jack Bauer as they described the real-life nuclear threat posed by this potential uranium sale. At first I didn’t know what to think. I was a bit confused over whether they had gone to commercial or the story was real, although I quickly caught on to what the network was doing: using a cheap entertainment ploy to garner interest.
It sickens me that a news channel believes that it is appropriate to mix footage from entertainment programs with real-life news broadcasts. I am unaware of when it became acceptable to make comparisons between the threats posed on “24” and those in real life, and it speaks volumes of the quality of the Fox News broadcast.
This connects quite well to the first chapter of Practices of Looking, is it pertains to how different viewers make meaning from images. Since I was watching the news, I expected what I was seeing to be reality. Instead of the informative images based in reality that I was expecting, I got fictional shots from a television series I happen to be a big fan of. Now, had I not been an avid viewer of “24,” would those images have affected me differently? Maybe somebody that doesn’t watch “24” would have panicked, thinking a nuclear attack had really just transpired, since they were watching the news and expecting the stories and visuals to be accurate and informative.
This mixing of Jack Bauer into the broadcast says a lot about the blur television has created between entertainment and the news. This was a technique used to try and make the news more interesting, hoping to draw in fans of “24,” to the story. It was sensationalization of a serious story, which seems to be all too typical in today’s news. It also shows that we have come to see fictional TV series like “24,” as serious, perhaps even accurate, reflections of the world around us. We are going to be a very confused crowd as the lines between news and entertainment, fiction and reality continue to blur like this, as television and the news seem to be holding themselves to lower and lower standards. People will need to begin to shift the way in which they treat visuals and make meaning from images, as sources no longer hold on to their traditional roles. It is amazing to think that many of the things that come almost second-nature to us, like treating a news broadcast as credible, are rapidly eroding. It is going to be much harder to decode images in the future as sources multiply and leave their traditional functions. It's happened before, but can it happen again, with pictures and TV?
Saturday, January 27, 2007
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2 comments:
This is a great post -- really excellent! Exactly what I had in mind. I love that you brought in the image from 24 and also the historical example. And of course, Fox news always provides good materials for critique!
Oh, Fox news! I wonder if they even take themselves seriously.
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