Television news and the nation: The end?

Menahem Blondheim*, Tamar Liebes

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

The golden age of television news gave a large majority of otherwise diverse Americans a unified, seamless, and clear-cut image of their nation, its central players, and its agenda. Carefully scheduled, edited, sequenced, and branded, heard and seen simultaneously across America, it provided a pretense of order to the chaos that is news. The permanence and stability of the nation, as expressed in a complex way by TV news, provided Americans with an all-important sense of existential security experienced on an unarticulated emotional level. Today, a disjointed news environment is crushing the nature of network news as a transitional object. Television news no longer reassures viewers by connecting them to a surmountable world out there but carries them on a loop from themselves to themselves.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)182-195
Number of pages14
JournalAnnals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume625
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2009

Keywords

  • Nationalism
  • News
  • News technologies
  • Telegraph
  • Television
  • Transitional object

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