1. WK 7 – “REALITY TV AND NEWS”
- NEWS AND SOCIETY
Dr. Carolina Matos
Lecturer in Media and Communications
Department of Sociology
City University London

2. Readings for week 7
• Required:
• Creeber, Glen, Miller, Toby and Tulloch, J. (eds.) (2008) The Television
Studies Genre Book, BFI, see section on “reality TV”
• Holmes, S. and Jermyn, D. (eds.), ‘Introduction: Understanding Reality TV’
in Understanding Reality TV, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp.1 -32.
• Additional:
• Dovey, Jon (2009) ‘Simulating the Public Sphere’ in Austin and De Jong
(ed.) Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices Open
University Press, pp. 246-258
• Fiske, John (1999) ‘The Codes of Television’ in Marris and Thornham (ed.)
Media Studies: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press. pp220-231
• Matos, C. (2012) Media and politics in Latin America: globalization,
democracy and identity, London: I.B. Tauris, p. 114-139
• Tunstall, J. (2010) “Anglo-American, global, and Euro-American media
versus media nationalism” in D. Thussu, (Ed), International
Communication: A Reader, pp 239-244

3. Main themes
• Television theories: a historical and theoretical context
• News on television (commercial and public)
• Entertainment versus “serious” news
• The public versus “private” dichotomy
• How to analyse a TV news programme
• Globalisation of television and formats
• Reality TV: “realism” and entertainment
• Clips: Reality TV editing and Big Brother (2000-2010)
• Conclusions
• Seminar activities and questions
• Readings for week 10

4. Questions asked
• How can we define and understand “popular factual programming”?
• What is “reality TV”?
• Can it be more “real” than documentary and news?
• In what way is news different from “reality TV”?
• Is popular television “ideological”? How can we analysis it?
• Reality TV as the first international genre:
• Is this a consequence of the increasing globalization of television, its genres
and formats?
• Is “reality TV” a result of the increasing democratisation of television and its
appeal to mass audiences?
• Is “reality TV” contributing to undermine “serious genres” (i.e. like classic
documentary and hard news)?
• Is it “dumbing down” TV ?
• Can we talk about “genres”, or should we concentrate on “formats”?

5. “Reality TV” and news: realism and
entertainment

6. Television audience theories and entertainment (in
Matos, 2012)
• Traditional views on entertainment by the Frankfurt School:
• “…entertainment was seen in a negative light by Adorno (1950) in The
Authoritarian Personality, mainly as being a vehicle used by the cultural
industries to manipulate the consciences of the population and provide them
with escapist and fantasy material that would boost individualistic attitudes
and undermine collective action (Curran and Seaton, 1997, 267). It was also
closely connected to the idea of the ‘hypodermic needle’ and the injection of
particular capitalist values into the mindset of passive audiences”.
• High brow versus low brow culture:
• “Entertainment was thus constructed in sharp opposition to ‘serious’ news
and ‘high’ culture, seen as enlightening and authentic art in opposition to
mass culture, perceived as a ‘low’ form of cheap and mass produced art for
easy consumption and dismissal”.
• Discussion in the literature on the “negative” effects of TV viewing.

7. “Entertainment” versus “serious” TV news (in
Matos, 2012)
• “Television can be seen as a site of contested struggle, having both
progressive as well as reactionary tendencies”
• A more complex understanding of the role of television in contemporary
societies and in everyday life shows that it is one among many influences on
an individual (i.e. peer pressure, etc), but also it makes evident the fact that
entertainment does not necessarily need to stand in opposition to ‘serious’
journalism, quality programming or politics.
• “For media entertainment can articulate various social values and identities,
which can ‘strongly influence political positions…’ (Curran, 2002, 238)”.
• “Both ‘serious’ and ‘entertainment’ genres (i.e. talk shows, sci-fi) are shown
on both private and public television. Quality entertainment can be
enlightening. What is deemed problematic is a heavy entertainment diet
purposely undermining the media’s democratic civic duty and
encouragement of in depth analyses and political debate. Such a style is
generally associated with a more paternalistic and populist stance.”

8. Television viewing in the UK and the public sphere
(in Matos, 2012)
• Public versus commercial television:
• “The report The ownership of the news of the Select Committee on
Communications of the House of Lords (07/08) indicated a fall in the
viewing of television in the UK amongst mainly the younger strata of the
population. Other research work has come to similar results, underscoring a
fall in viewing which includes also socially excluded and ethnic minorities.
These groups have began to turn away from PSB (Tambini and Cowling,
2004, 173)”.
• Criticism towards the ‘elitist’ nature of PSB, which placed further pressures
on UK broadcasters to invest in more entertaining programmes capable of
catering to younger audiences.
• Reality TV as entertainment?:
• The genres associated to entertainment (i.e. talk-shows, sit-coms, fantasy,
sci-fi, see Table 1) have an advantage over the ‘serious’ television material
(i.e. historical narratives, documentaries and in depth reporting).

9. What is reality TV?
• Similarly to documentary, there is a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty
regarding how to define and pin down exactly what reality TV is (or
‘popular factual programming’)
• “Reality TV” has been caught up in the debates regarding the “dumbing
down” of television (i.e. elitism discourses), the “democratisation” of TV or
the excessive shift towards entertainment and commercialisation at the
expense of “serious news”
• Reality TV has come to occupy an important place in contemporary
television culture
• Corner (in Holmes and Jermyn, 2004) has suggested that we now live in a
“post-documentary” culture. This is a term used to suggest its relocation as a
set of practices and forms
•

10. Understanding “reality TV”(in Holmes and
Jermyn, 2004)
• According to Kilborn, “reality TV” could be considered as:
• “recording ‘on the wing’, and frequently with the help of lightweight video
equipment, of events in the lives of individuals and groups;
• the attempt to stimulate such real-life events through various forms of
dramatised reconstruction
• the incorporation of this material in suitably edited form into an attractively
packaged television programme which can be promoted on the strength of its
reality credentials.”
• In short, what “unites the range of programming conceivably described as
‘reality TV’ is primarily its discursive, visual and technological claim to ‘the
real’.

11. Understanding “reality TV” (in Holmes and
Jermyn, 2004)
• “Debates on the definition are enmeshed with the concept of generic
hybridity in reality TV, its relationship with the history and status of the
documentary form…”
• The early work on ‘reality TV’ was primarily ‘real’ crime texts, both in the
US as well as in the UK.
• The period of the early 1990’s, with the combination of economics,
scheduling practice and cultural change would see a huge expansion of
actuality-based programming.
• A wide range of productions can be classified as “reality TV” - A
significant shift in the field has been the emergence of global ‘event’
formats of “reality TV’’ (i.e. Big Brother, Popstars and Survivor) during
1999-2001.
• Since the 1980s, there have been changes in national TV systems, with a
shift towards privatisation, de-regulation and new technologies
(multiplication of cable and satellite, ‘crisis’ of PSBs)

12. Globalisation of television formats (in Holmes et al
and Matos, 2012)
• In such a scenario, we see not just the exportation of popular programming
throughout the world, but also format circulation and adaptation
• Many national markets do not have strong production industries to create all
the programming required, and the format carries the advantage of being
able to adapt locally an idea that has been tested and proven successful
• Such a reality also raises issues of cultural imperialism, and the dominance
of Western programming, and mainly American genres, formats and shows,
on weaker markets throughout the world
• As Holmes et al (2004) has argued, “the accumulated importance of the
format is a product of the multichannel environment in other ways given that
the increasing fragmentation of audiences accentuates the economic
importance to ensure the popularity (and economic viability) of particular
programmes (Moran, 1998: 18)”.
• I.e. In the UK, Big Brother has given C4 some of its highest audience ratings
in its 21 year history

13. British television and globalization (in McNair, 1998,
2009)
• In 1989, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched Sky News, Britain’s
first 24 hour TV news channel as part of its Sky Television service.
• “Sky News was Britain’s domestically-produced 24 hour TV news service,
although the US-produced Cable Network News (CNN), owned by Ted
Turner, had been available since 1985 to those with the technology.”
• There was another satellite provider of news, the British Satellite
Broadcasting, which was launched 14 months after Sky but eventually both
would emerge into BSkyB (50% owned by News Corporation, 16% by
Pearson)
• The British public was slow to take up satellite, and cable services would
struggle to penetrate the market until the end of the 1990’s
• By 2008 however, more than 8 million British households had access to Sky
TV.
•

14. Analysing TV news (in Creeber et al, 2008)
• We tend to think of news as information only, rather than as an
entertainment service.
• How can we analyse news? There are many ways of doing this
• We can decide to focus just on the text (textual or semiotic analysis)
• Creeber et al (2008) suggest that we look at the media coverage of other
comparable events as a point of comparison to the issue that we are looking
at
• Once we have chosen the sample, we can adopt a procedure for analysis,
including a coding frame if necessary
• The coding frame can include a set of criteria for categorising each news
item or news programme
• Who is represented? There can be various categories of appearance: 1)
quoted without being seen; 2) quoted next to the photograph; 3) shown
speaking on camera

15. Analysing TV news (in Creeber et al, 2008)
• Textual and content analysis
• How can we study TV news as a text?
• We can look at the visual elements of the story, the graphics and the design,
the actuality footage, the institutional voices, the narration, the action and
dialogue, and we also consider the context under which it has been produced
• News production: professional-organizational elements (i.e. editors and
journalists and the decision-making process, the relationship of the company
to professional journalistic values and its routine organisations), influence of
cultural values, role of sources, as well as ownership and its impact on the
shaping of news and ideological concerns
• What are the differences between a TV news broadcast on a public
broadcaster (i.e. BBC) to a commercial one?:
• Audiences’ needs are also increasingly influencing the construction of news
values (and also TV programming, such as the demand for reality TV)

16. Analysing TV news (in Creeber et al, 2008 and
Matos, 2012)
• Similarly to our discussions of the differences in the reporting of newspapers
of a particular issue, it is important to understand the differences between
television channels, and the implications of the public versus private
dichotomy

17. ‘Private’ versus ‘public’ dichotomy
Private Public
Right/Conservative/Centre/Left – the
consumer
Centre/Left/Liberal/some
conservatives - citizen
‘Objective’ and informational
journalism
‘Objective’/’public’/’serious’ journalism
Talk shows/sit-coms/reality TV –
American programming, some content
from other countries
Realism in films/documentaries/reality
TV – ‘arty’ and European
programming, some US material
Advertising/aesthetic of consumerism
– self/intimacy/the private sphere (i.e.
Sci-fi, horror)
‘Quality’ aesthetic/Challenging
material - collective/the public sphere
Dreamy/fantasy/’escapism’ texts –
occasional ‘serious’ material
Historical material/in depth analyses –
some entertainment (i.e. Soaps,
drama, sci-fi, horror).

18. “Direct and indirect media exports” (in Tunstall,
2010)
Some aspects of media globalization:
•Versioning is a variety of editing and translation. An importing TV
network buys eight hours of a TV mini-series and edits it to five
hours.
•Foreign financing – I.e. foreign owners of newspapers, magazines
or satellite TV channels claim not to interfere with the local editorial
team.
•Foreign commissioning of television programming is a common
practice of export versions of American satellite channels that want
to become local.
•A script-sale or format sale – I.e. Cheap device of a new channel is
to purchase the scripts of an American or British comedy. Script will
then be rewritten into the local language.
•Format sales – common in game and reality shows. An importing
TV network acquires access to useful production details and advice.

19. Globalization of media genres, news trends, political
campaigning techniques (in Matos, 2008 and Tunstall,
2010)
• Copying of a genre or editorial formula – I.e. If an African or Asian
TV network is about to make its first hospital drama, it may well
look at episodes of American, British, Mexican or Indian hospital
dramas…
• Globalization of media systems - the commercialization of the
media model, which many countries throughout the world began
to pursue since the 1980s’. Global companies (i.e. CNN).
• Global trends included: decline of public service broadcasting;
personalization of politics; human interest stories in news and
focus on celebrities.
• Genres – Big Brother franchise; reality TV; talk-shows, etc.
• News formats, content and journalistic practices (Anglo-
American liberal media model)

20. Problems with the definitions of TV genres and
cultural value (in Holmes and Jermyn, 2004)
• Due to its fluid formats and self-reflexive economy, TV is resistant as a
medium to the rigidity implied in the category of genre
• “Reality TV is evidence of the ways in which TV has increasingly combined
this with a very self-reflexive and self-conscious interplay between different
programme forms”
• Issues of cultural value and how it represents the ‘real’:
• Traditionally, reality TV has emphasised its “documentation” of “ordinary
people” and their daily lives, but its development has seen an increased
focus on “celebrities”
• Many producers of Big Brother for instance, according to Roscoe’s research,
have seen it as a real-life soap because of its relationship with editing and its
normative construction.
• Quality programming versus “trash” TV (quality for whom?)

21. ‘Reality TV’ versus documentary

22. Codes of television: popular television and
“ideology”
• Fiske (1999) uses the example of the TV series Hart to Hart to demonstrate
that popular TV is infused with ideology
• “If we adopt the same ideological practice in the decoding as the encoding
we are drawn into….a white, male, middle class American of conventional
morality.”
• Methods of analysis: semiotics, content and textual analysis
• Effects on the audience of “popular television”:
• “This analysis has not only revealed the complexity of meanings encoded in
what is frequently taken to be shallow and superficial, but it also implies that
this complexity….has a powerful effect upon the audience. It implies that
the wide variety of codes all where to present a unified set of meanings that
work to maintain, legitimate and naturalise the dominant ideology of
patriarchal capitalism.”

23. The codes of television (in Fiske, 1999)
• An event to be televised is already encoded by social codes such as those of:
• Level One:
• ‘Reality’ appearance, dress, make up, environment, behaviour, speech,
gesture, expression, sound, etc
• These are encoded electronically by technical codes…:
• Level Two:
• Representation camera, lighting, editing, music, sound
• which transmit the conventional representational codes,
which shape the representation of: narrative, conflict, character, action,
dialogue, setting, casting
• Level Three:
• Ideology which are organised into coherence and social
• acceptability by the ideological codes, such as those of:
• individualism, patriarchy, race, class, materialism, capitalism, etc.

24. ‘Reality TV’ versus documentary: what is ‘fact’
and what is ‘fiction’?
• As Holmes et al (2004) have noted, the capacity of television to blur the
boundaries between fact and fiction continues to be open to debate
• Question that is raised by the Creative Director of Endemol is what is the
difference between the construction of reality, and the editing, that exists in
a documentary as well
• ‘Reality TV’ constantly appears in quotation marks due to its contested
claim to represent ‘the real’.
• Issues of audience engagement and interactivity:
• What is the (global) appeal of ‘reality TV’?
• Relationship of ‘reality TV’ to the documentary and soap-opera:
• Fact-fiction hybrids such as reality TV, docu-soaps, talk shows and reality
game shows are seen as a break away from the classic documentary style
and its approach and conception of the real

25. Big Brother UK 2000-2010
• (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ct8qENC-0A )

26. Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe - Reality TV Editing
• (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBwepkVurCI )
• Question: How “real” is reality TV?

27. Some conclusions and questions for thought
• How real is “reality TV”?
• But then, how “real” is documentary and news?
• Discussions regarding reality TV should move away from the focus only on
its cultural value, to include a more sophisticated understanding of the text,
its national and global appeal, as well as its relationship to formatting, genre
and to globalisation
• Similarly to documentary, “reality TV” carries ambiguities in its definition
and conception within the context of a medium such as television which is
fluid and open to hybridity and the blurring between fact and fiction
• As Corner (in Holmes et al, 2004) notes, the documentary however can be a
starting point to discuss “reality TV”
• It is possible to analyse TV texts through semiotics, and also examine the
ways in which popular TV texts are socially constructed and carry within
them many ideological elements

28. Seminar activities and questions
• General questions:
• What is “reality TV”? How is it different from documentary? Do you see it as having
lowered quality standards? In your opinion, what is the nature of its appeal and why
does it play such an important part in contemporary television culture?
• What is the relationship between television news and the public sphere? Can reality
TV contribute for a better understanding of social and political issues?
• Seminar activity:
• Think of a Big Brother episode that you have seen and discuss it in
relation to the following questions:
• How ‘real’ was it? Was there a lot of editing? Did it shows us the lives of
‘ordinary people’? Did it attempt to clarify our understanding of a current
issue? Why was it entertaining? Would you classify it as “quality
programming”? In what way was it different from a documentary, or
similar?

29. Readings for week 8
• Required reading:
• Bruzzi, S., ‘New British observational documentary: ‘docusoaps’ in New
Documentary: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, pp.75-98.
• Nichols, Bill (1991) ‘The Fact of Realism and the Fiction of Objectivity’ in
Representing Reality. Indiana University Press. pp165-201
• Additional:
• Dovey, J. (2000), ‘McDox’R’Us - Docu-soap and the Triumph of Trivia’ in
Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television, London: Pluto,
pp.133-153
• Kilborn, Richard and Izod, John (1997) ‘Tackling the Text: Documentary
Analyses’ in An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting
Reality. Manchester University Press 88-115
• Scharrat and Luhr (2005) ‘Bowling for Columbine: A Review’ in Corner,
John, ed. New Challenges for Documentary 2nd Ed. Manchester University
Press pp253-267