studio metonymically stands in for, is substituted for, a reality which
cannot be otherwise represented, such as the audience itself.
Television news is an important starting point for understanding the
temporal life of audience communities. Whether on free-to-air or cable,
television news functions as a hub around which other kinds of program-
ming are organized. The major evening bulletin provides a time-mark for
the end of the working day and the beginning of a sense of private con-
trol of one’s pleasure. This time-mark is itself heavily promoted by the
networks in the expectation that news service loyalty will lead to channel
loyalty for the rest of the evening. Freeway billboards and internal pro-
motion aggressively market news programming for its comprehensive-
ness, its parochial expertise, or simply because the presenters appeal to
the image of a surrogate family who will look after the viewer’s needs.
The format of news itself provides comfort to audiences in the very
regularity of its structure. On commercial media this format usually
involves some variation of a proven sequence, beginning with stories that
have photo opportunities, car crashes, local politicians, national then
international sound bites, followed by a three-minute world news round-
up, sport, weather and the mandatory human interest story in conclusion.
The predictability of such programming, and the fact that its affective
pattern shows little variation, from violence-rage, to public figures offer-
ing a voice of reason, to the closure of a cat rescued from a tree, offers a
constancy in viewers’ lives that may compensate for the disorder of the
working day. Thus, the performativity of the news is carried by both its
formulaic sequencing and its serialization from day to day.
No other television genre quite has this constancy and availability,
which is why news is invariably a flagship for channel loyalty. The point
here is that this quality of constancyis evident independently of the actual
content of news texts. That narrative details change each day reaffirms the
durability of the genre itself. Thus the ritual of television news is not
related to any kind of bardic ‘textual’ function of representation (see Fiske
and Hartley, 1978), but to the fact of its performance and the authority of
this performance.
The metaphysical grounding of such authority is a doctrine of repre-
sentation as vision, in which language is a ‘system of representation’
rather than a form of activity (see Carey, 1989: 80). But also, news is
invested with an authority by which its producers are bestowed with the
power to metonymically manage, codify and organize the representation
of the world for us. The world is substituted by a referential format that
‘stands in’ for some larger, unknown reality.
As a visual, ephemeral medium, television news elevates the doctrine
of expressive realism to a high point that is expressed in the fetish of the
‘photo opportunity’. The ephemeral dimension which distinguishes TV
news from the press is its preoccupation with ‘live’ footage. The expecta-
tions of ‘liveness’, which are in conflict with the regulated timetabling of
television news, is accommodated by the continuous obsession withTelecommunity 215Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 215