Igor Vobič(2023): “It’s Not as Neat Television Like Before The Epidemic”: Analysing the Visuality of Television Journalism During the Covid-19 Crisis

Abstract

The study explores the (re)negotiated visuality of television journalism during the first wave of the epidemic in Slovenia and on this basis examines the visibility of the COVID-19 crisis. Institutionalised procedures and relations of production together with the conventional visual-aural news form are analysed by assessing journalism’s (cl)aims of bringing relevant events and disputes to public attention, uncovering hidden social realities, and enabling people to engage in public life. By combining qualitative interviews with journalists and editors of public television and the leading commercial broadcaster with ethnographic content analysis of the lead news packages, the study reveals “not as neat television like before the epidemic”, albeit a detailed analysis of the mechanisms for ensuring veracity in the newscasts showed “business as usual” in television journalism. Although the two newsrooms (cl)aimed to be performing in line with the journalism’s normative foundations, chiefly monitoring disputes, deviances and changes, making them visible for people in their public engagements and encounters with power, the study points to the emergence of “kaleidoscopic vision”. Namely, television journalism provided a shifted, fractured and scrambled vision of the COVID-19 crisis defined by competing, conflicting and dysfunctional narratives articulated in the contradictory (dis)connect within the journalism–power–citizenry nexus.

Published in Journalism Practice 2024, Volume 18 No.1, pages 27-47.

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