The evening network news on TV is a prominent feature of American culture and, indeed, has assumed the status of a national institution.  Each day tens of millions of Americans tune in to the network news and receive what for many of them is their primary access to the wider public world, from which they only glean partial and specialized fragments in their everyday lives of work and leisure.  The network news is fundamentally a series of reports or samples of a broad and contemporary human environment which it is impossible for any individual or primary group to grasp in direct perception.  Yet despite its inaccessibility to concrete acquaintance, that greater environment is often decisively formative of mundane existence, posing dangers and opportunities for it.  The intrinsic appeal of network news, which cannot be reduced to any extraneous cultural or social factor, is that it provides a channel for responding to salient features of an environment which is our own but with which none of us individually is wholly in direct contact.    

          The rise of network news as the major form in which the wider world is mediated to individuals and primary groups has occasioned a large scholarly and critical literature.  That literature has predominantly situated the news in a number of interpretative contexts that are not endogenous to it.  For example, one focus of scholarly studies has been on the effectiveness of TV news in communicating information about public events.  Those studies, which interpret TV news in the context of liberal‑democratic ideals of enlightened citizenship, uniformly show that the news fails to convey lasting knowledge of public affairs to those who do not utilize other information media.  They point out what the TV news fails to do, not what it does  (see,e.g., 8, 24, 26, 29).              

          Another sector of commentary on TV news seeks to understand the factors that condition the content of its stories.  Ranging from criticisms and analyses of liberal bias from the right and class bias from the left, to reflections on how the presentation of the news is conditioned by pervasive cultural values, this part of the literature demystifies the political, social, and cultural impartiality of TV news (see, e.g., 1, 3, 10, 11, 13, 21, 22, 23). Often, in detailing substantive bias, media criticism discovers some of the forms and procedures by which TV news produces that bias.  But although the critical literature often provides significant insight into the mode in which bias is transmitted, such insight is not its major purpose. Its focus is on the social and cultural contexts of TV news and not so much on what the network news does, how it is generally constituted to produce a typical kind of response in its audience.    

          Finally, a few studies have situated the news in the context of TV as an entertainment medium, revealing how its contents are rekeyed in the form of pleasurable spectacle   (see, e.g., 20, 27). Such efforts come much closer than the others to disclosing what TV news does, but they reveal only a subsidiary aspect of its intentionality.  TV news conveys more than the pleasure of its text.     

          The extant literature on TV news provides important insight into its place in contemporary American culture.  Understanding that the news does not provide lasting knowledge of public affairs need not only lead to a reflection on its failure to educate democratic citizens but may also raise the possibility that it does something entirely different.  Similarly the criticisms of substantive bias alert inquiry to the fact that TV news is a producer of perspectives, not a report of neutral fact.  And the interpretation of TV news as entertainment directs investigation toward the endogenous forms in which the news takes up its varied contents.  The contributions of the literature, however, remain disparate and even when added together do not comprise an integral vision of TV news, because they do not isolate the news as a social act with a unique intentionality.  It is in terms of the guiding intentionality of TV news that the various contemporary reflections about it become intelligible as factors in the constitution of a single and comprehensible phenomenon^[i] .    

          The evening network news will be understood here as the rhetorical production of attitudes, dispositions, and sentiments toward public objects.  In order to understand and substantiate this thesis it will be necessary to clarify briefly the place of attitudes in social action, what they are and how they function in human experience.  Then the ground will be cleared for showing how the form of TV news is a set of rhetorical strategies for communicating and cultivating attitudes, and for identifying some of the pervasive attitudes that it transmits (31).  Only after that analysis is completed will the cultural significance of TV news begin to appear in the kind of public that it is geared to create.TV News and the Practical Mind     The basic interpretative shortcoming of many analyses of the TV news is to view it as a means for providing information about public affairs or, even worse

 

TV News and the Practical Mind

     The basic interpretative shortcoming of many analyses of the TV news is to view it as a means for providing information about public affairs or, even worse, critical knowledge about them.  A related limitation is to ignore the cognitive function of TV news altogether and to understand it primarily as a form of entertainment which is continuous with the rest of the television aesthetic.  It is undeniable that the network news transmits cognitive content; its stories are about contemporary events, conditions, and personalities.  And it is also true that the news is served up in an entertaining way, creating a kaleidoscopic spectacle for its audience that often fades into the docudrama or comedy of manners.  But an effort to attend to the news phenomenologically, to experience it without prior assumptions about its purposive context, to let it appear to the auditor for itself and to work its effect, reveals that it elicits a more comprehensive response than conventional wisdom allows.  Network news is not a mirror of the world as a whole, a theoretical totalization of that world, a presentation of objective facts about the public situation, or an illustration of a consistent ideology.  It is also clearly not a set of direct commands to act on the public scene, except in rare cases of immediate emergency, or a self‑contained aesthetic object.  It is something more primal than all of these, including components of each fused in an undifferentiated product.    

          The network news is a rhetorical restructuring of public objects which evokes attitudes toward them.  As it is used here the term "attitude" means a favorable or unfavorable response to an object, containing cognitive, affective, and, most importantly, volitional components.  To have an attitude toward something is to be well or ill disposed toward it, to respond to it as something desirable or undesirable to have in one's environment.  An attitude has a cognitive dimension in that it is about something which must have some minimal description, but it also fuses an emotional tone to that description, distinguishing it from an opinion, which abstracts judgment from emotion.  Cognition and emotion are synthesized in an attitude by a volitional charge of like or dislike, attraction or repulsion, that is more primal than any self‑conscious decision about how to behave toward an object.  Attitudes create decisional environments, climates of opinion, and coherent moods and sentiments when they are reflectively differentiated.  But as we come upon them in life they are primary responses to the world and its objects, the ways in which we become ready, pre‑reflectively, to meet the world.  As a rhetorical construction for evoking attitudes, TV news creates images of our current environment that are structured to induce typical responses.  The TV news does not appeal to the reflective ego but to the psyche interacting with its environment.  It does not present the psyche with objects to which it must determine its own response, but with objects embedded in constructed attitudinal responses.    

          TV news is a phase of the practical, not the theoretical, mind.  The notion of practical mind is kindred to the concepts of the social theory of George Herbert Mead and, more generally, of pragmatism in philosophy and symbolic interactionism in sociology.  For Mead, mentality is primarily a function of inclusive social action, that is, of the activity by which human beings sustain themselves in the world.  In Mead's theory of communication the symbol completes a truncated act in the imagination, giving rise to a world of language which doubles the world of physical behavior, permitting participants in group activity to prefigure their concrete responses to objects.^[ii] Communication here is mainly preparation for action, though it may also be diverted into play or speculation; that is, it has a practical root.  Considered as a phase of the practical mind, TV news creates an attitudinal climate for social acts.  It is not so much the context of planning, discussing, debating, and deciding, which characterizes the realm of politics, as it is the context in which people who are not directly involved in making and executing public decisions are disposed favorably or unfavorably toward public actions performed by others.  Network news is foremost a means of vicarious participation in public life, often taking on the aspect of spectator sport, and secondarily a more directly political mobilization of consent or dissent.  But the news normally dwells between the poles of vicarious and direct participation, cultivating general and often ambiguous and ambivalent attitudinal environments, fostering both quiescence and a readiness to respond in an uneasy mix.    

          The guiding intentionality of TV news is mimesis.  The rhetorical devices which are formative of the network news are geared to produce in its audience the same dispositions that are embedded in its stories and more generally in its total production as a program.  The invitation of TV news is to respond to its presentations in the same spirit in which they are offered:  it ingratiates in Kenneth Burke's sense.^[iii]  That is, the news does not encourage its audience to dispute it, to take a critical distance from it, or to use it for independent reflecting or imagining.  On the contrary, TV news offers its audience the opportunity to share in the attitudes that it has already formed toward public objects.  It is contrived to create dispositional unity.               The above analysis of the intentionality of TV news is based on a phenomenological viewing of it, on an effort to see what it does when it is apprehended without appeal to prior theoretical suppositions.  Such an analysis is the basis upon which a more complete understanding of TV news can be built, but it cannot stand alone.  It must first of all be substantiated by a study of the specific rhetorical strategies by which the network news works its effects.  Further afield, and not a primary concern of the present discussion, it can be illuminated by all of the critical literature on TV news.  The specific stories that appear on network news and the attitudinal responses that are embedded in them are contingent upon a complex web of economic, political, social, cultural, and mass psychological factors, from which each tendency in media criticism selects a few threads.  For example, the network news is involved in the struggle for ratings, must avoid alienating advertisers, must be attentive to vigilant social groups, must gain access to public actors and agencies, and must keep from incurring the wrath of regulators.  It also faces the technical constraints of deadlines, limited budgets, and the need for film.  All of these determining factors on the content and attitudinal response of TV news have been treated in the literature.  The present discussion is not meant to answer the question about which factors are the most important in shaping the contents of network news, but is confined to showing what the network news does and how it does it, regardless of its content.  But it is also necessary to remember that rhetorical strategies are not attitudinally neutral.  The TV news does evoke certain typical attitudes which form a general dispositional environment in which more specific and contingent responses appear.  Identifying those typical attitudes in relation to the rhetorical constructions that convey them is a major concern of the present discussion.       

          The unity of the TV news resides in its rhetorical form, in the ways in which it remakes its contents to evoke attitudes, dispositions, and sentiments.  Its variety stems from the irreducible multiplicity of the public world, including voting masses, competing social groups, concentrations of economic power, the state and political organizations, the leisure culture, and received traditions.  The unifying structure of TV news points to its integrity as a form of cultural life and its diversity to the difficulty in totalizing its contents, which are often compromise formations that register stubborn social and cultural conflicts.  The root of the diversity of network news in social dispersion and tension also indicates that those who construct the news are not necessarily aware of the fundamental intentionality of their social practice.  Some of them may realize that they are producing attitudinal responses for mimesis, but others may believe that they are purveyors of public information, enlighteners of public opinion, political advocates, or entertainers.  The intentions of the news fabricators are not the intentionality of the TV news, which can only be grasped in phenomenological reflection and analyzed and substantiated by a study of its rhetorical construction.

 

The General Rhetorical Structure of the News Program            The attitudes generated by TV news for mimesis can be divided into those which remain constant over time and those which vary according to circumstance.  The objects toward which dispositions remain the same are general, comprising the news show itself, the world, and the audience.  These three objects can be visualized in a triangular relation, in which the TV news is the mediating apex.  The network news functions as the link between the audience and the wider public world, or at least viewers are encouraged to take that orientation.    

          The rhetorical formulations which bind audience to world through the news are not subtle.  The title of the ABC network news is "The World News Tonight."  Tom Brokaw, NBC's anchorman, sits in front of an elaborate set in which one major panel, the usual backdrop for his talking‑head shots, is a map of the world.  The moving graphic over which the title of the CBS network news first appears and to which the show returns from each advertising break is a stylized map of the world. Dan Rather, the CBS anchor, often closed his shows with the remark:  "And that's some of our world."  The inclusion of at least one news story each evening that originates, at least in part, outside the United States is another device to persuade viewers to see the TV news as comprehending the whole world.            The other side of the rhetorical linkage, the viewer, is brought into the relation through a number of devices.  Foremost among them is the absence of the theatrical "fourth wall" which characterizes most TV shows.  The fourth wall allows the viewer to be omniscient, to spy on a slice of life in which the actors behave as if they were spontaneous and unobserved.  Most movies, theatrical dramas, and TV shows use the fourth wall as a rhetorical device to create believability.  The exceptions to this generalization, which were discussed cogently by Berthold Brecht in reference to theater, occur when actors acknowledge the audience and, thus, establish a social relationship with it.  Television shows which purport to be non‑fictional have always practiced the arts of ingratiation involved in achieving a cordial relationship with their viewers, sometimes using a "live" studio audience to mediate the viewer to the actors and to interpret what the actors do to the viewer. The network news emphasizes the inclusion of the distant audience in the show, focussing the mediating role on the anchor.    

          The anchor speaks directly to the audience, employing the conventional bracketing social forms that initiate, continue, and terminate social interaction, thereby drawing the audience into a friendly attitude through forms of address such as "hello," "good night," and "see you tomorrow."  The anchor lets the viewers know that he is bringing the world to them and not merely allowing them to observe the interaction between the world and the news staff.  The audience is told that "I am bringing you the news" and is constantly reminded before each advertising break that it will soon be treated to certain stories.  Finally, the parting words are some variant of Walter Cronkite's "That's the way it is," signifying that the audience has been told about the world.        The anchor is styled as a confident, benevolent, and friendly expert who is performing an important service for the audience, someone who engenders respect, authority, and positive affect.  He is the focal point for mediating the contributions of correspondents, experts, newsmakers, and commentators who enter and leave the news set (18). Each of the world's representatives initially addresses not the viewer but the anchor.  The camera angle often captures this relation, showing the anchor facing the audience and the other contributor in profile, facing the anchor.  This device further establishes the linking function of the anchor and strengthens the sense of his authority.  The role of the anchor as benevolent and expert authority disposes the audience to accept the veracity of the news and to share in the attitudes embedded in its stories.  The air of friendly and efficient professionalism does not foster a critical spirit, but an easy and trusting acceptance of the contents conveyed by the news staff.  Indeed, many of the rhetorical devices of the TV news establish and maintain attitudes toward the news show itself rather than toward the public objects that are its content.

          The network news must dispose the viewer to see what is delivered as "news," as an objective report of the present public situation.  A vast array of devices is employed by the TV news to promote its veracity and actuality.  The viewer is persuaded that the news is timely at the opening of the show.  Anchors are captured in "candid shots," putting "last minute touches" on papers or glancing through and shuffling them around.  Whether these sheets of paper are mere props or are actually used in the report, their presence gives the impression that the stories are so fresh that the news show is being put together while it is on the air, that it has not been programmed in advance.  Other "backstage" activities work to enhance the sense that "it's happening now."  Teletype machines or merely their sounds are heard at the show's start.  Visuals of numerous staff working hard at their newsgathering tasks, in the midst of high technology, are also prominent opening backdrops.  These devices communicate the message that "at this very moment news is being provided."  The sense of actuality is also generated by the ubiquity of the word "live" in TV news.  Correspondents are said to be "live in the field" and do their talking‑head reportage outdoors, buffeted by people and weather.  They convey the feeling that they are there now even if they have been videotaped hours or days earlier.  The rhetorical insistence upon a sense of the immediate present reduces the distance between the audience and the representations or images produced by the news.  The audience is made to feel that it has been transported to the site where significant or interesting events are happening now.  Not only does the rhetoric of presence foster an attitude that the viewer has been taken into the situation as an honored observer, but engenders the illusion that the news has not been interpreted, that it is a report of unmediated actuality.       

          The rhetoric of presence plays a major role in achieving the sense that the news is objective.  There is an implicit understanding that bias is something placed over the truth, an additional interpretative step which takes time to perform.  The breathless here‑and‑now rhetoric seems to preclude the time it would take to cook, to script, actuality.  Further, the appearance of immediate presence makes it seem that stories select themselves (10).  Network news obscures the bias of selection and furthers the viewer's acceptance of the stories as mirrors of reality.  TV news does not present to its audience any list of stories that it might have but failed to cover, nor does it justify its selection of what to cover.  Indeed, each story stands for itself as self‑justified and eminently worthy of attention.  The TV news presents itself as a trusted guide to the unfolding public world, a professional guide with estimable clients. It is an expedition or a tour, depending on the story, an unveiling of the wonders and curiosities of the world as they purportedly are emerging.            The illusion of objectivity is reinforced by supplementing the rhetoric of presence with a multifaceted rhetoric of neutrality.  The news anchor, for example, must play at being objective by seeming to be neutral.  His performance is a semblance of the practice of Max Weber's ideal‑typical bureaucrat who acts sin ira ac studio, without passion or bias (30).  The semblance of acting without passion requires avoiding any obvious display of strong emotions such as anger, joy, and fear.  Yet the news, which is about humanly significant affairs, cannot be reported without emotion, since it appeals to the responsive practical mind.  The anchor must convey emotion and volition through subtle displays of passion registered by speech cadence, small changes in vocal tone, and eyebrow raises; rather than by large facial displays, such as smiles, frowns, and grimaces; changes in vocal volume; and obtrusive exclamations.  The rhetoric of neutrality is also evidenced in the syntactical structure of anchorspeak, which differs significantly from interpersonal communication (13).  For example, anchors avoid the use of adjectives, since listeners perceive users of adjectives as biased, whereas those who employ other speech patterns, such as pre‑modifying nouns, convey the impression of being objective.  Anchors are cool and seem to be dispassionate.  They are male since the culture perceives women to be more emotional than men.        The appearance of neutrality is further bolstered by the use of pictures.  Access to film and videotape is now almost an essential element of TV news, necessary but not sufficient for "gatekeepers" to decide whether to select an "event" for inclusion on the program.  For the audience pictures mean direct access to the truth.  Speech can be mendacious and distorting, but "the camera never lies:" seeing is believing.  That pictures function as rhetorical devices to create a sense that the news is credible is evidenced by the fact that the video portions of the show convey little, if any, information.  When the voice claims that "terrorists took another American hostage" the pictures of the Beirut skyline, car‑strewn streets, and a photograph of the "hostage" do not support or demonstrate the anchor's or correspondent's assertion.  When the voice states that "negotiators could not agree" the video of picturesque Geneva, where the talks were being held, gives no support for that statement.       

          Pictures generally convey merely the appearance of truth.  Much of the subject matter of news reportage cannot be filmed.  Video can capture the world of visual perception but it cannot easily depict the conceptual realm.  There can be no pictures of general economic or political forecasts.  Events that are hidden from the public eye, such as the proverbial meetings held behind closed doors, cannot be filmed, nor can events that are unscheduled and thus do not provide the time for film crews to get to the scene; for example, tornados, building collapses, and assassinations.  Often witnesses or experts are asked to describe unfilmable events or prognostications, and pictures of these people are shown.  But for many news stories pictures that are somewhat related to the assertions made by the audio portion are aired and provide specious credibility to those assertions.

          The rhetoric of neutrality is enhanced by the presentation of "both sides of the story."  Actual political and economic phenomena are complex realities which are interpreted through a multiplicity of perspectives held by competing social groups.  The simplification of issues into two contrasting sides serves rhetorical ends.  An either/or makes the fact that sides are presented very obvious.  The audience is encouraged to feel that the presentation of "both sides" demonstrates that the news cannot be biased since "all viewpoints" have been aired.  Commentaries on the news program also serve as rhetorical devices to sharpen, by contrast, the dichotomy between news and opinion.  The commentaries are obviously biased and are meant to be perceived as such by the audience.  Their segment of the show is clearly defined in distinction from the "news" and the word "commentary" is often on the screen.  The difference between the more overtly attitudinal manner in which the commentary is given and the cooler disposition of the anchor and correspondents makes the latter appear to be unbiased, to be neutral. 

          The differentiation of "news" from opinion is also effected through a rhetorical device in which dichotomous positions on an issue are represented by spokespersons who "debate" one another on the news show.  In order to advance their viewpoints they must often make extreme statements or argue in a heated, visibly passionate manner.  This enthusiastic style contrasts neatly with the ever‑cool anchor, enhancing his perceived neutrality.  The display of "both sides" also casts the aura of neutrality on the entire news show.       

          The use of experts from outside the news staff also functions to give credibility to the news show, in this case by reinforcing the illusion of neutrality directly.  The expert is clearly labelled as such; not only is the professional title and affiliation announced, but they appear as graphics on the screen.  Further, the professional term of address is used by the anchor, enhancing the sense of authority and veracity.  The common understanding of experts is that they know and are in the business of telling others the truth about their special areas of competence.  An assertion made by an expert builds an attitude of trust toward the news.  Similarly, the TV news exploits belief in the neutrality of technology.  Computers and experts are, respectively, the mechanical and carnal sides of the myth of scientific rationality.  The national TV news is awash with images of technology.  The prominent display of computer screens, video monitors, and the heavy use of musique concrete (machine sounds in a musical format) are devices to suggest the technological support of the show.  The message is that the network news is based on reliably objective machines.  Further, disclosing the machinery on the screen gives the impression that nothing is hidden.  Backstage views rhetorically foster the sense of credibility.       

          The various devices that comprise rhetorical neutrality appear within the rhetoric of presence, which fixes the news within the imaginary temporality of the unfolding actuality of the world.  There is also a temporality internal to the presentation of the news which enforces the appearance of objectivity.  Each news story is ordinarily no more than a minute or two long.  The brevity of the story reinforces the sense of "alive" and "now," and excludes complexity, which is associated with the perception of bias.  Short and direct assertions convey the illusion that "just the facts" are being presented.  Longer stories are usually features about human‑interest concerns or about the past, and news stories which exceed two minutes in duration are generally comprised of several related reports from different areas, each one a brief sub‑story.  Collapsed temporality, in conjunction with the rhetoric of neutrality, conveys the impression that the news show itself is a faithful, professional guide to the world‑in‑process.  The audience is encouraged above all to trust the anchor and the news staff, not to be critical or independently imaginative.       

          The success of the TV news in fostering a trusting and uncritical attitude toward itself has been substantiated in the scholarly literature.  A number of studies, done at different times and on different populations, conclude that TV news is not only perceived to be credible, but has become, over time, the source of news that is trusted the most (see e.g., 5, 25, 32).   The above discussion of the rhetorical devices employed by the TV news to evoke a trusting attitude toward itself suggests some of the reasons for the findings of the survey literature.        Establishing trust in itself is the foundation upon which the TV news is able to construct attitudinal responses toward other objects.  When it is perfected credibility becomes credulity, but even short of perfection the juggernaut of rhetorical neutrality tends to draw the viewer into an accepted frame of mind or a susceptibility to suggestion.  The dialectic of the rhetorical construction of TV news makes the illusion of neutrality its theme and the specific attitudinal responses it generates its counterpoint.  Two of those responses are constants ‑ the reaction to the world in general and the reaction of the audience to itself.

 

The World and the Audience

          The attitudes of familiarity and trust that network news cultivates toward itself carry over into the dispositions that it engenders in its audience toward the world.  TV news creates a world that is knowable and known by the news media, not a mysterious world.  From the starving Ethiopian children feebly swatting flies off their faces to rock‑throwing Palestinians in Israel, demonstrators in South Korea, and Armenian protestors in Azerbaijan the wider public world enters the home through picture and report.  One may not personally know the next stop on the interstate or even the other side of one's own town, but the world appears to be fully available to TV news and, therefore, to the viewer (16, p.165).  Through the illusion that the world is known, the viewer is disposed to see the world as familiar.  It is not an alien place but is comprehensible and contains meanings.  Indeed, although network news does not create a meaningful totalization of the contemporary human world, it constructs a world in which each story has a meaning within the general frame of the newscast.       

          Events, wherever they occur, are placed in the ever‑same context of the program.  The names and places have been changed, are ever new, but the form is constant.  Elections, protests, wars, cruel nature, and economic booms and busts are displayed as the same play with new scenery and actors, unified by the homogeneous approach of the news team.  A disposition to find the world familiar is reinforced by the tendency of the news to personalize events, to understand them in "human terms."  The drought of the summer of 1988 was interpreted through the sadness and fear in the faces and voices of farm families as they displayed their stunted corn.  Candidates for political office are queried about their hopes, fears, and marital relations.  The impacts of police repression and violent crime are seen in the faces of the victims ‑ the mourning and grief‑stricken mother, the crying children, and the ashamed and emasculated men.  Like the prisoners in Plato's cave, who knew the world only in the reflected shadows on the wall which they faced, the viewers of TV news apprehend the world as it is reflected in the emotions of the "common man."  The "real people" on TV news represent the audience in the world as objects of identification and cathexis.  Seeing oneself in the world makes it familiar, eliminating any intimations of stubborn, even unfathomable, difference.           Familiarity is even further enhanced by making the nation the interpretative context for all human and even natural occurrences.  America is located at the center of the world of TV news, much like the earth was the center of the pre‑Copernican cosmology.  The world maps on the news sets inconveniently break up the European land mass so that the United States can be the literal center of the two‑dimensional cartographic projection.  All world events are discussed from the perspective of how they impact on American interests or actions.  The opening news story, which is the most important one on the program, has an American angle, either because the story is located in the United States or because it affects American interests.  Foreign and international stories include some relation between the reported events and the United States.

        A broad and usually attenuated nationalism is the only constant and overriding substantive bias of the TV news, the partisan commitment that guides its formal rhetorical devices.  Even when the news responds unfavorably to governmental policies, America is portrayed as powerful and good, providing the best way of life for its citizens.  The power of other countries is at best seen as somewhat comparable to that of the United States and the policies of the American government are normally described in terms of the objectives of the relevant departments and agencies.  The rest of the world's inhabitants are often seen to be desirous of migrating to America.  When stories which challenge the good, bounty, and power of the United States are aired, they are interpreted as temporary or minor aberrations, not as defining characteristics.  They are the exceptions that prove the rule.         

          The identification of the network news with the nation can also be read in the names of the networks:  American (ABC), National (NBC), and Columbia (CBS).  The pervasive nationalism of TV news functions in tandem with the familiar attitude toward the world to cultivate a sense of belonging and self‑justification.  The world is an arena in which America is the benevolent and capable protagonist, subject to failings but inherently good and competent.  Just as the anchor is a benevolent expert, the nation he speaks for is a great power.  Trust in and hope for the country is the dominant attitude toward the world fostered by TV news.  And that world is familiar.  Ultimately it can be mastered by a hopeful and resolute nation.       

          The unity of attitude conveyed by the rhetorical construction of the news culminates in the dispositions engendered in the audience toward itself.  As Americans the viewers share in the morality, power, and attractive life styles promoted on the news.  The goodness of the audience is communicated clearly in stories about violent crime.  The newscaster and the audience are always styled as "good people" in contrast to the criminal, who is depicted as lacking in human qualities.  Corrupt officials are also seen through the eyes of the "good people."  In the case of widespread victimless or nonviolent crime, however, unfavorable attitudes are muted.  The internally differentiated mass audience is given a broad common ground for feeling good about itself.            TV news gives the audience a sense of power by the frequent appearance of poll results as news items and by persistent attention to voting patterns and prolonged electoral campaigns.  Public opinion is treated as an autonomous and potent force in American life, indeed, as the major factor in determining the shape of public affairs.  The audience is also flattered about its way of life.  American mores, folkways, and styles are held up as exemplary in contrast to the ways of other cultures, which are belittled, snickered at, or shown to be exotic and, therefore, abnormal.         

          The basic attitude of the audience toward itself that is engendered by TV news is complacency.  All the way from the anchor's friendly welcome to his familiar good‑bye viewers are disposed to see themselves as good people who have no need to engage in self‑criticism, but, on the contrary, should be proud of living in a great country and secure that their world is comprehensible and manageable.  They are encouraged to feel at home in a world that belongs to them.  All that they must do is to trust the news and follow its guidance in shaping their attitudes.  Trust begets familiarity, which in turn begets a self‑justified sense of belonging.  The ultimate disposition propagated by the TV news is self‑congratulation that one is normal.  TV news is the dispensation of secular grace to its audience.

 

The Rhetorical Construction of the News Story

        Within the context of the constant attitudes of trust in the news program, at‑homeness in the world, and self‑complacency of the audience, TV news embeds specific attitudes toward public objects in each of the stories that it relates.  Although it does not hold a monopoly over the formation of attitudes, it is a point of reference of crystallization for the contributions of other agencies of attitude formation such as the other news media, interest groups, government departments, informal opinion leadership, and political humorists.  It is a kind of meeting ground for attitudinal definition in which the differentiated, heterogeneous, and often competitive society confronts the artifact of the homogeneous viewer produced by the news itself.  The particular attitudes toward events, persons, and situations that are engendered by the network news vary according to a multitude of factors, especially those associated with the contending power centers in the society at large and the viewpoints of their leadership groups.  But they are restricted to the range permitted by the constant attitudes produced by the basic rhetorical structure of the news.       

          Each news story is a rhetorical construction evincing a dramatic narrative form which evokes an attitude; that is, the story conveys not only some bits of information about some event, personality, or situation, but also a disposition toward its subject.^[iv]  The rhetorical import or intentionality of the story is an inevitable feature, an essential characteristic, of the TV news, not something adventitious to its structure.  TV news addresses the practical mind, which is involved in responding to the world in manifold ways, preeminently emotionally and volitionally, and it does so by more comprehensive means, both visual and auditory, than do media which rely on single sensory channels.  That stories are structured to evoke attitudes is not a defect of the news but a necessary consequence of how it must organize its materials for its audience.       

          In order to achieve even a modicum of coherence each of the brief stories on TV news must be organized around a theme or angle which interprets it according to some sense of importance or significance (2, pp.89‑96).  The necessity of perspective characterizes every human report of fact from the scholarly paper to the anecdote related to friends; every story has some meaning or significance and is not a random agglomeration of simple facts.  On the continuum between a research report and a story told to friends, the TV news falls closer to the latter.  It is not given focus by an hypothesis to be tested or a thesis to be demonstrated, but by an appeal to active sentiment.  TV news is dramatic narrative, not scientific exposition, and, like drama in general, it highlights the interplay of conflict and resolution.  As noted above, its general angle is a diffuse nationalism, but within that context it selects from among a wide range of perspectives, sometimes emphasizing such social divisions as race, party, economic group, and life‑style, and sometimes stressing personal emotions such as grief or outrage.                 Angle tells the audience what is salient about the story, the terms in which to be oriented toward it.  For example, if an airliner is shot down the event may be interpreted, among other things, as a "human tragedy," a technological failure, an incident in an ongoing conflict, a possible provocation, or the moral and political bankruptcy of a policy.  The angle that is chosen is not attitudinally indifferent, as the prior example indicates.  Stressing the technological dimension will dampen and narrow political passion, whereas emphasizing the policy issues will tend to heighten it.  The presence of an angle in a story predisposes the audience to an interpretation of an event, since a special act of imaginative reinterpretation is needed for the viewer to overcome the spin.                 

          In addition to a guiding angle the news story is structured by the injection of bias.  Whereas the angle alerts the audience to what is important about the story, bias directs viewers to respond favorably or unfavorably to the public objects that compose its content.  Bias in the news is primarily an appeal to widely held sentiments which can be triggered by relatively standardized stimuli, including camera angles, voice inflections, common myths and symbols, and a variety of other rhetorical devices discussed below.  Unlike angle, which is necessary to narrative, bias, though it is irreducible because human beings spontaneously respond to the world through their sentiments, is subject to strategies which enhance or minimize it.  The research report is structured by conventions which seek to keep bias to a minimum, whereas the friendly anecdote is expected to emphasize bias.  TV news is a unique rhetorical construction which is made to appear rhetorically neutral while it actually heightens positive and negative attitudinal responses.  It is basically a form of seduction in which the audience is a willing participant.  The audience is given the illusion of the event as it is and is provided simultaneously with a response to it.       

          The interplay of the rhetoric of neutrality and the strategy of heightening bias results from a general problem that the TV news must continually resolve in its relation to its audience.  That audience is a heterogeneous mass composed in some proportion of all of the elements of the population.  It represents all of the major social divisions and must be addressed in ways that will not permanently alienate any significant social group. The rhetoric of neutrality is the symbolic umbrella under which the entire audience can gather.  Under its protection bias can be introduced to satisfy the dramatic interest of the audience in an attitudinal response to news stories.  TV news must steer between the Scylla of overt partisanship and the Charybdis of unadorned information, the latter which is an abstract limiting case, since even a dispassionate talking head would create an attitudinal response by its absence of emotional reaction to emotively‑charged events.  The network news tries to steady its course by suggesting attitudes rather than stating them explicitly.  When it airs divisive issues it refines the rhetoric of neutrality to include "two sides," so that those who are offended by the dominant bias will not be alienated altogether and may even find satisfaction, and so that those who are attracted to the spin can feel that their attitude is justified in relation to one of its opposites.  The news story, then, suggests a mimetic response to its audience through angle and bias:  angle plus bias equals spin.       

          The means by which spin is put on a story can be illustrated by the example of the ways in which a presidential candidate's speech can be covered.  The TV news has more effective access to a speech than it does to many other stories, since it has been well informed of where and when it will occur, and since the requirements for camera and audio crews have been arranged by the candidate's staff.  Indeed, the speech itself has been created for the news media, and if they were not there to cover it might not even be delivered (4).  But even in such nearly ideal conditions for access there is a need to be selective.  The news crew, for example, will normally have no more than two cameras set up, so it will not be possible to obtain all views of the site.  Further, there may be protestors or supporters outside the speech area who could, if filmed, be included in the report.  Let us say that two hours of film and audio are taken for this item.  But the news story will run no longer than two and a half minutes.  Most of the raw material will be excluded and only a fragment of it will be viewed by the audience.                  A ruthless narrowing down of possibilities is required to produce the final contents of the story.  Are any of the candidate's words included, and, if so, what issue do they address?  Does the news select a few frames where the candidate flubs a line, makes a slip, looks foolish, or becomes angry; or does it show the candidate at competent moments?  The decision to include mistakes or miscues biases the story against the candidate, whereas omitting them biases the story in the candidate's favor.  Similarly, is the reaction of the candidate's audience included in the story?  Capturing the shouts of approval and the eager faces of an enthusiastic audience biases the story toward a positive view of the candidate, whereas omitting such material puts the politician at a disadvantage.  And if the audience's response is lukewarm, bored, or hostile, airing this material will foster a negative attitude.  These possibilities give merely a hint of the inevitability of bias.  At every turn in practical life there are emotional and volitional shadings, and while the news cannot capture all of them it must seize upon some of them.       

          The imperative to select, to narrow down a wealth of material into a brief and coherent story is the major formal condition of spin.  Other sets of rhetorical constructions ‑ verbal and visual biases ‑ are also based on the decisions required to produce a news story.  Words and visuals must be obtained or made.  The angle and the bias of a story are products of the pattern that such decisions take.  And these decisions can never be rhetorically neutral.  Whether or not a spin is consciously intended it will be present.

        Among the verbal devices for structuring a story is the manner in which people are identified.  Use of a formal name, such as James, conveys more distance and, therefore, dignity and credibility, than use of a familiar name such as Jimmy.  Employment of a title credits the person so designated with the authority of the institution with which it is associated.  Calling a physician "Doctor," a priest "Father," or a judge "Your Honor" demonstrates an attitude of respect from the news staff, and this attitude is conveyed to the audience.  Whatever is said by a person so addressed tends to be taken more seriously than it would be if the title was omitted.              The ubiquitous pre‑modifying noun or phrase used by the newscaster to identify a person, organization, or group also creates a favorable or unfavorable attitude.  Is the head of a government introduced to the audience as "dictator," "leader of the Marxist‑Leninist governing party," "president," or "elected president?"  Each phrase has a positive or negative bias for an American audience.  Is China introduced as "Red China" or "The People's Republic of China?"  The military opposition to the government of Nicaragua has been called contras, freedom fighters, guerrillas, and mercenaries.  Each term is charged with a positive or negative bias, disposing the audience to take an attitudinal stance.       

          In all cultures there are special words that are imbued with emotive import.  American culture prizes such words as "democracy," "American," and "freedom," and when one of these words is embedded in a story it takes on the aura surrounding that term.  And, of course, all of the rhetorical devices familiar to the Greek sophists and their opponents, and to contemporary specialists in advertising and public relations, find their way into TV news, if only because of the general tendency of the news to ingratiate itself to its audience.

        Visual biases are also necessarily involved in constructing the story (28). Each camera shot must have an angle from which a person or event is filmed, and that angle is not rhetorically neutral.  For example, there is a tendency to withhold credibility from those who are seen in profile rather than full face.  Similarly, camera angles that look up to the subject convey an air of authority; we "look up to" that person.  Whether many people or just one person appears in the visual frame also conveys a disposition.  Singularity commands credibility, whereas multiplicity breeds confusion and, therefore, a sense of disorder.  In their extensive and insightful study of British coverage of labor‑management disputes, the Glasgow Media Group observed that management was usually represented on film by a single individual in front of a neutral backdrop, whereas workers were filmed outdoors and in groups.  The authors concluded that this differential visual bias consistently inculcated a positive view of management and a negative one of labor (13). 1 The audience can also be more compassionate toward an individual than toward a multitude.  The TV news often makes in clear on which side it is on in a conflict situation:  the favored side has a single individual in the visual frame.

        The rhetorical devices that have been discussed here do not exhaust the wealth of techniques used by TV news to embed a spin in its stories.  Consider the selection of a spokesperson for or a typical representative of a group or position.  Can the audience identify with the person?  Is that person rationally articulate, sincere, confident?  Similarly, the TV news often recruits experts who lend their authority to some side of an issue or conflict.  It is, indeed, difficult to provide an exhaustive account of the rhetorical devices used by TV news in constructing its stories, since there are so many of them.  By simply suggesting a few of them it is possible to substantiate the pervasiveness of spin and to indicate how it is achieved.

 

Triumph of Attitude     

          The foregoing discussion of TV news has interpreted it as a rhetorical construction geared to conveying attitudes to its audience and not information.  This interpretation has so far rested on an account of the way in which the rhetoric of the news positively functions to induce attitudinal response.  But it is also possible to proceed negatively and indicate how the rhetorical devices of the network news discourage the effective transmission of information.       

          The brevity of news stories precludes an adequate or, perhaps, any contextualization of their content.  An insurrection, for example, cannot be understood without knowing something about the history and current conditions of the country in which it occurs.  In addition, isolated information is not effectively retained, making attitudinal response the lasting residue of the story.  Indeed, the dramatized selection and ordering of the bits composing the story fuses information and emotion into mimetic volition rather than cognition.       

          Presenting "both sides of the story" also obstructs the effective communication of information.  Viewers are exposed to two opposed perspectives on a content which they have not fully grasped.  They will tend to be confused about the reality and significance of the item, and might be better informed by a self‑consciously and consistently biased newscast to which they might respond critically or at least could discount.       

          The rhetorical device that probably does the most to frustrate the transmission of information is the use of film in news stories.  Talking heads convey more information than pictures, the old saw that "one picture is worth a thousand words" notwithstanding.  The use of film on network news is not tightly coupled to the narrative of the story.  There are many reasons why this is the case, including lack of access by film crews to events, stories which cover general conditions, and, fundamentally, the inability to capture more than a fragment of any story in a few frames. As a result the audio channel normally conveys different information than the video channel.  The audience is simultaneously receiving two messages, one from each source.  People react to such dissonance either by obtaining information from neither channel or by focussing their attention on one preferred channel.  For the most part the dominant channel is the visual.  Since the narrative is contained in the audio channel, attending to the pictures provides no coherent information but does allow the viewer to be affected by the emotional nuances of the voices.  The effective intentionality of TV news is not cognition but emotional mimesis, which is not merely indifferent to cognition but subversive of it.    

          A phenomenological description of TV news provides no explanation of why it has just the intentionality that it communicates to the investigator.  A rhetorical analysis of TV news is morally and politically neutral toward its object, though it has its own rhetoric and, therefore, its own spin.  Both phenomenological and rhetorical inquiries remain in the zone between why and wherefore, describing and analyzing experience directly reflected to the knowing self.  Investigation of the origins and ends of things belongs to other forms of reflection, science and ethics respectively.  But descriptive thought cannot be comprehended adequately apart from knowledge of the vicissitudes of the phenomena that it captures in mid‑course.  The intentionality of TV news is conditioned by the society in which it functions as a practical agency, and it creates a simulacrum of the human being ‑ the artifact of the viewer ‑ which falls under the domain of moral judgment.

     Why is the intentionality of TV news emotional mimesis of rhetorically constructed attitudes toward public objects?  One possibility is that the powers that be do not wish the broad American mass to be an enlightened citizenry and have crafted a strategy for leaving it benighted.  Another possibility is that the people do not want to be responsible citizens and are getting just what they wish or, perhaps, need.  Both of the above hypotheses probably contain some truth, and their combination much more, through their mutual limitation.  A third alternative, however, seems to be more fundamental.  TV news can be considered as performing a central function in contemporary society, the mobilization of attitudes.  Why is it necessary to have a collective mechanism of attitude formation and propagation?  Contemporary American society is a key contestant in a rapidly mutating and fiercely competitive world.  It is intensively differentiated structurally and highly diverse culturally; that is, it is competitive from within.  It is a society that is very difficult to totalize in the categories of any ideology, but it can achieve some unity through sentiments of nationalism, and it must be able to respond to internal and external challenges to its well being with sufficient consensus to be effective.  TV news is one of the primary agents in achieving rapidly shifting semblances of consensus toward emerging and often salient public objects ‑ events, personalities, and conditions.  It does this on, perhaps, the only foundation that it can in a competitive and heterogeneous world ‑ sub‑reflective attitudinal response.  Whether it is successful as a mobilizer of attitudes appropriate for social survival is another question, which the many excellent sociological, political, and cultural criticisms of it answer in the negative.  But at least it is possible that it is doing a reasonable job in relation to the dispersion and dissonance that it must process.  Critics of TV news should reflect more on the question of whether some mechanism for mobilizing attitudes toward public objects is necessary for American society to have sufficient integrity to survive.  If they answer in the affirmative they may then turn their attention to the concrete possibilities for contriving a better mechanism than the TV news.        Functional analysis, however, contains no moral imperatives, only the analytic value of social survival.  Even if TV news is indispensable and irreplaceable it may still be morally wanting.  The most pervasive characteristic of the network news is to contrive the artifact of the self‑complacent (uncritical) audience that is susceptible to suggestion through the rhetorical arts of ingratiation, and then to project that artifact on to each viewer.  That is, TV news generates its own sub‑species of television's passive audience which is there to be entertained and diverted from the deeply negative moods.  It is radically biased in the direction of short‑term security, precluding any trace of the self‑discipline necessary for autonomous choice.  Yet it flatters the viewer with the rhetoric of freedom.  The TV news is hypocritical at its core.  But, even more fundamentally, network news is in bad faith.  The rhetoric of neutrality conveys the impression that the viewer is receiving not only information about the world but the world itself as it really is.  Yet the very rhetorical construction of network news generates attitude and not cognition.  Indeed, in order to suggest dispositions effectively it must make the pretense that it is doing something else.  And that pretense may only rarely be self‑conscious.  TV news is essentially mendacious; its formative rhetorical strategy contains the lie.  It cannot address its audience as autonomous moral subjects.

        The claims that TV news performs an essential function in American society and that its intentionality precludes moral autonomy may both be correct in their domains of relevance.  Placing them side by side indicates some of the more basic tensions in modern, perhaps postmodern, culture.