This article explores the use of sources in national security reporting by twenty-three reporters for seven major newspapers, with particular emphasis on the distinction between “statist” and “civil” sources and on the degree of variation among reporters and papers.
A detailed a d y & of a tekwision report exphres the conjunction of the techwhgks o f wa$are and of communication that reveals &ralptotypes and creates a muster nurrm've for the strategic defme program.Journalists know they write "stories," and we know that we watch "stories" and read them, but we are not sufficiently attentive to the consequences of these acts. For "news" occurs where texts and events come together, at that place where the reporter puts a name to things, tells a story about them, and thereby gives them a structure. Narrative conventions bring order to events by making them something that can be told about; by organizing experience, they exert a powerful pull on journalists and publics alike. As individuals and as a people, we tell the stories we need to hear to make sense of the world. Reality appears to us, but we grasp it through the tales we choose to tell to ourselves, our way (30).Journalists grasp the world by making a text of it, and for those who seek to understand the journalistic act, this textualization of the world thus becomes a primary object of study. This article takes a single television news report and inquires into the strategies that governed the way it made its subject into a story, the way it transformed the world into a text. It does so in a sphere of textual and cultural studies loosely circumscribed by the work of such writers as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault ( 4 ,22, 27,44). But it is in no sense a systematic application of their work. It is rather a provisional attempt to describe the logic according to which meaning is created, an effort to describe how truth-effects are produced, to open up a space of possibility for regarding the discourse of television journalism in the nuclear era.
For most reporters the atomic age began with a press release. "It's a statement from the president, "Assistant White House Press Secretary Eben Ayers told those gathered at the Monday-morning briefing on August 6, 1945, and he began to read:Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare....It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its powers has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.
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