Известия Саратовского университета. Новая серия. Серия Филология: Журналистика (Mar 2024)
The typology of actors in Czech TV News in 1989–2021
Abstract
A human face is called one of the main expressive means of the screen, this is true for all kinds of audiovisual content including television news, which have a high degree of credibility among the audience due to their audiovisual nature. The main purpose of the paper is to study whether and how the actors in television news have changed in the period of 1989–2021. We employed the content analysis to examine 1608 TV news items of one of the Czech TV channels in three periods – 1989, 2005 and 2021. We analyzed 2755 fragments of interviews that form the video news. The findings of the research illustrate how the number of actors in the Czech TV news rose by 2005–2021 (the number has increased 7-9 times compared to 1989), and the presence of journalists – the authors of the news pieces – in the frame has increased significantly too. There is a stable functional structure of actors typical for all three periods of the research: on average, the presence of about 70% of “participants”, 20% of “eyewitnesses” and 10% of “experts” in TV stories is revealed. According to the categorization of actors by areas, we found out that there is a significant domination of the representatives of the political area: from 47 to 61% of the actors (“participants”) relate to politics and power. Over the years, the presence of foreign politicians in Czech television news has grown, and there has been a substantial increase in the number of representatives of public organizations as actors. In addition, there is a democratization of actors in the economic sphere: the number of “managers and businessmen” has at least halved over the years, and the number of specialists and employees in Czech TV news has increased four to six times.
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