Revisiting the Howard Dean scream: sound exclusivity in broadcast news

Abstract

Sound in television news broadcasting is dominated by perceived authoritative voices, resulting in a narrowing of ideas and a restriction of experiential and cultural representation. Television news offers audiences selective access to events through a suppression of environmental ambient sound. It thereby actively removes the context of an event and denies the public a broader sense of the event’s present significance. This article is a critique of the way in which media institutions and their practitioners wield the tools of their industry to manipulate audible content in order to preserve their own interests over those of the public. It begins with a brief historical examination of technology and the institutional practices that developed through the emergence of radio, sound films, and television. I then argue that through such technology and practice, television news decontextualizes the sound of events in order to overwrite them with authoritative analysis. As my main example, I offer two versions of the Howard Dean “scream” – one as presented through the broadcast institution and the other as presented through independent media and the internet. These two versions of the same event reveal how audible misrepresentation threatens news as public good and the documentation of history.