Packaging Reality

Abstract

This study takes its lead from Schudson’s (1995) insightful suggestion that the power of news lies less in the stories it tells than in the form those stories assume. The form of news directs the journalistic effort to engage with the world, shapes the subsequent narratives of the real, and encodes wider cultural patterns of authority. Yet the form of news is continually changing. To assess the nature of news form in two eras of markedly different journalistic standards, this study explores the patterns of form that structured US network news coverage of Watergate in 1973-74 and the Clinton impeachment of 1998. Specifically examining the format known to the television news business as the package, it charts a turn in news form from the typographic to the televisual and considers the implications of that turn for journalistic authority.