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This book explores how infrastructures and strategies for distributing online television news are developed and maintained. Focusing on MSNBC, a hybrid company built to link television and the Internet, it challenges often-simplistic assumptions about how media is produced and considers the route that online news takes to reach consumers. It discusses the notion of “conversation economy,” articulated by John Battelle in his 2005 book The Search, and the tendency of online journalists to select story topics partially on the basis of whether an article is likely to generate page views through sharing and search. Part 1 of the book considers the path taken by MSNBC television programs as they made their way to online audiences; Part 2 examines MSNBC's online distribution platforms from the vantage points of different system builders within the larger organization; and Part 3 focuses on how MSNBC's distribution channels were built to serve a broad array of online audiences.

This chapter examines media distribution within the context of sociotechnical systems. It begins with a discussion of the concept of recalcitrance and its relation to heterogeneous engineering before turning to technologies as parts of heterogeneous systems. It then considers the persistence of heterogeneous engineering in the world of online television news distribution, along with time delay as an example of how the route of online video is influenced by the various forces and architects involved in online and social television news distribution. It also describes the distribution system developed by MSNBC for online television news in the years leading up to 2010 by tracing how a typical cable news program is brought to online audiences.

Unlike previous chapters, Chapter 4 examines the language of television news in France, Italy, and Britain. In looking at both visual and verbal data, it shows how news about Europe is ‘framed’ in different ways in the different countries. The chapter concludes that in French TV news there is pervasive reference to a united European identity, constructing a strong concept of a collective European ‘we’ (albeit French‐centred). In Italian TV news the European ‘we’ is less strongly represented, but Europe is nevertheless a central figure, particularly in its political and institutional roles. In the UK, on the other hand, Europe is represented often sceptically or semi‐seriously — as something rather distant.

Over the past four decades, television news has become the primary source of political information for a majority of Americans and, as that reliance has grown, the most credible, appealing, interesting, and believable source as well. These trends are not without reason, as audiovisual media more effectively complements human information-processing abilities than any other message platform. Politically, television connects candidates with voters and provides a visual record of campaign events. Just as newspapers of record deliver the first draft of written history, network news provides the equally important first draft of visually recorded history. This chapter argues that it is the significance of this latter point that intellectuals and other self-appointed guardians of the public sphere have difficulty acknowledging. The irony of taking television seriously stems from the research community's stubborn refusal to grant the medium best positioned to fulfill mass communication's great promise its due. Although consistent with culturally defined priorities reviewed in the introduction, this neglect is out of step with biologically based principles of how humans process information.

ABC’s coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics amplified its reputation as the Network of the Olympics and took advantage of the consistent space Monday NightFootball forged for sports in prime time. But the Munich games were overshadowed when the Palestinian terrorist group Black September took hostage and eventually killed eleven members of Israel’s Olympic team. ABC Sports’ marathon coverage of the incident became the department’s most celebrated achievement to date. This success eventually convinced ABC to entrust Arledge with its languishing news division in 1977, which he revamped by modifying the recipe he developed at ABC Sports. Chapter 5 uses Munich to explore how ABC Sports composed a template through which the network reinvented ABC News, as well as network sports television more broadly.

This chapter argues that a model of communication based on demographic-targeted marketing and strategic political communication has become a dominant force in the United States, and that this development has profound consequences for the patterns of social identification in late modern society. In particular, over the past twenty years television news content has trended toward fewer displays of collective representations, fewer positive portrayals of government, and fewer stories about policy issues. The move toward a more personalized and consumer-oriented news format, charged with negative emotional images, has numerous political implications. The chapter argues that changes in the media have engendered a sense of isolation, failing to connect citizens who might share a collective sense of concern and need for action. The implications of this dynamic are explored, as well as the potential for internet communication to correct for the shortcomings of mainstream news.

This chapter, which examines the history of the conflict between news and science television broadcasting in the United States, discusses the role of television news in reframing science's public image and cites a survey result which reveals an increase in mass media coverage of science, technology, and personal health stories. It explains that communication about risks identified by or related to scientific research posed special challenges for television, particularly with the passage of the Fairness Doctrine. The chapter also considers the link between declining enrollments in science courses and the state of science on television.

Americans rely heavily on the news media for information about society in general, and the media shape the public's perception of the social and political world they inhabit. This chapter investigates the role of the national news media in shaping American's views on race, poverty, and welfare. It examines news magazines and television news shows and argues that mass media distortions correspond with public misperceptions about race and poverty.

This epilogue provides an update on MSNBC and NBC News's footprint in the distribution of online television news since their acquisition by Comcast, with particular emphasis on the restructuring of MSNBC.com into an expanded NBC News Digital and the creation of an entirely new website for the MSNBC cable news channel. It discusses other changes at MSNBC, including the rebranding of the Blue Site as NBCNews.com, the creation of a new MSNBC.com based on the open source content management system Drupal, and the use of the “Newsvine 3.0” commenting system as the basis for all the community features on the new site. Despite some changes that seem to show the influence of a centralized management and hierarchy, complex assemblages of system builders remain both inside and outside the MSNBC organization. Heterarchy is alive and well within MSNBC's constellation of companies and teams.

This chapter examines television news' reporting of the Selma campaign for voting rights that led directly to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Television cameras present on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday March 7, 1965, were able to capture the beating, gassing, and brutalizing suffered by voting rights demonstrators as they attempted to march to Montgomery. The uproar generated by that footage generated more support, volunteers, and moral clout for the civil rights movement. This chapter considers how one news program, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, presented the Selma campaign as an ongoing nightly news story, with particular emphasis on its coverage of the campaign's three martyrs: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. It also discusses the response of white Selmians in the “glaring light of television” and the commentary in the African American press regarding the television coverage of the campaign.

This book examines the role played by American network television in reconfiguring a new “common sense” about race relations during the civil rights revolution. Drawing on stories told both by television news coverage and prime time entertainment, it explores the relationship among the civil rights movement, television, audiences, and partisans on either side of the black empowerment struggle. In particular, it considers the recurring theme that America's racial story was one of color-blind equality grounded on a vision of “black and white together.” The book concludes that television had an ambivalent place in the civil rights revolution. More specifically, it argues that network television sought to represent a rapidly shifting consensus on what “blackness” and “whiteness” meant and how they now fit together. Network television premised equality on a largely white definition whereby African Americans were ready for equal time to the extent that their representations conformed to whitened standards of middle-class and professional respectability.

This book has explored trends in the distribution of online television news and the underlying sociotechnical systems by looking at the case of MSNBC. It has described concepts and offered insights regarding new and emerging organizational forms and distribution networks that are often said to be hallmarks of the Internet. It has suggested that many significant relationships shaping both access to content and the nature of the systems delivering it can be discovered by tracing the path of media as it reaches its intended audience. This concluding chapter discusses contemporary, multifaceted media organizations and their efforts at online distribution. It also considers the notions of epistemic cultures and heterogeneous engineering and how tracing out the “voltas” of media distribution allows us to reevaluate the so-called “moments of tracing.” Finally, it assesses the role of transparent intermediaries, or “business-to-business” distribution firms, in the distribution of a provider's content while remaining invisible to end users.

This chapter examines how television networks handled the coverage of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 to a national audience of millions. The March on Washington drew a quarter of a million civil rights activists who converged on the nation's capital to press for “jobs and freedom.” Television cameras and reporters focused on the demonstrators' placards and signs. All three networks broadcast the event live. With the exception of presidential inaugurations and nominating conventions, no single event had ever commanded such extensive television coverage. This chapter first considers how the CBS news team framed and packaged the March on Washington as a news story, and particularly Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech, before discussing various responses to the television news reporting of the march in the African American press. It suggests that the March on Washington functioned as a paean of “black and white together,” as the networks invited viewers to share in a utopian taste of achieved equality.

This chapter examines whether television news was “the instrument of the revolution” during the civil rights era. It first considers early television news coverage of the civil rights story, focusing on the seminal news documentary series, See It Now (1957) and its strategy to privilege the white moderate. It then turns to television coverage of the James Meredith crisis at the University of Mississippi, along with network news' ambivalence with black activism and CBS Eyewitness coverage of the Albany Movement. The chapter asks whether television news amplified and publicized the goals, politics, and agendas of the civil rights movement, its activists, demonstrators, and spokespeople for the cause of voting rights, desegregation, and African American empowerment. It suggests that news reporting, whether print or television, is obviously not a neutral mirror reflecting reality.

This chapter presents a case study examining the metadiscursive representation of politicians' text messages within television news broadcasts. The analysis shows that from the multimodal media context of TV news and the inconsistent erasure of some features of the texts, heteroglossic representations emerge of individual text messages and text messaging. It discusses this heteroglossia as it relates to ideologies of standard language, adulthood, and youth.

This chapter considers the time crunch in television news. Network newscast content suggests that in some ways the time crunch did get worse. From 1968 to 1988, the total minutes dedicated to political reporting in network programs had become smaller by about a quarter. At the same time, how long newscasters spoke continuously shrank on average, just as the sound bites of politicians had shrunk over the period. But in other ways no time crunch appeared. Beyond political coverage, reports overall did not grow shorter. Of the time available, almost 10 percent shifted away from sources, but correspondents used about the same number of minutes at the start as at the end of the period studied. Newscasters increased their share of time compared with the total of their sources' much-reduced sound bites, which had declined by half.

This chapter considers the provision of context and analysis in television news. Americans have tended to be realist, viewing problems as “concrete rather than abstract” and are relying more on television for news, which simplifies “complex issues to the level of anecdotal evidence.” However, episodic newscasts may lead audiences to ignore the modern big picture of social conditions and public policy behind problems. For a century the U.S. population has scored poorly on standard memory tests of political knowledge. An uninformed audience may need more explanations, but did the interpretive turn fail to spread to television as critics suggest? It is shown that television news adopted the wider modern perspectives that critics demanded. Since the 1960s, newscasters have expanded interpretation on national evening news. After beating newspapers to the newest stories, network newscasts themselves began shifting into modern interpretive styles instead of sticking with realist, episodic coverage.

This introductory chapter discusses the major themes that have informed the news coverage of Hillary Clinton since the start of her public life. In particular, emphasis is placed on news media and its preoccupation with “authenticity”—an issue that has often permeated media coverage of Clinton. This chapter briefly sets out the evolutionary news narratives and visual framing devices used to cover one very public political woman over the span of sixteen years. Furthermore, it considers the historical and gendered spaces of the American nation-state, wherein this coverage is situated. As the chapter shows, scholarship on nationalism and its connection to theories of character and authenticity, gendered politics, and news function as the primary critical lenses used to examine the television news coverage of Hillary Clinton.

This chapter analyzes the impact of location in network evening newscasts. The background surrounding newscasters is one indicator of location. Correspondents appear close to the action by going on location, where they stand before the scene itself. Or they can appear surrounded by the technology needed for direct transmission. Sitting in front of a simple backdrop or a typical TV studio set with a desk and chairs produces the impression of distance from events. Studio shots position the anchor at a vantage point for observing events dispassionately. The placement of the camera can also produce an impression of viewing newscasters up close or from a distance. Two main changes in the visual vocabulary of location were observed. Through a quarter century beginning in the 1960s, cameras moved in much closer on the faces of newscasters, conveying visually a sense of their proximity to the audience. Close-ups helped collapse the distance between the viewer and especially anchors. The other change involved the backgrounds. In the 1960s network news style amounted to a series of moderate shots of talking heads on a bland set. By the 1990s reporters began to appear on location more often than on any other backdrop.