Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Almost from the moment Vladimir Zworykin, John Logie Baird, Philo Farnsworth, and others started improving German inventor Paul Nipkow's “spinning disc television” idea in the early twentieth century, the debate began concerning journalism's role on the small screen. Communication researchers, sociologists, and others scholars were slow to take the medium seriously as an information source, even while people around the world turned to television as their primary source of news. Television news became one of the most popular sources for information in the last four decades of the twentieth century, especially in Europe and the US. By the start of the twenty-first century, satellite technology helped spread news channels in the Middle East, Asia, and other regions of the world, allowing non-western perspectives on world issues to gain a wider audience (→  Satellite Television ; CNN ; Arab Satellite TV News ). Diffusion of television, and television news to a greater extent, has happened at dramatically different rates around the world ( Conway 2006 ). Broadly speaking, the two most important factors determining television news content are the method of funding and the political structure of the host countries. Countries that have set up a tax or user-fee system for funding broadcast news (e.g., Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands; →  Public Broadcasting Systems ) tend to focus ... log in or subscribe to read full text