Visual Communication
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Archive video footage in news: creating a likeness and index of the phenomenal world
David Machin and Adam Jaworski
Visual Communication 2006 5: 345
DOI: 10.1177/1470357206068464
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visual communication
ARTICLE
Archive video footage in news:
creating a likeness and index
of the phenomenal world
DAVID MACHIN
University of Leicester, UK
ADAM JAWORSKI
Cardiff University, UK
ABSTRACT
This article examines the use of archive footage in television news
bulletins. Due to economic pressures and technological changes in the
newsroom, there has been a general increase in the use of such
secondary sources in news: press releases, public relations material,
photographs from image banks and archive news footage. Looking at the
contents of one film archive and several news items that use such material,
we consider the implications of such footage for the nature of news as
bearing witness. We also ask how viewers may interpret this footage. Do
they see it as actuality or as indicative? Existing models of visual
communication suggest two possibilities: that viewers will understand the
footage in terms of the way it is anchored by language (Barthes) or that
visual communication, like language, is made up of signs that form a
grammar (Kress and Van Leeuwen), allowing viewers to ‘read’ the nature of
what is communicated, such as whether it claims to be a true representation. We reject both views. Images can communicate without
language, but there are important differences between images which form
simple signs systems, and language which forms complex sign systems.
Signs in simple semiotic systems are closer to the phenomenal world
(Halliday, 1985) and closer therefore to the real world of our experiences.
They powerfully index discourses within which the linguistic accompaniment can be contained. Thus, viewers are able to see archive footage
as a sufficient likeness of the world through its ability to index the
phenomenal world, and through the compelling nature of established news
frames.
KEY WORDS
documentary • multimodality • new media technologies • news •
television • video footage
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi:
http://vcj.sagepub.com) /10.1177/1470357206068464
Vol 5(3): 345–366 [1470-3572(200610)5:3; 345–366]
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INTRODUCTION
You are watching a television news bulletin. There is an item on the
possibility of future conflict for your government involving industrial action
due to recent proposals for the use of private funding in a state-run system.
Footage is shown of rioters struggling with riot police, although the images
have been cropped so that faces are not seen. The images are slightly
pixellated. In fact this footage was not filmed for the report but was taken, at
low cost, from a film archive. Of course the conflict could not have been
filmed as it had not yet happened. But this use of archive footage is now very
common in news reporting.
The next item is on the conflict in the Middle East between Palestine
and Israel. Footage is shown of mourners carrying a coffin, angry shouting
women in close up. This is followed by a scene of men parading past the
camera wearing ski masks, carrying flags, although the detail of these cannot
really be made out. The clips are shown with added colours which saturate
out much of the detail. Again this footage has not been filmed for the report
and has been taken from a film archive. Any similar footage could have been
used as it was meant to indicate generic terrorists rather than particular
people acting in a specific place or moment in time. This is typical of such
archive footage, which is widespread in today’s newsmaking. It is used to
make reports visually more appealing and entertaining and also because it is
cheap and easy to access. A single editor can easily choose material from a
commercial footage archive to create a bulletin or a report.
Of course, this isn’t what we would expect from news, which should
document actual events. Machin (2004) expressed concerns about the similar
use of photographs in news and magazines that come from global
commercial image banks. He argued that this is part of a move away from the
use of the photograph as evidence, as witness, to the symbolic use of the
photograph. So, rather than being used as records of say poverty, or a record
of a particular instance of suffering, generic stock photographs are used to
symbolize these things. For example, a close-up of the dirty face of a child
might symbolize the chaos caused by war.
The result of this, Machin suggests (2004), is that we move into a
realm where photographs connote rather than denote. These stock photographs, bought cheaply from image banks, provide us with a set of clichés
which themselves become iconic of the things they would, in a former time,
have recorded and bore witness to. The world in these images comes to
resemble the limited world of the image banks, which is an ideologically prestructured world, a world based on corporate capitalism and consumerism.
Most importantly, these images are part of a move away from journalism as a
checking of facts and of investigating issues, to a journalism of editing and
processing, in which style, layout and marketing are central. This is part of a
process whereby news media are becoming more and more reliant on
secondary sources such as official press releases, public relations material and
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other pre-packaged information (Bennett, 2005; Rampton and Stauber,
2000).
The video archive footage that we analyse in this article can be
thought of in a similar fashion. But it is important to go a step further and
ask how it is that such footage is able to symbolize, to connote, in this way.
How is it that viewers are able to see disembodied footage of people as a riot?
Why do they not immediately ask ‘Where exactly is this taking place?’, or
‘Who precisely are these people?’ We argue that this can happen in news for
three reasons that we examine more closely throughout the article.
1. Viewers have been trained to see the world in news through established
news frames (Allan, 1999; Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Hartley, 1982). They
encounter these frames visually through memorable ‘mediagenic’
moments rather than complex socio-political processes. And they are
trained to receive these in terms of the reality of news.
2. The history of film editing has established a different convention for
documenting as compared to film fiction. In the latter, cuts must be
evidence of the narrative. In the former, they need not be consistent but
add up to an argument about the historical.
3. There are some important differences between images which form
simple sign systems (Halliday, 1985) and language which forms complex
sign systems. Signs in simple semiotic systems, Halliday suggests, are
closer to the phenomenal world and to the real world of our experiences.
Thus, we cannot assume that viewers will read their elements as a
grammar which will connote the symbolic. Rather they will read them as
a whole so that they index actual or symbolic events, places and
moments.
Therefore, the visual in news has a powerful ability to index the real world
‘out there’, and, in turn, to restrict or even override the accompanying
linguistic message.
D ATA
The two data extracts discussed in some detail in this article have been
selected from among 30 video news clips which use archive footage. The
sample comes from 23 Newsnight (BBC2) and 7 Channel 4 News
programmes videotaped between 8 May–15 June 2001 and 24 May–6 June
2001, respectively. The two examples analysed here come from Channel 4
News. The extracts have been transcribed in their audio and visual tracks.
C H A N G I N G N E W S S TA N D A R D S
There is now a large literature arguing that standards of journalism and news
have fallen over the past 20 or so years. This explains the increased reliance
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on archive material. There are two changes that lie behind this that concern
us here.
First, there has been increasing commercial competition between
news media (Bourdieu, 1998; Hallin, 1996), introduced in the UK by
regulatory changes in the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which led to waves of
redundancies in broadcast news. As a result, much smaller news teams have
less time and financial resources to gather their own material. There has been
a corresponding growth in press offices and public relations departments
which now feed reporters and news rooms with prepackaged material. There
has also been a similar growth in news agencies which operate to repackage
and recycle news which they then sell on (Machin and Niblock, 2006).
Second is the arrival of new digital technologies in the newsroom that
only require a small number of staff. In these times of downsizing, the
journalists who remained were forced to become multiskilled and technically
competent in fast editing (Ursell, 2001). Garcia Aviles et al. (2004: 87)
demonstrated that journalists in both Spain and the UK were concerned with
the demise of traditional reporting values in the speeded-up digital
newsroom leading them to become ‘mouse-monkeys’.
Bromley (1997) and Parker (1995) described the consequences of the
move to new technologies in terms of changes in journalism where new
recruits were primarily being trained in digital editing, and in script writing,
rather than traditional core investigative techniques which centred on
producing well-substantiated news. Much of the daily news, for example,
that we hear on our radios, no matter what the station, will come from
perhaps one electronic newsroom, spliced together from news feeds and
archive material by at most two newsroom editors. This will then be
syndicated out, free to users, supported by advertisers (Machin and Niblock,
2006).
Ekström (2000) argues that digital facilities in the newsroom have
lead to a television of ‘attractions’. His point is that the use of the new
technologies themselves can lead to digital theatrics. This is where news
reports move away from investigation and documentation to the elaborate
use of graphics, maps, tables and reconstructions. The archive footage we
consider in this article can certainly be seen as part of the process of the
move towards a dependence on secondary sources and can also, to some
degree, be thought of as part of this process of digital theatrics produced by
journalists-as-editors.
A FILM ARCHIVE: THE EXAMPLE OF ITN
The examples of archive footage we analyse in this article come from the ITN
archive, which provides footage for all of the British commercial terrestrial
news channels, along with sounds, for all commercial radio. It is one of the
biggest commercial archives in the world. It has over 600,000 hours of film
footage and offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Tokyo
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and Paris, and its footage is accessed around the world. The ITN archive is
just one example of many large archives, such as CNN and ABC, that provide
stock footage for television and television news in many different countries.
In the ITN brochure they claim: ‘Many of the world’s prominent
producers, broadcasters, corporations, new media ventures and film makers
have used the ITN Archive to find exactly the right footage, shot or clip for
their project.’
News and feature footage in the archive comes from ITN news,
Reuters, Granada Television, Fox News and Channel Four, and others. It also
licenses use of material from archives such as Images of War which contains
hundreds of hours of ‘premium’ war footage, and, for more improvisedlooking footage, Sam Silver Films which is an archive of amateur material.
The commercial development of the ITN archive can be seen as one response
to the weakening of ITN after the 1990 Broadcasting Act. New competition
from the BBC and Sky meant that there was urgent need to build new
outputs. It managed to outbid competitors for some news provision, but this
meant finding more cost efficient ways of producing news, with more
emphasis on smaller newsroom teams (Ursell, 2001).
At the time of writing, ITN was owned by a single company, ITV plc,
the company formed by the merger of Carlton Communications and
Granada plc, thereby placing one company in control of a huge slice of
commercial television in the UK.
When a news editor is creating a television news bulletin one important factor influencing whether an event will become news is whether or not
there is video footage to show (Hartley, 1982), which might include an event,
a setting, or an interview. Footage archives mean that there is generally less
problem with having access to such visuals. Additionally, electronic
accessibility means that stock footage can be quickly searched and selected
allowing reports to have visuals where none might be otherwise available. For
example, a government report on the occupation of Palestine can be
presented using stock footage of previous film of conflict in the area.
Importantly, as with the images from the image banks (Machin, 2004), this
footage is cheap. To send out a camera, lighting and reporter to a location is
very expensive and time consuming.
The ITN archive can be searched under the following categories:
Accidents & Disasters
Arts, Entertainment & Media
Conflict
Crime & Punishment
Culture and Beliefs
History and Politics
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Industry & Commerce
Life and Death
Lifestyle
The Natural World
People & Places
Science & Technology
Sport & Leisure
Transport
Each of these gives a further range of options, sometimes offering specific
events and stock type events. Under the category of Crime & Punishment, for
example, we have:
Anonymous Crime
Courts and Trials
Hooligan
September 11th
Hijack
Myra Hindley
Immediately, the ideological nature of the way that this material is classified
becomes apparent. Hijacks and September 11th come under ‘Crime’,
alongside a convicted serial killer, Myra Hindley, and Courts and Trials. In
this section there is nothing on, say, the US occupation of Iraq, its feeding of
arms into the Middle East and Africa, its support of Israel in developing
nuclear weapons while denying the same to all surrounding countries. There
is nothing on the British government’s occupation of Northern Ireland, of
the activities of the World Trade Organisation.
We might think about the contents of this archive as being highly
ideological. This is certainly the case. But we must not assume that the
archive itself is therefore constructed for political reasons. As has been
mentioned above, sociologists of news (Bennett, 2005; Galtung and Ruge,
1965; Hall, 1983; Hartley, 1982) speak of the way that one criterion as to
whether an event becomes news is whether or not it fits with an existing news
frame. Such frames are established, widely trodden, themes that viewers will
immediately recognize. These footage collections are designed with established news frames in mind.
Another way to think about these news frames could be as established
discourses (Fairclough, 2001; Foucault, 1972). Here we mean discourses as
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socially shared knowledges about the world and how it works. For example,
in western society we currently hear much of official discourses of terrorism
and ‘enemies of freedom’. In this discourse, terrorists are fanatics and
enemies of freedom. This discourse does not contain the reasons that
motivate such people, for example, that their village and economy have been
destroyed and family killed by the actions of a western government. When
events in the world are chosen as news, they must to some degree fit with
such existing accepted discourses or news frames such as terrorism. So, we
can think of the archive as providing visual realizations of particular
established discourses. The owners of the archive might argue that rather
than being political, they are supplying what customers require.
But crucially the contents of the archive must be easily useable. This
means that details of actual contexts and people must be reduced. Here is a
description of the footage that is filed under ‘Anonymous Crime’:
A collection of generic pictures where people and places cannot be
easily identified intended for use in crime stories. Shots have been
selected which make recognition of individuals difficult and in most
cases impossible. The collection includes anonymous shots of police
officers on patrol, [including the RUC] stations and incident rooms,
drug preparation and taking, dealing, busts and hauls, prostitutes,
burglary, neighbourhood watch, property marking and dusting for
prints, prison cells, corridors, officers and prisoners.
CNN, the leading archive footage supplier in the US, describes its
collection in the same way, claiming to have film ‘ranging from actual news
events to generic b-roll of “people, places and things”’ [http://www.orgs.ttu.
edu/CNNworldreport/video.htm].
Such material therefore is designed to be used generically, for example
in any news item that deals with say prostitution or drug dealing. In each
film, the precise nature of the footage is described as follows, giving detail of
camera angles and distances:
London: EXT GV police car pulling out from garage & along street /
INT CAR SIDE LA MS police officer driving patrol car / CBV officers
in front of patrol car as speeding through street / EXT BV police
officer away down passage into building TRACK FORWARD / GV
police patrol car along / INT BV police man & woman away through
door in garage / INT CAR CBV police officers in patrol car as
speeding down street / EXT LA MS pair of police officers’ legs
towards as on beat (GOOD GRAB) /
These kinds of film clips may be used many times to provide visuals to a
range of items. This footage, therefore, can be used to symbolize ‘a typical
arrest’, ‘a typical prostitute’, and so on. But these clips index a particular
discourse of crime, that will be recognizable as such by viewers. This world of
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crime, as many sociologists of journalism have argued, is not one that
includes corporate crime, political crime or the accepted injustices of society
(Bennett, 2005; Fishman, 1980; McChesney, 2004).
Machin (2004: 327) describes the photographic archive of Getty
Images as containing images that have broad meaning potential. Drawing on
Halliday (1978), he argues that images have a set of possible meanings which
can be actualized in context. Therefore, footage is more valuable for
archiving when it provides a connotative meaning potential, when it can be
used to connote ‘crime’ or ‘prisons’ in general. Simply put, when footage is
multipurpose. But in this case, it seems that the footage, and possibly the
images described by Machin (2004), are designed to index specific
discourses. Their meaning potential is therefore highly restricted.
A N A LY S I S O F N E W S I T E M S
In Extract 1, we use a segment of a news broadcast from Channel 4. It is a
news item reporting on what the New Labour Party plans for the National
Health Service if re-elected.
Extract 1 Labour’s new NHS policy (Channel 4 News, 24 May 2001)
Video
Audio
Black background with red grid on it.
To centre left is a red square with rounded
corners. Below this are the words ‘Public
Promise’.
Fade to OTS [over the shoulder] of lab
technician, to right of screen facing
slightly right, who is working.
Grid can still be seen superimposed
overframe, stronger at edges.
Noise of heart-rate monitor beeping
over all archive footage.
VO [voice over]: Labour was trying
to put Tory NHS policy under the
scanner . . .
Fade to view of hospital seen over sign
‘X-ray Dept’ at bottom of screen.
Rounded square [about one-third of
screen] flashes on screen. It contains
different view of building. Again grid
remains seen.
Fade to OTS of woman technician
. . . claiming that a Conservative
working at right of screen facing slightly
government would mean patients paying
left. Grid remains. Square flashes onto
thousands for their . . .
frame with B&W hospital machinery in it.
It is hard to make out details.
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Fade to CS [close shot] of drip, panning
down, blurred background. Square
appears with same drip in it in B&W.
. . . operations. And Tony Blair was
repeating Labour’s tried and . . .
Fade to MLS [medium long shot] of
porter pushing wheelchair containing
woman, from left to centre frame. Square
appears with B&W X-ray of human body.
. . . tested ‘You can only trust Labour
with the public services.’
Cut to head and shoulders of Tony Blair
in front of brightly lit background.
[noise of heart-rate monitor stops] Tony
Blair speaks: ‘And in the end that’s the
choice the country’s got to make and our
choice is to carry on with the investment.
Their choice is to cut it back. That is the
election in a nutshell.’
Cut to MLS of panel with Tony Blair and
three other Labour MPs. In front of stage
journalists raise hands and one is pointed
at by Blair.
VO: But Labour has sown confusion
with its new emphasis on how . . .
Fade to CS of head and shoulders of two
male nurses, facing left speaking on
telephones. Square appears containing
X-ray of skull and neck from right side.
[noise of heart-rate monitor starts] . . .
the private sector might transform the
NHS. Government advisors talk about
the private . . .
Fade to CS of heart-rate monitoring
machine.
. . . sector throwing a life line to public
services. But . . .
Fade to low shot of hospital corridor.
. . . there is puzzlement and some anger
Four people walk towards the frame. The at the heart of the Labour movement.
two at the sides can only be seen from
chest down. Square appears showing
X-ray of two full bodies next to each other.
Analysis of Extract 1
The main part of the footage used in this item is typical of that taken from
archives. Here is an example of some of the clips on hospitals held by ITN as
they describe them:
Nurses with paperwork
Bed being made
Consultant examining patient
Male nurses dispensing drugs in ward
Nurse writing out prescription
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The verbal part of the report comes from the New Labour press release. This
is summarized to provide the text on the screen, but there is no additional
investigation into the claims made by New Labour from the news
programme. The item as a whole suggests that New Labour may increase
private investment into the NHS. There is speculation that this might
generate responses by the ‘Labour movement’. To say exactly how we think
the footage here works, we need to show what the news item does not cover,
or what we believe is in fact the real situation with regard to this issue.
Since the 1990s there has been increasing private involvement in
British health care, particularly the move to a commercial model of health
care for consumers, along with severe constraints on public service spending
(Prior, 1996). Since this time there has been massive outsourcing of services,
sliced-up budget systems, market systems of accountability and increase in
government by appointment (Daly, 1996). During the 1990s, local authority
representation was removed from health authorities (Davis and Stewart,
1993). These writers describe a health service run by private management
groups distanced from elected government whose policies will always be
filtered out. Flinders (1999) argues that by the late 1990s the British health
service had become a semi-private organization.
Yet in the news item, there is no analysis of what the effect has been of
these changes, to the costs or the results in service. Most importantly the item
fails to address who in fact now makes decisions on the way that the health
service is run. In this case, the reliance on official sources means that there is
no investigation.
Deacon (2004) warns that journalists are organized to focus on a
system of political control that no longer exists. Public services in Britain, he
comments, are now governed by private organizations, quasi-government,
health trusts, advisory boards, and other committees. But these do not
register on the traditional journalistic radar. In fact, as Deacon (2004) states:
‘even experienced journalists struggle to cope with the complex and evolving
structure of quasi-government in the UK’ (p. 339).
We can see therefore that our news item is interpreted through a
political model that belongs in a previous era. The voiceover tells us that ‘the
Labour movement’ are ‘puzzled’ and ‘angry’. Yet this movement no longer
exists and speaks of a former time when the British political parties
represented significant ideological differences. The linguistic representation
of the social actors includes no players outside an older political system. But
it would be difficult for journalists to generate material from these new kinds
of sources; viewers might not be able to recognize them easily, and this would
not sound newsworthy. Thus, the programme seems to use archive footage as
part of the tested and unquestionable news frame that is ‘reporting political
party election campaign’, in which the views of the three main UK political
parties on key social and political issues are presented as three radically
different ideological positions.
While referring to photography and suffering, Sontag (2004)
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suggested that news photojournalism has encouraged us to think about the
world of events in terms of memorable moments rather than lengthy
complex processes. Drawing on Morley (1992), we can suggest that as news
consumers, in the west, we are familiar with the way that the news sweeps us
to these moments. The news claims to take us to these outbursts of the
newsworthy. Of course, the reason the event is newsworthy, such as a famine,
a war or a natural disaster, is partly precisely because it is recognizable
through a news frame. It is framed in terms of wide-eyed children and other
motifs that draw on western values (Benthall, 1993; Lutz and Collins, 1993).
Yet, as Morley notes, these events are rarely given political or sociological
context. Wars are simplified into good and evil. Famines are not connected to
structural adjustment loans and the World Bank. Conflicts in Africa are not
related to western governments supporting dictatorships for decades or a
century of colonial meddling. These events seem to simply happen for the
viewer. Their meaning is concentrated into that one memorable moment,
which gets its meaning through its seeming to embody the essence of the
news frame.
So we have a culture where viewers almost expect the world in news to
be slightly mysterious and where events are accepted because they are part of
a usual news frame. This is part of the history of the definition of news.
Therefore, we can accept that we might not quite grasp in any concrete sense
what is happening with the NHS. We are able to accept the moments we see
in photographs and video footage as real moments of the historical world.
There is a further reason that we do not interrogate individual frames
or news images. This is to do with the way that we have come to understand
the meaning of images that do claim to document. Nichols (1991) argues
that in the case of film fiction the different cuts should add up to a narrative.
Each clip is, we might think, evidence for the believability of the narrative. In
a documentary film it is different. The cuts do not have to be evidence of a
narrative, but only of an argument. So there can be huge gaps, so long as it all
testifies to a certain point about the world. Nichols says: ‘At the heart of
documentary is less a story and its imaginary world than an argument about
the historical world . . . [So] documentary gives us photographic and aural
representations or likenesses of the world’ (p. 111).
It follows that news footage is offered as documentary and therefore
viewers will not expect the cuts to be coherent, since they need not add up to
a narrative. Critically, Nichols suggests that in the case of news, it is the
reality of the news that is more a central issue than the news of reality.
Viewers have been trained to view the memorable, and however fragmented,
moments in the context of the reality of the news as likenesses of the world.
This may also be the case for photographs that are offered to us as
documents.
If we turn our attention to the detail of the clips of the hospital in
Extract 1 in terms of their content, style and editing, we can see just how
fragmented this likeness is.
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Representation of participants as generic social actors
Participants, such as nurses, technicians and patients, are not individualized.
Van Leeuwen (1996) suggests that this is either done through lack of closeups – to which we would add cropping, say of heads, as in the clip where
people walk down a corridor. Or it can also be done by representing actors
generically through clothing, so they appear as generic doctors or nurses.
This technique can encourage the viewer to accept the news item as suitable
for a particular news frame rather than as part of a specific story.
Lack of defined space
There is no sense of laying out a specific space for the action. Bordwell (1985:
117) discusses the way that film narrative must lay out pertinent terrain.
Nichols argues that documentary does the same. These shots do not. There
are no cues telling us about spatial continuity. This means that we are
encouraged to read them as being anywhere. Scenes are linked due only to
membership of a category.
No relationship between shots
There is no suggested relationship between shots, no cross-cutting, e.g.
moving between two different shots to link action. Each cut carries forward
another instance or example of the same following on from the outside shot
of the hospital.
Transitions to clips and fades
The clips move one into another using fades rather than clean cuts. In their
classic book on film editing, Reisz and Miller (1968) suggest that such
transitions are used to connote fantasy or dreams, rather than the real. Slow
motion that is used in some of the clips also has the effect of drawing the
action contained in them away from real time. Pop videos often use slow
motion to give a sense of timelessness, which has in this case the effect of
making the act appear more poetical.
Use of colour
All this footage is monochrome red, organizing it under the colour used to
represent New Labour. The same footage is later repeated in the colours
representing the other political parties outlining their plans for the NHS.
Kress and Van Leeuwen (2002) have suggested that colour can sometimes
have a textual function of linking items. For example, a magazine article
might use red for a heading and for bullet points underneath, whereas the
rest of the text is in black font. The red might also be found as a salient
colour in an accompanying image. Kress and Van Leeuwen also say that
colour can be used ideationally, such as on maps to mark out political
territories. The use of colour in this footage seems to be a combination of the
two. As in the case of a map, we might think about the colour drawing the
meaning in a particular direction, e.g. the New Labour election manifesto.
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Montage
In the age of digital theatrics, it is common in news to have a multitude of
things happening on the screen at one time. There may be separate dialogue
and information boxes. But such boxes should not float over the screen and
appear and disappear abruptly even though this is what happens in the footage
in the case of the inlays of X-rays and medical equipment. It is interesting that
viewers do not see these floating images as problematic. This can be explained
again in terms of Nichols’ suggestion of documentary not being about coherence in the same way as fiction film, but rather an argument about the world.
These are ways we might think about the footage as being fragmented
and presented as a likeness of the world. But does this mean that, for the
viewers, this footage is not about the real world? Do they see it as ‘true’, as
evidence, or do they see it as symbolic? After all, the footage was at one time
about the real world even if it was staged. In the view of Kress and Van
Leeuwen (1996), we might expect visual signs, such as unrealistic colours and
decontextualization, to communicate to the viewer that this is less than real,
or ‘low modality’, as they would put it. However, we do not accept that people
necessarily judge the realism or meaning of images through any kind of
components of visual grammar. To support our point, we now analyse
another example of the use of archive footage. The following extract draws
on the press release of the Mitchell Commission, whose role was to investigate the possibility for resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Extract 2 The Mitchell Commission recommendations (Channel 4 News, 29 May 2001)
Video
Audio
MCS [medium close shot] masked men
carrying flags walk towards left-hand
corner of frame in front of crowd of
mainly children. Frame is monochrome
with three horizontal stripes going from
browns at the top to greys at bottom.
VO [voice over] The panel urged the
Palestinians to take ‘immediate steps to
apprehend and incarcerate terrorists’
Over this appears the words ‘Mitchell
recommendations: Palestinian Authority’.
Then the words ‘immediate steps to
apprehend and incarcerate terrorists’
appear below as they are spoken.
Words remain on screen but we cut to
MLS [medium long shot] over crowd as
three men hold guns which point
upwards. There is a flag to the left. The
words ‘prevent gunmen from using
populated areas to fire at the Israelis’
appear below the other words.
and to ‘prevent gunmen from using
populated areas to fire at the Israelis’.
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MLS tracking shot of tank moving to
right, with bushes in foreground. Frame
divided into three horizontal monochrome
stripes, but this time highly saturated
diffuse blue at top and bottom with sand
in the middle.
The Sharon government, on the other
hand has been told to: ‘freeze all
settlement activity in the occupied
territories’, to ‘stop communal
punishments such as economic
blockades’, and
Words appear ‘Mitchell recommendations:
Israeli Authority’ then below ‘freeze all
settlement activity in the occupied
territories’, and below ‘stop communal
punishments such as economic blockades’.
Words remain but we cut to MLS
tracking some kind of bulldozer or
agricultural vehicle moving to right.
Frame still in blue and green layering.
to ‘refrain from the destruction of
homes’.
Words appear below others: ‘refrain from
the destruction of homes’.
Analysis of Extract 2
The ITN archive lists, among many others, these examples of footage from
Palestine. The following clips are listed as filmed in 2000, although of course
they can be used at any time:
Man sitting shoulder high at head of Palestinian rally in support of Hamas
and Hizbollah
Rally
Marchers along with banners and flags
Mourners looking on
Israeli soldier standing guard with gun at checkpoint overlooking hills
UN armoured vehicle along road as gunfire heard
Rocket launchers on hillside
As with other topic areas, news editors can choose shots on the basis of
subject and camera position. For example, the editor may want footage to
support a press release about a suicide bomb explosion in Israel. One option
could be to use footage of mourners. Suffering could be indicated more
strongly in a close shot which would create more emotional intensity,
drawing attention to the actors rather than the setting.
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Before we move on to discuss how we believe that these clips work for
viewers as a likeness of reality, we again wish to show what context is missed
in this news item which is taken straight from a press release with no
additional investigation.
Looking more closely at the Mitchell recommendations it becomes
clear that, like other US proposals for peace in the region, the report revealed
more than anything else the American reluctance to deal with Israel. The
report does not call for Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories in
return for security guarantees. This withdrawal was in fact required under
UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, long considered by the United
States and the international community as the basis for peace. The Mitchell
Report only called for a freeze on further illegal settlements, even though,
according to Article 40 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, it was illegal for an
occupying power to bring in its civilian population at all. Therefore under
international law, all of the settlements were illegal. So we have a case where
Palestinians were thrown off their land through Israeli military occupation,
where settlements were then built. Yet the victims of this process are
represented as shadowy terrorists and gunmen, not as political activists.
The report as presented on the news bulletin placed equal blame on
Israel and Palestine. Yet it is Palestinian land that is being confiscated and
colonized. It is the Palestinian people who are being denied the right to selfgovernment. Clearly the violence would be unlikely to ever come to an end
without the Palestinians being able to reclaim the land seized by Israel in
1967. Yet the Mitchell Report does not mention this and since the news item
uses no other sources other than the official press release, this remains
uninvestigated.
The members of the Commission, George Mitchell and Warren
Rudmen, had themselves previously made it clear that they were strong
supporters of Israel’s expansionist policies. Both were Americans and were
US appointed. The US refused to allow non-Americans on to a so-called
international committee. This is a country that has provided Israel with
economic and military aid to the tune of billions of dollars a year, even at
times when Israel was acting highly aggressively towards the inhabitants of
Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. Although the US did at times criticize Israel
for invading these countries, it continued to provide military aid (El-Khawas,
1984; Sarran, 1963), including help in developing a nuclear programme
while preventing neighbouring countries from doing the same (Seymour,
1983). Israel’s continuing refusal to permit the presence of UN arms
inspectors was not acted against while this was seen as reason enough to go
to war with Iraq.
What happens is that the press release is presented in an established
news frame of the activities of terrorists. The verbal and written parts do not
do this so precisely, but the video footage does. The verbal does actually refer
to acts of aggression by Israel, but we see none. Visually, we do see extensive
footage of iconic terrorists and crazed Arab types.
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The categories of analysis we laid out for the previous news item also
apply in the same way here. There is no mapping out of space. There is no
linking of scenes in terms of causality or other relations. Participants are
shown as generic rather than as individuals. This is done through cropping,
lack of close-ups and the use of generic social types. Finally, the clips have
been digitally coloured. The frame in each case has been split into three
horizontal bands that use monochrome colours that are darker in shade at
the top. The lack of articulation of detail of the participants and the use of
low colour differentiation and high colour saturation would, in Kress and
Van Leeuwen’s (1996) terms, be ‘low modality’ or less than real.
A R C H I V E F O O TA G E A S A L I K E N E S S A N D I N D E X O F
THE PHENOMENAL WORLD
However, as suggested earlier, it is not at all clear that viewers see such
footage as less than real. For one thing, as we have already discussed, we have
been trained in the ‘reality of news’ and its providing of a message or
argument to which we as viewers will tend to subordinate our viewing. We
are familiar with fragments and moments that are presented as likenesses.
But we believe that this is also to do with the nature of images themselves.
Roland Barthes (1977) would say that we can think of images as
‘polysemous’, that is that they have many possible meanings and interpretations. This floating meaning is then anchored by the use of language.
Decontextualized images therefore, in this view, might be said to have broad
meaning potential which is grounded by language. So an image of a hospital
corridor or a man in a ski-mask have their meanings realized for the viewer
through language.
This idea has been rejected by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) basically
for two reasons. First, all texts are multimodal, that is they combine the
linguistic, visual and other modes of representation. So language and images
can work together rather than one being seen as primary. Second, the visual
and linguistic ‘both realize the same more fundamental and far-reaching
systems of meaning that constitute our cultures, but . . . each does so by
means of its own specific forms, and independently’ (p. 17). In other words,
we must think about visual communication as also being organized like a
grammar.
Kress and Van Leeuwen argue that visual signs, like words, have
meaning potential that can be realized through their combination with other
signs. So, as Machin (2004) demonstrates, an image bank picture of a woman
jumping may signify ‘freedom’ without language. We can look at the way her
arms point outwards, rather than inwards, in what Kress and Van Leeuwen
see as ‘visual verbs’, indicating energy and motion. We can look at the
iconographic meaning of the setting, its colours, which might be flatter than
in a natural setting, the level of illumination, which might be brighter than
normal with no single natural source of light. By putting these together, the
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viewer gets the meaning of the image. In the case of the woman jumping we
might say outward-going energy with bright optimistic lighting and
modernist colours. This can work multimodally with language but does not
require language to anchor meaning.
While we would agree that visual communication does not require
language to be read by viewers, we want to question the view that images
necessarily communicate through combining sets of visual signs into formal,
grammar-like structures. We believe that the footage we have considered
works because it comes to index the real world through its likeness to a
discourse. We argue that any language that accompanies the image is then
contained by the world created by the image. This is because visual signs have
a specific quality and are not so similar to language as Kress and Van
Leeuwen suggest in Reading Images (1996).
To illustrate what we mean here we can look at an example given in
Reading Images. Kress and Van Leeuwen show a picture of a man pointing a
gun. They explain that we can think of the pointing as a visual verb, which
they call a ‘vector’. The term ‘vector’ is used in science to indicate the
direction of force and motion, often represented graphically by an arrow. So
this metaphorical association can be brought into naturalistic images. The
meaning potential of this vector can then be realized by combining it with
other signs. So, linguistically, we can have ‘the soldier shoots the enemy’. We
have actor, process and goal. The visual verb fits into the same kind of clause
made up of visual signs. The actor is the soldier, the process/verb is the vector
made by the pointing gun, and the goal is the man he points it at.
But we could ask: Do we need the visual verb or vector to see a
narrative? We would argue that in the case of schematic diagrams, using
geometric shapes and arrows, perhaps yes. But in the case of photographs or
other naturalistic images, the answer is no. We can see more clearly how the
sign of the man pointing the gun works for the viewer if we imagine, first, a
slightly different image.
What if the man is not pointing the gun. Instead, the gun is now
pointing downwards at the man’s side and is only just visible to the viewer.
And we can see the man who has just been shot as he lies on the ground but
with his arm stuck pointing upwards as he fell awkwardly. Is this the vector?
Is this how the viewer will judge the narrative? Of course we can still see a
narrative but it is not based around the vector.
The same goes for another aspect of the visual grammar described by
Kress and Van Leeuwen – modality. In our case of the footage of the
hospitals, do viewers assess how real it is by modality markers such as
articulation of detail? Let’s think of another photograph, say, of Adolf Hitler
where he is slightly out of focus. Does this mean that we will view the image
as low modality? Or will we bring in a whole range of information available
to us about the world and people in it, specifically in this case about the very
real person who was part of some very real events? We argue that this is the
case for the way that viewers interpret the footage of hospitals and of
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terrorists. Do we see a picture of a group of men on their way to explode
bombs on the London Underground in Summer 2005 as less than real, or
claiming to be less than real, if the colours are undersaturated?
We think that we interpret images in this way because visual signs are
different from linguistic signs. In linguistic grammar the word ‘gun’ and the
verb ‘shoot’ get their meaning partly due to their grammatical characteristics.
As Halliday (1985) has described, in complex sign systems, like language, the
sign is separated from meaning by grammar. In contrast, in simple sign
systems the meaning of the sign lies much more in the phenomenal world.
So the sign of the man with a gun does not have its meaning potential due to
its place in a system of grammar, but due to our lived experience of seeing
guns in our lives. We know about guns and what they can do. We do not need
to see a vector to understand a narrative where there is a gun in an image. We
would certainly not base our narrative around the vector where the dead
man’s arm points awkwardly upwards towards a tree. The narrative in this
image does not come through the arrangement of signs as would happen in a
complex sign system. In this sense we might suggest that attempting to create
a grammar of images is not unlike attempting to create a grammar of reality.
Possibly, as we stated, vectors might work more in the manner of
linguistic signs in the case of a schematic diagram such as a flow chart. But
this shows that the difference between a simple system and a language is only
gradual (a cline, as Halliday would call it). To us, images seem to be too close
to a simple system to be analysed or understood in the same way as language.
But while the visual is different to language, this does not mean that
we have to take a step in the direction of Barthes (1977) and say that images
are ‘polysemous’. Since visual signs for the viewer are closer to the referent in
the simple system they can have this power to mean, and for the viewer to
connect to the phenomenal world.
In the case of the archive footage used to visualize terrorists analysed
earlier, this footage has been placed in the archive as it can easily be used for a
specific news frame. When the newsroom access and assemble the footage,
they can assume that this will comply with accepted discourses about the
conflict between Israel and Palestine.
It may not occur to viewers that these are not actual events and they
will see them as part of the reality of news and of the documentary process of
using cuts to make an argument about the world out there. The viewer will
not need to read a grammar of signs, but will see these images as indexing
something real in the phenomenal world. This is the nature of how we
understand such images.
CONCLUSION
In the Language of News, Fowler (1991) defines news as ‘a practice: a discourse
which, far from neutrally reflecting social reality and empirical facts,
intervenes in what Berger and Luckmann [1966] call “the social construction
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of reality”’ (p. 2; see also Scannell, 2001; Schlesinger, 1987; Tuchman, 1978;
Van Ginneken, 1998). Likewise, as we have argued in this article, archive
footage presents us with typical versions of the phenomenal world which we
take to be ‘real’ in the specific frame of broadcast news. However, these
generic, decontextualized, and anonymized images do more than just
construct particular visions of the world. They also iconize and legitimize
them.
The reduction of the world to iconic instances has been discussed by
Frederick Jameson (1991) in the context of movies. Jameson said that movies
have led to certain depictions of US history becoming iconic of certain
periods of time, when in fact they were only one isolated image or instance.
When this happens much gets left out. He gives as an example the image of
the idealized late 1950s when teenagers wore sneakers, went to the diner, the
prom, and drove customized cars. This is a representation that has now
become iconic of the US at this time – a time, Jameson reminds us, when the
US was racked with civil liberties issues and urban inequalities.
Just as Jameson (1991) argued that our collective memory of the US
in the 1950s had been iconicized by a handful of selective images, we can
argue that our knowledge of our own societies, our hospitals and wars are
equally essentialized by the repeated use of generic, stylized news video
footage sequences. In this sense, it is possible to argue that our collective
image of the NHS is that of efficient and balanced auxiliary personnel in
hospitals doing tests in labs and ferrying patients across hospital corridors in
wheelchairs; and our idea of the conflict in Palestine is associated with
shadowy fanatical gunmen.
Moreover, the way archive footage emphasizes the generic supports
the use of generic news frames rather than examination of specifics. Instead
of being offered a thorough examination of specific events, places, people
and situations, we are left with representations and realities of ‘typical’
hospitals and conflicts, in the same way as we live with powerful, conventional and habituated icons of a typical crime, or a typical terrorist attack
displacing all other possible or actual instances.
But when we emphasize old news frames, say of industrial dispute or
the conflict in the Middle East, and the footage is readily available to connote
this frame, what happens if there are new actors, new forces at play? As we
have seen, this may mean that they simply remain invisible and therefore
ignored. The result of this may be that we will be unable to recognize
anything other than the generic. Systems might change, the world might
move on, but visually it could remain the same for years. Our knowledge of
history is in crisis, Nichols (1991) says, but then so is our knowledge of the
present and of the future.
In 2004, the journalist John Lloyd started a furious, although
shortlived, debate about journalism in the UK. He argued that the news
media no longer have a role in keeping in check the political system. Instead
they have become an alternative establishment. They are highly critical, but
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only of individual politicians, not of the actual institutions themselves
(Lloyd, 2004). We really should return to this debate. We entrust informing
the public and, checking the power of our politicians so that we can maintain
our democracies only to journalists, to no one else. There is so little
discussion about how this role is performed. Yet one can imagine how the
debate itself might now be framed in the news media, complete with its own
generic footage of journalists – of a kind that existed before the cut-backs
and before the digital newsrooms.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article is a result of a dialogue between two Leverhulme Trust-funded
projects: ‘Back to the Future’: Reporting of the Future in Broadcast News
Programmes (F/00 407/B) and Language and Global Communication
(F/00 407D), both awarded to the Cardiff Centre for Language and
Communication Research.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
DAVID MACHIN teaches in the Department of Media and Communication
at the University of Leicester. He has recently co-authored the book News
Production: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2006). He is also the editor of
Social Semiotics.
Address: Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester,
University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. [email: dm148@le.ac.uk]
ADAM JAWORSKI is a Professor at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, ENCAP, Cardiff University. His latest book is Discourse,
Communication and Tourism (Channel View, 2005, co-edited with Annette
Pritchard).
Address: Centre for Language and Communication Research, ENCAP, Cardiff
University, Humanities Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK.
[email: jaworski@cardiff.ac.uk]
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