Do Pictures Help or Hinder Our News Memories?

Abstract

Television is a visual medium. This means that television news is defined by its pictures. For professional newsmakers, unless the screen is filled with visuals of one sort or another, the medium is being wasted. Of course, a lot of the information that is essential to our understanding of what a news story is all about is contained in the news narrative. This is the part of the story that is spoken by the news anchor or the news correspondents who file specific stories. The ‘talking head’ is a visual feature, but for television news producers it is little more than visualised radio and so must be embellished by other visual material if the news is to take full advantage of the essentially visual nature of the medium of television.