"real" media coverage

In the writing Satellite Panoramas, Lisa parks discusses the media documentation of the shoe-maker-levy 9 comet’s collision with Jupiter to emphasis her concept that the images captured are connotative to the occurrences. The images captured by the Hubble Telescope of the collision and star formation offer the citizens of planet earth a window to another cosmic world.

While this astronomical view enabled us to see what was happening in outer space, the media dispersed the images and information to show the world as it was happening in “real” time. The media portrays the truth as “real” and the audience accepts it, though, it goes through the process of media agenda, the demand for viewer ship and generating money.

Media coverage of an event such as this one generated to believe that the images and footage taken are of immediate exposure. Though, while the footage was shown on the media outlets the event has already happened, time has passed by, and real time was already the past. Through the process the media engages in to produce news the truth gets reconstructed.

The media gains from people wanting to watch the material they produce; they make the agenda suitable to attract viewers. Parks states that these still images taken by the Hubble telescope don’t have meaning and the news media built a story around them. As a story is constructed based on social events, they get over dramatized and details get added, it’s not necessarily what happened if one was physically present. Thus making the fact that real time connotation does not exist.

In a worldlier example we can examined the images shown on the news media outlets to the public about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Thought the United States is far from these locations, the public does want to gain knowledge about what is happening. The media uses images that have been taken in the past and reuses them to create meaning of what is happening right now on the grounds. When the news covers what is happening in the war, they will not show you images of the soldiers as they fight in the desert, images of sand, or in the middle of an operation. This is because of the fact that in “real” time the audience who is watching the television coverage would not be able to make out what is really happening, as they would see sand, unclear sound, and blurry images.

In their coverage of war affairs the media will use an already written story, with edited footage of soldiers on the field, or weapons or any images that relate to the story. These images are clear and enforce the message that the media wants to speak about. Also this footage is also accompanied by audio and commentaries from an individual who has some sort of authority and credibility on the subject. However even the commentary is preplanned and produced because the individual got the topic, the questions, and the information he was going to discuss ahead of time. Thus proving the point that even though the media portrays their coverage as in “real time”, the content of the coverage has been prewritten and preplanned to air.

In their interest to gain audience, get high ratings, and make money, news media outlets take the coverage of the war and shows what they think will draw audience. They do not necessarily show what is the most important, or what would be most important for citizens to watch. Rather, a producer who wants to draw people to watch, constructs a story line, that may have facts, but is not actually what happened in “real” time. These kinds of events had to be filmed; a story line had to be written, then edited a number of times, and finally broadcasted through the media. The story it self went through a process to have meaning and importance for our world to have an understanding of what was happening.

The media incorporates images, raw footages, audio, and commentaries to try and make the situation comprehensive to people. Reality does not always make sense; the media constructs an explanation based on what society values to create an understanding that makes sense. By doing so the media is not really showing real time footage of what is happening, rather they are exploiting the occurrences and creating their own description to the public.

The war footage as well as the Hubble satellite images was purely connotative as they both were being used as a discursive narrative dictated by the media to reveal this phenomenon that never occurred before. The news media could tell the audience many events and occurrences that are happening at war in many different ways. Though, these things are told to the audience using arguments and stories that are socially familiar to us. News media coverage in “real” time does not exist; rather a given discourse of what is happening is produced for the audience.