Television News and National Identity

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

The purpose of this chapter is to highlights the impact of television news and national identity with focus on young audience. Television news has a positive impact on youngsters. As the youngsters of present era are highly patriotic, they love their country. Media has played a significant role by portrays a good image of the country to the youngsters.

The world today is an unpredictable place. The economy has begun to move in irregular cycles that now depend more on real estate than on stocks (Choi Lee 2006). A few massive conglomerates control almost all forms of media and advertisement, jeopardizing truth and freedom in the press. With all of these uncertainties and hazards in the world today that can destroy a lifetime of hard work at the flip of a switch, people often feel lost and insignificant. They have no real identity, individuality, or greater purpose.

Features of a media system shaped by market forces include such elements as segmentation of audiences (including separation of elite and popular media, and identification of market niches in both broad areas), stress upon entertainment rather than on educational or informative content, a preponderance of advertising- oriented content, media concentration, etc.

The problem with media interfering with nationalism is that the large media moguls control what the youngsters reads, what they do not read, and how information is presented to them. This media manipulation “means that those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it 'true' that is, to enforce a particular reading of a threat according to which people and groups are defined,” according to Kinnvall (1999). Thus, newspapers and television can manipulate news using a variety of techniques, such as phenomenon distraction and yellow journalism, to skew or spin stories so that they make ...