Research Paper
Immediacy of news: How technology sets the media agenda and ultimately affects society
Cindy Petterson
November 30, 2001

"George Bush ended a presidential press conference saying he had to leave to call the President of Turkey.  In Ankara, Turgut Ozal turned off CNN, walked into his office, picked up the ringing phone and said 'Hello, Mr. President' (Tracey in MacGregor, 1997, p. 4).

Turner calls this phenomenon the CNNization of the world (MacGregor, 1997).  It's not just the advent of globally available television services says Turner, but the fact that such services have begun to play a role in international politics.  Alves (2000) agrees that the "CNN factor" revolutionized journalism on a global scale.

Prior to CNN, television news in the United States consisted mainly of a nightly newscast from the three major networks.   There were special reports during times of crisis and coverage on location, but it was nothing like the live-from-the-scene phenomenon created by CNN (Wicks & Walker, 1993).  The CNNization of the world has been a pivotal change in broadcast news. 

Feingold said in MacGregor "We are in the middle of a seismic shift, which will change the broadcasting landscape forever: the way we gather it, the way we receive it, the way we watch it, the way we use it (1997, p. 2). 

This paper will focus on technological advances that have changed the way we receive the news.  However, receiving news such as live scenes from Baghdad, implies a change in the way news is gathered in the first place.  There are also implications in the way society watches and uses news when it's reported as soon as it happens and not simply on the 5 o'clock news.  Therefore, all four areas: gathering, receiving, watching and using the news will be explored in terms of its impact on society.

Case study evidence of the impact of technology on media

Various methods can be used to explore the multi-faceted impact on society from technological advances that drive the media agenda and change the way news is presented.  A content analysis of news reports that used live coverage would answer part of this question but the depth of the complex effects may be lost.  A survey of viewers would answer the societal impact portion of the question but this would be a massive undertaking to target a sample large enough to formulate conclusions.  A case study of an event might be the best method to discover the full breadth of as well as possible effects of media technologies in play.

For this paper, I have selected a case study of the impact of technological advances on the news surrounding the events of September 11, 2001.  The story is still unfolding and is relevant from a timeliness standpoint.  The scope of events will include: coverage immediately following the terrorist attacks on The World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, short of its intended target; the ensuing Anthrax scare; war coverage, and the seemingly unrelated plane crash at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on November 12, 2001.

Media coverage of the events surrounding September 11 will be contrasted with coverage of the Persian Gulf War—a time when media technology seemed to advance to a new level. Namely, a technological advantage that afforded CNN an exclusive on reports live from Baghdad. 

Information was gathered during the Gulf War in unprecedented ways by the use of cellular technology and a dedicated line from Baghdad.  When all of the other reporters waited impatiently to transport rather than transmit their broadcast material from Iraq, Arnett and the 'Baghdad Boys' from CNN had the only working phone line.  CNN's use of the satellite phone differentiated them in coverage of the Gulf War (MacGregor, 1997).

Ten years later, the first major crisis on US soil since Pearl Harbor again caused a realization that there was another advance of media conventions.  And again, after September 11, technology had a big role in media coverage.

The evolution of immediate gratification

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a series of events led by technology, were the cause of my watching the news at 6 a.m.  When the first airplane struck World Trade Center Tower One, news crews were on the scene and video rolled.  Within minutes, regular broadcast was interrupted to deliver what may become one of the most memorable scenes in television history—a jetliner crashing head on into a New York icon.  Many of the early pictures were home video of tourists and locals who just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. 

As networks broadcast the event, still unsure as to just what was happening, the news Websites flashed with pictures of the unfolding events.  My sister arrived at work in Florida about the same time that commuters were arriving at work at The World Trade Center in New York.  News of the crash spread through the office via emails and Web updates.  As she rushed to the corporate conference room to view the news live on television, she called Reno on her cell phone to tell us of the news.  Elapsed time from the event at 8:48 a.m. EST to the time that I was out of bed and glued to Peter Jennings on ABC news, was less than 20 minutes.

I watched as the second plane rushed into tower two and I listened to the frenzied reports.   I switched from the networks to CNN and MSNBC, hoping that someone had answers to explain the unbelievable events on the television screen.  Each broadcast was a bit different and no story was concrete.  Anxious to find out more, I turned to the Web.  On that day, I was one of the millions of visitors who pounded the Internet on MSNBC.com and CNN.com.  My daily NewYorkTimes.com news update was a constant hourglass.  Frustrated, I turned back to the networks—in time to see the first building collapse. 

So what's so unusual about the news on September 11?  It's not really new news, but a realization that the time lag between a crisis and media event has shortened significantly.  The buzz from journalists and on-the-street citizens reporting and spreading news via cell phones and the Internet has become so prolific and we don't even notice how profoundly communication has evolved.  News is now gathered, received, watched and used in a matter of minutes.

Hiebert asserts that war coverage like the Gulf War, "was, without a doubt, the most widely and certainly most instantaneously covered war in the history of mankind"  (Greenberg & Gantz, 1993, p. 30).  Now perhaps, the war on terrorism, will become the most extensive and immediate coverage of a war.

Television news has always exploited its' inherent strength to provide timeliness in its' broadcast.  However, expectation of nearly immediate news is a more recent phenomenon.   As technology evolves, mass media, especially television, embraces new methods to shorten the cycle from gathering to broadcasting the story.

"Journalists have always been competitive and the television sub-species are no exception.  Getting the story first, a 'beat', the much prized scoop, is a function of two factors: finding the story and then getting it back to base"  (MacGregor, 1997, p. 174).  The method used today by journalists to gather the news and transport it to the station is largely driven by technology.  In fact MacGregor (1997) says that broadcast is second only to the military in its' industry use of technology. 

In the early days of television news, cameramen shot silent newsreels with very heavy 35 mm cameras, often attached to the roof of a car (MacGregor, 1997).  The visual was edited to a certain length and then a sound script, to match the pictures, was produced in the studio.  An Eyemo 35 mm camera was capable of filming 1 minute 10 seconds of footage without sound.  The Auricon Cine-Voice was capable of pictures and voice, however, a thick cable awkwardly attached the cameraman to the voice recordist (MacGregor, 1997).

Camera technology had to improve to gather and transmit the news in a timely fashion.  In the early 1950s, during the Korean War, television cameras were used but it took so long to transmit the film, that pictures were old by the time they were received (Baroody, 1998).  Fifteen years later in Vietnam, three person crews gathered video shots, developed and shipped the film from Saigon news bureaus, and called in voice-overs from material presented at the "Five O'clock Follies" military briefings (Baroody, 1998).

Media camera's improved so that they were more portable and capable of capturing audio and not simply visual.  A change in media convention occurred as technology no longer dictated that visual only was captured in the field.  In 1969 the standard method, requiring the addition of a sound script as a voice over that matched edited pictures, changed (MacGregor, 1997).  Suddenly the reporter's commentary was filmed in the field at the same time as the visual.  Basically, film was edited to voice instead of pictures dictating commentary (MacGregor, 1997).  But the biggest changes in coverage did not occur until the advent of satellite technology.

American media became truly portable during operations in Grenada in 1983.  Equipment improvements allowed for on-the-spot editing and satellites offered instant transmission of a finished piece (Baroody, 1998).  In less than 10 years, transmission of film from satellite base stations evolved to even more portable satellite phones.

News from the front line of Desert Storm was transmitted via satellite telephones that were hooked up to lap top computers (Baroody, 1998).   So transmission speed from the front lines to viewers' living rooms was nearly up to the minute.  In fact this technology meant that "an American, watching CNN and talking on the phone to his daughter in Israel, could tell her a missile had been launched at Tel Aviv before the air raid sirens sounded there"  (Baroody, 1998, p. 18).

With the capability to capture audio and visual simultaneously, transmit quickly via satellite, and the star of the show already on hand, came on-the-spot reporting.  And with each improvement in tape technology, the length of time shortened between the event and the nightly news.  Eventually, technology and news crews became so good that reporters could go live-at-the-scene during the newscast. 

But staff reporters can only be in so many places, waiting for events to happen, at one time.  Often, a crisis or breaking story occurs when there are no reporters available.  That's when technology stepped in to allow the average citizen to act as a new kind of on-the-street reporter.  Armed with camcorders and cellular phones, now just about everyone is a star in the media show.

Cellular phones are used by amateur "reporters" to deliver everything from traffic reports to news from the airplanes that were taken over by terrorists on September 11.  News was gathered, broadcast and used by the public in a most immediate way that day.  As pictures of the airplane exploding into the Twin Towers were broadcast on television, the message was relayed to captives on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.  The media, viewers, and technology were all working together to change the course of history.

But, the new news is often so immediate that traditional editing, tweaking and fact checking do not occur to mediate the message before it's broadcast to viewers.  Average citizens are also amateur camera crews.

Camcorders create home movies that are used in the news all the time.  There always seems to be a tourist or neighbor who just happens to have a camcorder handy to capture the "news."   On September 11, there were many amateur reporters filming the scenes of destruction and chaos in New York.  Anything the media could use became breaking news.

Live breaking news is very relevant and has important broadcast value.  As Tuggle and Huffman (1999) indicate, the John F. Kennedy funeral, the Watergate hearings and clips from the Gulf War are so memorable because of live coverage.    "The immediacy offered by live coverage helps bring news to viewers as it happens, and live coverage of developing stories, such as an approaching hurricane or tornado, serves the public interest well by warning local residents to take cover" write Tuggle and Huffman (1999, p. 492).  However, too much live breaking news is irrelevant.

A desensitized public

"If everything is important, nothing is" said Lockman (November 7, 2001).  For days after September 11, all of the news was breaking news.  A viewer might find it difficult to decipher just what is important.

The scene of American Airlines flight 175 plowing into the north tower of the World Trade Center was reported from different angles by various media and repeated thousands of times during the ensuing days of September 11.   The pictures were repeated on the cover of magazines like Time and printed on every newspaper.  Repetition, repetition, repetition.

With each new fact, no matter how trivial or relevant, came the 'breaking news'  followed by more repetition of the exploding plane video clip.  At first, the visual brought tears to many viewers' eyes, as an evocative and emotional broadcast should.  Later, the scene became numbing and eventually annoying.  The media desensitized the public.

The media showed the clip over and over again to fill space in what Linn calls "suffering from consumption."  In the media he says, " we consume too much time and space to report too little.  When we don't have much of substance to report, we go ahead and fill up our time and space with weak, repetitive material"  (Personal correspondence November 23, 2001).

CNN does a slightly better job than the networks of reporting less sensationalized TV.  The networks tend to repeat one another with trite broadcast (Berry, 2001).

Because there is so much time to fill in a 24-hour news cycle, news programs have become creative.  In this endeavor to maintain a captive audience, entertainment-like conventions have been employed such as round-table discussions and screaming match shows that bear greater resemblance to Oprah than news.  "Indecision 2000, as Comedy Central called it, was a made-for-cable, real-life historical drama, with changing characters and plot lines that conformed to the norms of entertainment," said Hall (2001, p. 40) and  "exciting an electorate – and a TV-news audience- that had not shown particular passion for Al Gore and George W. Bush before November seven."  This coverage started in a big way during the Gulf war.

Hiebert said in Greenberg and Gantz (1993) that coverage of Desert Storm was instantaneous.  In fact it was the first war broadcast in real time.  There were nearly 1000 reporters in Saudi Arabia with CNN on the air almost 24-hours a day with war coverage.  "If Marshall McLuhan's global village was ever a reality, this was it," wrote Hiebert (Greenberg & Gantz, 1993, p. 30).

The same can be said for coverage of the war on terror.  Because of Satellites, we now see pictures of demolished targets in Afghanistan that are available the morning after the bombing.  We see newscasters live via a satellite phone

According to personal conversations with Bernstein, Frank Magid & Associates and Tom Dolan, Broadcast Image Group, news stations have an expectation of live coverage for two major reasons: cost justification for microwave and satellite trucks, and marketing the station for its' capabilities versus other operators (Tuggle & Huffman, 1999).  How often do we hear, see it all live, here on channel X?  All sectors of a business should be cost justified and companies would be foolish not to promote differentiating assets such as the ability to provide live coverage, however, at what point does a tool like live news negatively impact journalism standards?

Tuggle and Huffman (1999) studied perceptions of use and misuse of live technology to report news.  They surveyed news directors and senior reporters nationwide to test the hypotheses that: technology may drive journalistic methods and its overuse impacts credibility, and consultants and management drives the propensity to go live.

The survey included a random sample of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox affiliates in 211 media markets listed in the 1997 Broadcasting & Cable Yearbook (Tuggle and Huffman, 1999).  Respondents included 112 news directors and 108 senior reporters.  Only stations with local news coverage were included in the survey and responding stations reported that they have live newscasts from once a week to five times in one newscast.

Tuggle and Huffman's 1999 study indicates support for their hypothesis that a reporter is significantly more likely than a news director to assert that stories receive undue emphasis just because they are live.  One reporter commented, "We go live and worry later about whether the story warrants coverage, especially the amount of coverage it receives"  (Tuggle & Huffman, 1999, p. 499).  Although reporters are out in the field and can make a determination about the newsworthiness of a story, the news director may have already dispatched the live van and crew and has more pressure to worry about cost justification than the reporter.

Channel Four in Oklahoma City delivered live coverage after the bombing in 1995.  The news was really raw footage with a warning that the reporters did not know what happened nor the pictures we viewers would see.  Equipment was there; crew was there, so the news was reported, even when there was nothing newsworthy to report.

Tuggle and Huffman's 1999 study did not substantiate the hypothesis that the more equipment a station has for live reports, the more likely personnel are to believe that its use has a detrimental impact on judgment of newsworthiness.  The level of technology or amount of equipment across respondents did not have a bearing on judgement of live reporting use however, many of the reporters and news directors who responded did say that one of the drawbacks of live technology is the cost of equipment (Tuggle & Huffman, 1999). 

We see this with reporters at the World Trade Center—standing around looking for something to shoot and inventing something to say.  News gathering has become a haphazard process.  There's less fact checking, if at all, on the number of missing people at the Twin Towers.  Governments had not yet analyzed, verified and released their compiled findings of those reported missing.  Yet we received breaking news flashes of the number of presumed dead.

There were reports of a bomb exploding at the White House, then it was a bomb scare, then there was nothing at all.  With constant news flashes that day, no one knew what to believe.  But because the reporter, presumed to be a professional with authority and an inside scoop, reported live from the scene, the public believed that what they heard was true.  And with so many reporters dispatched to New York and Washington, news agencies did not have enough reporters to cover other stories.  Limited resources create the news by determining which stories are followed and which are dropped.

The cost of staff creates a drawback to live broadcasts.  Several respondents in Tuggle and Huffman's 1999 study said that reporters and support staff assigned to cover a live story are not available for other news.  Then resources are tied up creating news that may not be relevant.  In fact, respondents indicated relevant activity only 50 percent of the time.  One reporter's response was "Going live limits our storytelling options and has taken a front seat to journalism you can be proud of.  There are times when we devote two minutes to the Oklahoma city bombing trial and two minutes to an art show, because we're live at the art show"  (Tuggle & Huffman, 1999, p. 502). 

These changes in priority of news stories, live-from-the-scene reporting, and the 24-hour news cycle has a rippling effect on other news medium.

Affect on other news medium

Schlesinger says in MacGregor (1997, p. 174) that  "television reporters, more so than their print and radio colleagues, are 'captives of technology'."   Television requires cameras for sound and visual, reporters and equipment operators, and a method to transmit or transport the story back to the station.  The evolution of cameras and tape technology, changes in news conventions as the medium developed, and the advent of satellite and cellular technology have all changed the way news is gathered and received by the public.  The technology to make it happen developed rapidly and it left other news media scrambling to recapture market share.

The impact of television news on print media was astounding.  With news immediately available for consumption, who will wait for the newspaper to read about the same news the next morning?  Print media was forced to differentiate to maintain advertisers and stabilize its market. 

One option was to provide greater depth of coverage.  Since September 11, the New York Times has run in-depth profiles of the victims and heroes at "Ground Zero."  Reporters for a newspaper have more time to check facts and dig deeper into a story than their television colleagues do.  Newspapers can provide analysis with charts and graphs that are cumbersome to report on television news.  But even with extra time to check for accuracy and provide analysis, newspapers are capable of misstating facts. 

Rotberg and Weiss (1996) state that the New York Times printed a headline "1,000 Feared Dead" after the 1993 earthquake in India.  The eventual estimate was closer to 10,000—a fact reported on India State television.  Because of lead-time issues, newspapers sometimes go to press while the events are unfolding.  Conversely, television news can be updated relatively quickly and does not leave the same paper trail.

Newspapers have been forced to differentiate in other ways, to keep pace with continuously evolving television news.  A major shift occurred in the format when newspapers changed the reporting style to short stories supported by the proliferate use of color and photos.  USA Today grabbed a huge market share when they were the first to provide this new format to better mirror the immediate gratification of television news and provide snippets of information for busy people on the go (Vivian, 2001).

The Internet has been shaped by television as new media are often presented in terms of old media.  As Internet news sites have evolved, the technologies have become more intertwined with television news references to the Internet and vice versa.

Within minutes of the September 11 terrorist attack, hundreds of domain names were registered for relief efforts and for information and political sites.  Millions of viewers saw the events on television first and then referred to the Internet for discussion, additional information, and more depth.  Within weeks after the attack, Columbia Journalism school published a book of discussion essays, observations, and commentary on the World Trade Center attack (Rosen, 2001).

Online News Association president Rich Jaroslovsky summarized at the association's conference in Berkeley, California that online is  "more timely than print, more in-depth than broadcast, more interactive than either"  (Mensing, 2001).

There are now unlimited numbers of "reporters" who submit information, rumor, and pictures to the Web.  Information that may not otherwise make the news because it's unreliable or considered inappropriate, is available on the Internet.  Internet reports become news for a mass audience when they are broadcast on television.   Television is still the most powerful driving force of news media.

The media public relations campaign

Networks drive home the message, much like a commercial advertisement with the use of tag lines like "live from ground zero" "inhalation anthrax update" "war on terror"  Over and over again we hear the mantras of the crisis.  We see the tagline repeated with the breaking news update.  The same terminology is repeated in every network advertisement for upcoming news and then again during the broadcast.  Americans who have never been to New York, know nothing about chemical warfare and its' medical treatment, and couldn't name the correct hemisphere for the Middle East before September eleventh, can now name the location of the various towers of the World Trade Center, are stocking up on Cipro to fight a possible Anthrax attack, and know the exact location of Kabul and all of the Afghan borders.

So what can we thank for the publics' sudden revelations in knowledge?  Mainly technology.  News studios now have lightening speed access to informational databases.  Production staff can download and cross reference full medical definitions, print digitized maps with space allotted for customized notations and tally every conceivable key indicator of the crisis from death counts to dollars expended.

"In the war in the Persian Gulf, we have witnessed either history's most impressive use of military weapons, or history's most thorough use of words and images as weapons of war, or both"  summarized Hiebert in Greenberg and Gantz (1993, p. 29). 

Americans used to watch the news at the end of the day.  News was collected for television during the day and the story that occurred closest to the broadcast hour received the most attention.  Stories were taped in advance, carefully scripted, and ethical decisions about newsworthiness and content were discussed prior to air-time.  Public relations professionals and press secretaries carefully framed issues.  The schedule was predictable with a fairly even playing field across networks.  A Washington press conference could be held at 4pm and allow East Coast stations to air the story on the early news.  And then came CNN.

"CNN is like an interoffice memo in Washington," said Linn (Personal conversation October 10, 2001).  Indeed, the U.S. government might like to put the media hounds off for a day so that they can catch their breadth and think about what to do next.  The media induces incredible pressure for the government to respond with action almost as immediately as the news is reported.  Approval ratings and favorable results in media polls depend on perception of proper action by government officials.

Public officials have to launch public relations campaigns to manage the media and public perception.  Hiebert says of the Persian Gulf War, "The 'smart bombs' of the war succeeded in part because of smart words…It is my thesis that mass communication is today an essential part of modern warfare and that public relations is a primary weapon of war—increasingly for all sides" (Greenberg & Gantz, 1993, p. 30).

The Gulf War was a media event and CNN the event planner.  Pictures of the war were broadcast globally with commentary that some contend politicized Saddam Hussein's propaganda of innocent civilian casualties at the hands of American troops.  Officials had to combat possible negative perception by staging a public relations campaign using the media.

 This type of public relations campaign is evident in coverage of political reaction to the attack on the Pentagon and Twin Towers and the ensuing war in Afghanistan.  President Bush made public appearances almost daily, as did the Mayor and Governor of New York.  Networks broadcast White House press conferences as live breaking news.  Opinion polls of American support for policy presented by Congress and the President were broadcast on television news.  Every effort was made to ensure the public supported the "war on terror" and Bush enjoyed one of the highest public approval ratings of any president in recent years.  Just as planned.

Moral implications

"News is a constructed reality and framing of the news is important in audience perception"  (Tuchman in Tuggle & Huffman, 1999, p. 494).

The messages we receive and the way we use the news has been altered due to technology.  We know from McCombs and Shaw (1972) that news affects public perceptions with mediated messages.  And more recent studies have shown that groups can influence media and set a news agenda (McCombs and Bell, 1996).  Thus, it appears likely that new technologies have an impact on the way news is collected and reported.  And a change in the news will have an impact on society.  Since September 11, the method in which news has been reported has impacted public behavior.

After the attack, there's evidence of increased patriotism across America.  Through subtle but repetitious messages like the American flag replacing the rainbow of colors in the NBC peacock indicia, patriotic colored shirts and ties on newscasters, and "God Bless America" background noise, the media have conjured up a feeling they think viewers should embrace.  Sales of American flags and t-shirts soared.

A deadly case of Anthrax in Florida led to a frenzy of suspicion.  Hype generated from the continuous news cycle of screaming match commentators and breaking news events of every Anthrax scare around the country, eventually threatened the fundamental communication method in the U.S.—the mail.  Reports of mysterious white substances cropped up all over the world.  Citizens as far away as Australia were panicked.  The media helped to create a world crisis yet did not take the time to look in depth and expose the source.

Viewers' perceptions of news event importance, like the Anthrax scare, may be distorted by live-breaking broadcast.  According to Hall in Tuggle and Huffman, (1999) live reporting "often lasts beyond the true life of a news story."  Live scenes are often repeated as teasers before a newscast or as promotional tools after the news to show stations' unique ability to capture an event.  Such events become ingrained in viewers' minds long after the newscast while other stories are quickly forgotten.       

Another example of the effect of television news hype is the racial profiling of Arab Americans at airports and on the street.  Perhaps repetition of pictures of the hijackers led to a vivid visual in the minds of viewers.  And the constant use of "Muslims" and "Arabs"  in the news solidified the mental picture of the enemy.  The use of face recognition software at airports became the source of public debate. 

"Before glasnost, it would have been possible to hijack an Aeroflot jet," wrote Rosen (2001) "But it would not have been easy to terrorize the people of the Soviet Union, for the simple reason that the state could smother news of the event and contain its spread."

A plane crashed at Kennedy Airport in New York on the morning of November 12.  Suddenly rumors of another terrorist attack spread across the country like nuclear fallout.  Reports by the media, who were on the scene quickly, stressed the point that officials were not sure if this was a terrorist attack.  The continuous recycle of interviews at the scene with New York Mayor Ruddy Guiliani, served to perpetuate the idea of another terrorist attack.

Another finding in Tuggle and Huffman's 1999 study is that a reporter is significantly more likely than a news director to cite loss of credibility as a result of overused technology for live news.  A late breaking story leaves little time to check facts and corroborate evidence.  With preparation time for a live broadcast, reporters have even less time for journalistic duties.  In this study, reporters indicated an increased risk of making statements like repeating rumors, that they would not make given the opportunity to check facts before a taped report is aired  (Tuggle & Huffman, 1999).

Matters are further convoluted by the case of Masson v. the New Yorker.   The ruling said that media have no liability for the content of a story if they have a reasonable expectation that facts are correct (Pearlstine, 1998).  Pearlstine, (1998) editor in chief of Time, believes the content of magazines is ultimately on the conscience of the managing editors and executive producers should be responsible for television representations.

Wilson (2000) described experiences of social studies backgrounds of Americans and Ghanians.  Wilson (2000) said that one of the methods teachers use to teach culture is to show CNN to students.  Regarding the focus of newscasts on CNN, the teachers would like to see more coverage of African accomplishments.  Instead of CNN coverage of Ghana's first independence day, the video showed President Clinton's arrival to the country with unrelated audio of the Monica Lewinsky situation (Wilson, 2000).  This not only shows disrespect for the people of Ghana but also the American public.

At times, the public does not simply stand by to allow irresponsible media reporting.  After September 11, the incessant use of video showing an airplane crash into one of the Twin Towers, became the source of public concern.  The traumatizing effects of these visuals on children especially disquieted parents.  The media responded to the public and pulled the video.

Media technologies can provide a useful and timely source of information.  As is often the case, it's the misuse of technology that is the root of the evil, not the technology itself.  According to Wittstock, "The rush to be first has led to complaints from the audience that much live coverage is inaccurate, intrusive, badly timed, and in bad taste"  (Tuggle & Huffman, 1999, p. 493).  A close look at the financial and ratings considerations may possibly enlighten researchers to the cause of any misuse of technology in the quest to be first to report. 

Concluding remarks

In his official appointment speech for the appointment of the Director of Homeland Security, President Bush referred to modern technology when he said, "In the war on terror, knowledge is power."   Americans have turned to television, the Internet and newspapers to receive information about this tragedy and the ensuing war.  There are new technologies to present information, especially on television.  Scrolling banner messages, interviews via video phone, and satellite images have become commonplace for newscasts. 

What impact do these technologies have on our level of knowledge?  Some say that more information is not knowledge (MacGregor, 1997).  In fact, without proper context, information is simply data without analysis.

What does the future hold for broadcast and Internet news?  The 24-hour news cycle is here to stay.  With it will be a proliferate use of conventions to fill the news hole including screaming match shows, roundtable discussions, call-ins from viewers, and innocuous live-at-the-scene broadcast.  Repetition will lead to desensitization of the public and thwart productive discussion of issue resolution.

News without context and fact checking is sure to continue in the quest for immediacy.  The public will become even more impatient to obtain answers.  And with increased competition to be the first to break news, the answers will become increasingly useless.

Internet will supplement and create news for broadcast.  As video streaming technology improves and the medium is adopted, the Internet may fill the news hole with a more broad base of information.  However, control over context is limited on the Internet and information without context is really data, not news. 

The impact of technology in the news is becoming increasingly global.  Both sides of a war can watch CNN for up-to-the-minute updates.  During the Gulf war, a commentator said, "people in the smallest villages across the world are for the first time seeing a war fought out and a crisis slowly resolved through our American lens"  (Baroody, 1998, p. 19).

Media technologies will continuously evolve until there is no corner of the world untouched by the immediacy of news.

REFERENCES

Alves, R. C.  (2000).  News in the global sphere: A study of CNN and its impact on global communication.  Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 77, 202 – 203.  Retrieved November 20, 2001 from PROQUEST.UMI.COM online database.

Baroody, J. R.  (1998).  Media access and the military.  Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc.

Berry, J. N. III.  (2001).  The corruption of a public medium.  Library Journal, 126(6),  6 – 7.  Retrieved November 20, 2001 from PROQUEST.UMI.COM online database.

Hall, J.  (2001).  Cable: Flying high.  Columbia Journalism Review, 39 (5),  40 – 41. Retrieved November 20, 2001 from PROQUEST.UMI.COM online database.

Hiebert, R. E.  (1993).  Public relations as a weapon of modern warfare.  In Greenberg, B. S., & Gantz, W. (Eds.), Desert Storm and the mass media.  (pp. 29 – 36).  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc.

MacGregor, B.  (1997).  Live, direct and biased? Making television news in the satellite age.  NY: St. Martin's Press, Inc.

Mensing, D.  (2001, November 1).  RSJ delegation attends conference.  Zephyr.  Retrieved online November 2, 2001.

Pearlstine, N.  (1998).  The trouble with ground rules.  Columbia Journalism Review, 37 (3)  29. Retrieved November 20, 2001 from PROQUEST.UMI.COM online database.

Rosen, J.  (Ed.).  (2001).  September 11 instant book.  Retrieved October 11, 2001 from Blueear.com.

Rotberg, R. I., & Weiss, T. G. (Eds.).  (1996).  From massacres to genocide: the media, public policy, and humanitarian crises.  Harrisonburg, VA: R. R. Donnelley and Sons Co.

Tuggle, C. A., & Huffman, S.  (1999).  Live news reporting: Professional judgment or technological pressure?  A national survey of television news directors and senior reporters.  Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 43  492 – 505.

Vivian, J.  (2001).  The media of mass communication.  Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Wicks, R. H., & Walker, D. C.  (1993).  Differences between CNN and the broadcast networks in live war coverage. In Greenberg, B. S., & Gantz, W. (Eds.), Desert Storm and the mass media.  (pp. 99 – 112).  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc.

Wilson, A. H.  (2000).  Enlarging our global perspective: Lessons from Ghana.  The Social Studies, 91 (5), 197 – 201. Retrieved November 20, 2001 from PROQUEST.UMI.COM online database.