ABSTRACT
Television news shares with documentary a concern with facts and everyday reality, but is in most other respects at the opposite end of the spectrum from documentary. Television documentary involves an individual film-maker with two or three team-members crafting an artistic product over a period of many months. Television journalism operates at high speed; little TV news is more than a few hours old and much of it is live or ‘near-live’. Television weekly journalism-called ‘current affairs’ in Britain-tends to have a turnround time of several weeks, but even these programmes are much closer to British Sunday newspapers than to documentary.
