ABSTRACT
Richard Schechner's 1985 essay 'News, Sex and Performance Theory' suggests that if there is a perceptible overarching structure of news television communicating to a nationwide audience, it becomes intellectually productive to understand the structure as bearing legacies of certain performative practices and forms. Schechner's overlapping concerns theatre, arts and performance thus offers a discursive framework to understand the communicative form of news television. The media is interestingly placed here as a superlative performer of democracy in popular perception as it can act like the executive, legislative and judicial institutions, but these institutions can never appropriate the functions of the media. Media's special location is also underlined by its relative autonomy compared to the limits imposed by the constitution over formal institutions of democracy. The wider connotation of 'democracy as performance' is better understood by the way the public exhibit enough sign of being equally performative and 'reflexive'.
