ABSTRACT
The aim of News and Politics has been to understand the changing form, structure and style of evening television bulletins, considering how political reporting in particular has changed over recent decades and become distinctive from all news. For television news bulletins continue to be a permanent fixture in TV schedules and, in many advanced Western democracies, they remain the most popular format of news and influential source for citizens to learn about what is happening in the world. The resilience of the television news bulletin – a mainstay in broadcasting spanning over 60 years – is in spite of competition from online news and social media platforms over recent decades. Of course, television news bulletins have not maintained the vast audiences they once did decades ago when broadcasters were the monopoly supplier. After all, in the new media age of online, multi-channel television audiences have fragmented. But irrespective of the apparent choice and diversity of new information sources, the old-fashioned appointment to watch television news – tuning into a fixed time bulletin – has not been supplanted by receiving information at the flick of a switch or the tap of an app.
