ABSTRACT
By featuring news elites, Cable News Network (CNN) may have helped perpetuate various social norms and official viewpoints and may have functioned as a source of propaganda and disinformation. Use of news elites was a concern in an analysis of US television network news stories on air crashes. Press conferences and similar programming are an approach most viewers recognize and remember from television's Gulf War coverage. From the public's view, preproduced and edited tapes have the drawback of not allowing direct questioning by the press. Videotapes also have the power to be very highly persuasive, given the multiple channels of information and the air of authenticity associated with documentary-type footage. News summaries aired during the Gulf War regularly utilized footage—interviews, speeches, news briefings, reports filed by reporters, pool stories—originally supplied for other purposes. A great deal of what happens in a normal day's news reporting falls under the classification of "press release journalism".
