ABSTRACT
The days of the NRK monopoly are numbered: it has been crumbling for years, as the general deregulation of European television has also reached Norway. Old viewing habits are, however, hard to break: as indicated by a number of recent surveys, most viewers in the ‘multi-channel universe’ still list the NRK as their first priority. The Scandinavian viewers’ loyalty towards these programmes is not hard to understand. National news programmes all over the world are introduced in the same way: a screen message states the name of the channel, the title of the news programme, the time — and is then followed by a short sequence in which these few initial bits of information are repeated in images, spoken words, and music. The difference in formal organisation between the two types of news programmes discussed above is in itself an indication of some further differences, for instance differences with regard to general mode of address and presupposed viewer position.
