ABSTRACT
Although objectivity is considered a cornerstone of contemporary journalism, media aesthetics sometimes confounds that objectivity. Herbert Zettl, in a preceding chapter, has argued that the elements of media aesthetics can have a subjective impact on the audience’s interpretation of televised news. This chapter utilizes a content analysis of 1,509 camera shots to examine how five news organizations, in covering the same event, might have produced different portrayals of the event based on differences in shot selection and production techniques. The event was Jesse Jackson’s speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention.1 The results are then compared to those from a study that examined his speech to the 1984 convention.
