Article Details

The Role of Visibility Politics in Determining the Prime Time Content on Television | Original Article

Chanakya C. N.*, Narasimhamurthy N., in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education | Multidisciplinary Academic Research

ABSTRACT:

The content delivered to audiences through the television, especially the news, is mostly orchestrated to suit the commercial objectives and political affiliations of the media houses. There are complex political forces at play in defining what information should be visible to the public. This mediated visibility favours the powerful and restricts the diversity of information in general. In spite of how robust political reporting has evolved to be in the present times, most of it is skewed towards a particular kind of opinion or the image the media want to form. The notion of ‘what is visible is crucial’ has resulted in the formulation of explicit strategies that conveniently ignore the narratives of the powerless while prioritizing what is shown in the prime-time. Besides, complex algorithms are used to determine what is currently “trending”, based on which the content to be featured on the television is determined. A review of the available literature was conducted to obtain an idea of what has hitherto been studied regarding the political factors influencing the visibility on television. Literature from various sources such as Google Scholar, EBSCOHost, ProQuest, Scopus, JSTOR, etc., were collected, compiled in order, and examined in order to understand the relationship between the politics of power and television visibility. This paper is expected to help in understanding understand how the visibility politics decides what makes it to the prime-time on television. This review is also expected to examine the issue of selective reporting of news and what are the political forces that cause the same. Further, the paper also attempts to point out the further research work to be conducted explore how a just and objective portrayal of facts on the television can be achieved.