TV news has a number of advantages and disadvantages over other outlets.
Advantages of TV News
- TV makes you a witness to important events in real time
- It can be a powerful tool for verification
- It gives you personal storytelling: a strong connection to people in the news
- It can create a shared national experience (Think Man on the Moon, Newtown shooting, Marathon bombing)
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TV Verifies Powerfully, Seeing is believing
Here’s a painful example of how devastatingly vivid TV can be in documenting/verifying the truth. During the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary campaign, Candidate Hillary Clinton said she had superior foreign policy wisdom because, for instance, she risked being shot during a visit to Bosnia as First Lady.
CBS rewound old tape to check it out. Here’s the reality check.
That’s evidence that is hard to argue with.
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TV can connect us
We started the lessons by talking about the primal human need for information that alerts, diverts and connects us.
If a newsrooms set out to educate the public about autism, one facet of that may be to forge a powerful audience connection to an individual with autism.
Here’s CBS News’ Steve Hartman demonstrating how powerfully TV can connect us to someone we’ve never met.
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