Advantages of TV News

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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