The British BBC and the Chinese CCTV use different presentation strategies in their television news, writes Debing Feng, of Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics. Feng analysed the structure of BBC’s News at Ten and CCTV’s News Simulcast broadcasts from during five days in 2012.

BBC’s news can be interpreted as more “confrontational”, Feng discovered. For example, BBC’s news allow more sources to speak for themselves: not only does News at Ten present more voices, it uses more direct sound bites where as News Simulcast prefers to have its news anchors paraphrase sources. News at Ten also uses more on-location voice-overs than News Simulcast.

The article “Doing ‘Authentic’ News” was published by the International Journal of Communication. It is freely available online (open access).

Picture: Untitled by vanleuven0, licence CC0 1.0.