The Technology of Objectivity:Doing "Objective" TV News Film
Abstract
The Technology of ObjectivityDoing "Objective" TV News Film SAGE Publications, Inc.1973DOI: 10.1177/089124167300200101 GayeTuchman Queens College, CUNY AUTHOR'S NOTE: Rose Laub Coser and Erich Goode provided valuable criticisms of an earlier draft. Everett C. Hughes, Maurice R. Stein, and Kurt H. Wolff supervised my dissertation, from which this paper is adapted. GAYE TUCHMAN is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at She has published other articles about the social construction of news and is presently doing research on the concept of community and on the nature of social memory, in particular, the use of time-markers. FROM THEIR PRACTICES, including their identification of "mistakes," this article reconstructs television newsmen's theory of cinematic objectivity.' It does not analyze objectivity as a philosophic concept subject to operation- alization. Rather, it explores the ways in which television newsmen do objectivity by drawing upon visual perceptions associated with either sociocultural or role definitions. Television newsmen can manipulate the sociocultural and role definitions of vision and space because film organizes visual perception, and visual perception is affected by social definitions. There are many ways an object may be perceived. Perception may be affected by role definition. For instance, waves may be perceived differently by surfers and