Television News Ecology in the United Kingdom: A Study of Communicative Architecture, Its Production and Meanings

This article examines the communicative structures of UK television news presentation and how these grant characteristic shape and form to today’s mainstream television news ecology. This communicative architecture remains generally underexplored and undertheorized and yet can be demonstrated to be representationally consequential in terms of how TV news programs variously open up and elaborate, or close down and delimit, opportunities for contending views and voices as well as the cultural display of difference. Based on a systematic analysis of mainstream UK television news, the study demonstrates how today’s UK news ecology is (1) communicatively structured, (2) professionally reproduced and differentiated, and (3) representationally consequential. The communicative architecture of television news, we argue, both naturalizes and conditions the public representations of news-mediated contention and consensus, and it does so through an established repertoire of analytical and affective communicative frames.