Valu ja vägivalda sisaldavate telelugude retseptsioon

Date

2008

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

Description

This Master’s Thesis dealt with the reception of TV-stories that were of violent of painful nature. To research this field these research questions were raised by the author: - What reception-schemas could be noted, while people with different profile (sex, age) try to recall or give comments on a news-clip they were shown? Is the super- schema of the journalist picked up by the audience? How do schemas used by different groups differ from one another? - To what extent does a person’s personal experience interfere while describing a news story: to what extent do they associate themselves with the characters of the story, rate the relevance of the story etc? In order to map the situation of Estonian television the author of this Thesis recorded two weeks (14.01-27.01.2008) of crime-programmes and news-programmes, that were shown in channels ETV, Kanal 2 and TV3. This quantitative database contains more than 27 hours of material. From this 27 hours the author counted 206 stories, in which people connected with justice-process were shown. The table describing these stories more thoroughly shows, that the number of television stories that focus on violence, accidents and crime is unproportional. From this database three stories were selected by the author. These three stories differed significantly by focus and build up: they show the variety of showing pain and violence in different television-formats: there was a quite frequent story about a car crash, a murder story told as a narrative and a LIVE-story about a corpse, that wast pulled out of sea by police and rescue forces. The author used these four stories as base material for four focus group interviews: two with young women and two with young men. In total 19 people took part in the focus groups and they were in the age group of 17-30. In two of the groups the participants had a higher education and in two groups their education level was application (higher) education or vocational education. In each focus group there was a discussion held concerning recorded TV-story or stories: what was the essence of the story, who were the characters, was there enough information given etc. In order to describe the media usage habits of the group a questionnaire was used. To evaluate how much of the narrative of the story was remembered a written narrative method was used. As expected it turned out from the questionnaires that TV was regarded an important medium by the participants (ranked 2nd place, 1st was Internet). Crime-stories are mostly viewed as entertainment: participants marked detective- and C.S.I shows (more shows were listed by the groups without higer education). As far as reception-schemas go the author of this Thesis could not note major differences that would have to do with the level of education. But a difference could be noted while deviding the participants by their sex: female viewers were more disturbed by the brutal scenes shown than the male viewes. Also women regarded murder stories more negative than men. And excitement of the crime story was more important for men than women. In addition it can be concluded, that the narrative-schema used by the journalist was also picked up by the participants of these focus groups. Out of character-schemas the most used was the culprit-scheme. While reconstructing the story importance was given to the unusual details shown in the visuals or given in the journalist’s text. While talking about the justice system the agents were by rule not mentioned – the talk spinned around activities. While discussing the stories expert-schemas were used by people who have a professional knowledge which helpes them to analyze the visuals shown and text given in the TV-story, also while noticing the details. From the thema-schemes the participants of the focus groups mentioned, that crime news were of a precautionary nature. The background-schemas of specific crime stories were influenced rather by the other stories provided by media than personal experience. Due to the small number of the population of Estonia another reasoning was added pro watching crime stories: the chance that this tragedy happened to someone the viewer knows personally. This Thesis is a qualitative research that does not able to generalize these results to the population of Estonia. But it is the opinion of the author, that this problematic situation where a major part of a TV-channel’s programme consists of crime-related shows and as far as the viewer goes the line between a news story and a detective show gets clouded, it is a topic that should get elevated attention while planning a representative media study.

Keywords

H Social Sciences (General), magistritööd, meedia, televisioon, telesaated, uudised, teleuudised, vägivald, õnnetused, kuritegevus, retseptsioon

Citation