Entertaining TV news & news audiences in Taiwan: taking a look at TTV, CTV and CTS news broadcasts.

• Main Authors: Tsai Wei, Huang, 黃采薇
• Other Authors: 陳尚永
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/26122586578175109976

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 大眾傳播學研究所 === 90 === Recent studies by local and international scholars point out that in today’s competitive news market the market driven ‘infotainment’ concept has a strong impact on news broadcasts. Infotainment tries to kill two birds with one stone: enhance news ratings by capturing the general public’s attention while cutting costs with low production cost entertaining news. However international scholars also indicate that although in the short term this strategy might work it is bound to fail over the long term: as entertaining news doesn’t really satisfy news audiences these will gradually shrink. It is my aim to find out whether the above assertions are also true in Taiwan’s competitive news market. Using ‘content analysis’ I first measured the degree of infotainment in the 2001 evening news broadcasts of three Taiwan TV channels. Then I conducted three ‘Focus group interviews’ to find out how the news audience perceived and interpreted infotainment in the news broadcasts of these three channels. My research shows that in Taiwan’s market driven media environment an infotainment tendency in the evening news broadcasts manifests itself. Furthermore my research shows that the news audience perceives this tendency negatively: all this infotainment adversely influences the audience’s emotions and reduces their desire to watch news. The news audience advises the three channels to reverse this trend and emphasizes the need to pay more attention to topics of ‘public interest’ and cover the news ‘in depth’. I claim that only by becoming more professional and establishing themselves as a reliable ‘authority’ when it comes to news coverage will these TV channel’s news ratings go up again. The conclusions of my research largely coincide with the findings of international scholars: the media’s strategy of using infotainment to satisfy the news audience fails to really meet the latter’s needs.