I have completed my thesis titled "A Comparative Study of Daytime Newscasts on Public and Private Television Channels in Bangladesh" as a course requirement for my Master of Social Science program. This is to confirm that Sharif Ahmad Shabbir, ID has done his thesis titled “A Comparative Study of Daytime Newscasts on Public and Private Television Channels in Bangladesh” under my supervision and guidance. Considering the widespread nature of news broadcasts on television channels with power to influence the masses, this thesis is an attempt to analyze news broadcasts of some public and private television channels in Bangladesh in terms of their content in order to gain a better overview of the trends of what is making the news on Bangladeshi TV channels.
A total of 140 daily news broadcasts from 4 different television channels were considered for the content analysis study presented in this thesis. The author of this thesis hopes that this study will help Bangladeshi television channels to better understand how to make their newscasts more diverse rather than following certain old news structures, and also enlighten the general reader as to what makes news in Bangladesh through the eyes of daily broadcasters. reports that can give an idea of the general state of broadcast journalism in the country in terms of what topics are covered and to what extent they are covered. It has long been a practice for many viewers to watch TV channels of their choice during their free time just to catch the news and know what is happening around them.
Therefore, television is defined as an infotainment tool with "info" coming from news and "entertainment" coming from the entertainment offerings of television channels (Thussu, 2004). This made the author of this thesis arouse interest to start his study of television news broadcasts in his country, Bangladesh and make an attempt to analyze the news broadcast content of a mix of public and private television channels. of Bangladesh.
Review of Literature
The Daily Mail commented: 'When the King and Queen appeared, the picture was so vivid that one felt that this magical television would be one of the greatest modern inventions.' The Express announced that television had 'arrived'. In The Magic Window: American Television, James Von Schilling refers to the televised reports of the attack on Peal Harbor as "the first televised bulletin." The program visually defined the news with diagrams, arrows and other symbols.
Rahman (2009) revealed that most of the owners of private Bangladeshi television channels are very wealthy and closely linked to the country's two leading political parties, the ruling Awami League and the opposition BNP. These wealthy owners of private television channels in Bangladesh set the agenda for their channels based on their own political ideologies and consequently the editors of these channels act as gatekeepers to enable news that aligns with the interests and ideologies of the owners and other stakeholders. They also have control over the media which they used to fulfill their own agendas.
The media functions as a proxy for the dominant influential elite class by propagating their ideologies and ignoring other voices. With the control of the media, it is easier for them to spread propaganda that works only in their favor.
Methodology
It is the largest television channel in the country in terms of reach (BTV's website at http://www.btv.gov.bd states that 95% of Bangladesh's population is covered by its national television network), number of employees, space of its headquarters (located in Rampura, Dhaka) and broadcasting equipment. Currently it is functioning as a private satellite channel and could not live up to the hype it once created for modern day TV news in Bangladesh, but still the author chose to choose ETV if modern day TV news broadcasts were not possible if ETV had not shown the way earlier. It was included in the sample to see how a television channel associated with BNP forces covered their news during the rule of Awami League, the current ruling political party of Bangladesh.
It is also the newest 24-hour news channel in the country and started in 2016. The main news broadcasts are broadcast at these times; other news-based programs are broadcast in the remaining time. The first 5 news stories of each news broadcast were included in the content analysis to analyze the most important news stories, arranged in order of the news broadcast overviews.
Therefore, a total of 5 daytime news items x 4 channels x 7 days (1 week) = 140 news items have been taken into account for conducting the content analysis as part of this study. The author intended to go to BTV's news broadcast at 20:00 primetime, but due to limited resources he could not do so, nor was he able to find a copy of BTV's 20:00 news later, as BTV itself does not keep an archive of its news broadcast from 00:00. It was expensive to get copies of BTV's 8pm news from a third party called Ryans Media. After an extensive search, the author was able to find videos of BTV's news broadcasts from they selected Bangladeshi private television channels as part of this study.
People can conveniently check the daily news during their lunch breaks to get an idea of what happened during the day and what they can expect to happen later in the day. As a result, the author became curious to select daily news that could complement the existing content analysis studies on Bangladeshi television news and provide a better understanding of the nature of television news in Bangladesh in different time slots. Then we watched the news shows and selected the first 5 news items for content analysis.
The main topic or theme on which the news story is based. f) News treatment: PTA (out of view, showing video footage with news presenter narration), GFX (graphics), SOT (sound on tape recorded audio of a speech), PKG (package – news report by a reporter with video footage and reporter narration and news presenter introduction) , live (any live interaction – on location, on the phone, in the studio or via social messaging platforms such as Skype), live (recorded live but later broadcast), IV (in vision, news anchor reads news story without any accompanying video or graphics) Limitations . The content analysis only covers the first 5 news stories of each broadcast instead of all the news included in the news broadcast. The study only deals with daily news from 4 television channels and uses it to form an analysis of all the news broadcasts on Bangladeshi television channels which may or may not be representative of the entire population.
Findings and Discussion
The analysis will focus on the comparison of the first 5 news stories of daytime news on BTV (public television channel) with private television channels, namely ETV, NTV and News24 using the analysis indicators mentioned on page 18 of this thesis. In the week of October 23, 2019 to October 29, 2019, there were three main news stories that were reported by all 4 selected channels. As Shakib Al Hasan is a skilled and internationally recognized all-round cricketer from Bangladesh, his story made it into the first 5 news stories on all 3 private channels' daytime news broadcasts.
News genre – The following table is the comparison of the genre of news included in the first 5 news reports on daily news of BTV, ETV, NTV and News24 from 23 October 2019 to 29 October 2019. BTV, as it is considered the mouthpiece of the government, has the highest number of news stories about the ruling Awami League government (30) while. NTV also presented the highest number of 6 stories on the opposition BNP party, where 2 of the stories were presented as package news (no other television channels did any package news on BNP), which shows that NTV is trying to give space to BNP news also to stay true to the political ideology of its BNP-affiliated founder.
Altogether, about 81% of the news was surface news, follow-up news accounted for about 16.43% and the remaining 2.86% was interpretive news. Since there is shorter time frame for daytime news compared to prime time night news, it is easier for the TV channels to cover news by using OOV which takes less time than package news reports. Therefore, viewing 95% of the news stories was soothing to the eye and did not cause any discomfort.
However, 5% of the news was somewhat coherent, mostly BTV's news coverage of Obaidul Quader, the Minister of Transport, contained unclear, choppy videos that were not pleasant to watch. The majority of the news stories covered in the daily newscasts on the 4 Bangladeshi television channels were about men. 35% of the news stories had female news subjects; they were mostly about the Prime Minister and Minister of Education being women.
This is significant, because the easier the language of the news reports will be, the easier the viewers can connect with the news reports and make sense of the day's news. This shows that the news editors do their job well to keep the language of their news stories simple and easy to understand. NTV had the highest number of male-centric news stories at 18, while BTV had the highest number of female-centric stories at 18, which could be attributed to the fact that BTV gave the most importance to the Prime Minister's news coverage who is a woman.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The agenda-setting role of the mass media in shaping public opinion, University of Texas at Austin.
