Silent News.

I was unable to catch any primetime news shows, so I had to settle for watching pop culture news filler on HLN, a station owned by CNN. While it wasn’t the prime specimen to examine for the assignment, I figured it would get the job done. The only problem I could think of with using this station and type of news versus a show like “60 Minutes” on CBS would be that there was always something on the screen telling what the story was about and all its major components, whereas in “60 Minutes” and most other news shows, the show is based on interviews and commentary, making the sound crucial to understand what’s going on.
The segments on the program were discussing Lindsay Lohan and her supposed stint in a psych ward at a hospital. It then showed a screen capture of her twitter page debunking the rumors and stating that she has been working on a new movie. While I am sure there was a bit more information given audibly by the newscasters, the video alone seemed to give me the whole story did not leave me questioning anything that was going on.
It could be argued that news shows centered around pop culture and celebrity gossip are made to give all the information straight up and are rarely so in depth that the facts are easily misconstrued. Probably the people who watch this portion of HLN are watching it because they want simple, up to date information on celebrities and nothing more. I continued watching the show a little bit with the sound on and they were basically saying the exact same things that the text on the screen said, only put into different forms. The audio was hardly ever more in depth or elaborate than the video, so I can only conclude that, from this “experiment,” some types of news programs can be completely understood by the viewers with no audio needed. Thinking back to episodes of “20/20” and the NBC “Nightly News” that I’ve seen, I would be completely lost of no sound were included with the video. I could probably guess that if they showed war footage that something bad had happened lately, but beyond that I would not really know what was going on. (I would also not be able to judge from the expressions of the newscasters what was going on, because most anchors have a semi-stoic face while presenting the news, probably to not offend anyone by smiling unprofessionally or something of that sort.)