Everything You Always Wanted to Know About How to Be a TV Journalist in the 21st Century But Didn't Know How to Ask

T. Dan Gardner is a lawyer and social policy researcher in Port Moody,
British Columbia.

Intended to change television journalists’ understanding of their
craft, this self-published work by veteran television journalist Tim
Knight is also an unwitting addition to the arsenals of television’s
critics.

Borrowing the Jungian archetypes of Animus (the male) and Anima (the
female), Knight asserts that television journalism is held back by
“Animus-think”—generally a “male” focus on power,
institutions, and abstractions, as opposed to the “female” focus on
people and their stories; Animus-think, in Knight’s opinion, is an
unfortunate by-product of newspaper journalism.

Both Knight and the critics of television accept McLuhan’s idea that
the nature of a medium shapes its message. Television’s critics—most
famously Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death—argue that
television’s need for pictures forces it to focus on concrete images
and visible emotions at the expense of conceptual thought. Knight
agrees, but applauds television for precisely that reason.
“Television,” he asserts, “works on the emotional level which is
far more powerful, more human, deeper, basic and elemental than any
newspaper.” And because television as a medium is different from
print, Knight wants television journalists to expel the influence of
print from the news because television is not a “factual medium.”
Instead, Knight wants emotional stories. People stories. Stories with
simple language. Emotional language. Very irritating nonsentences.

Knight’s directions may well be suitable for human-interest stories,
but he seems oblivious to the possibility that his beloved medium’s
disdain for the abstract and its love of emotions and pictures may
actually oversimplify complex and subtle matters. This is made
especially clear in a story about Russia; Knight’s language here is
sparse and emotionally charged, but the actual information he conveys is
extraordinarily simplistic. Those who are concerned about television’s
effects on public thought should take note of Tim Knight’s views.