The Tones of Judgment in Local Evening News

Abstract

A young man, a television station producer, walks into the station’s broadcast control room to give a pitch for a new TV show to his boss, the station manager, who rejects the idea curtly. The control room is dark and cluttered. Shadows abound. The sole bright sources of light come from the several monitors displaying the station’s current broadcast. A man and a woman sit side by side behind a desk in that image. The scene is brightly lit without contrast and the backdrop behind them is nondescript. They converse seemingly convivially as they alternate looking towards the camera and towards each other. They shuffle sheets of paper that they hold in their hands, tapping them on the surface of the desktop to align the sheets neatly. They smile affably. What we see in the monitors is, ostensibly, the concluding moments of a news broadcast, as the two news anchors chat idly — typically contrived, cheery ad-lib and dispensable conversation, which can be transmitted in the broadcast audio, or alternatively replaced by the broadcast’s exit music. We know the impromptu chit-chat to be so trivial that it can be heard or not heard, and thus it hardly matters that in the scene in the movie we do not hear the broadcast audio.