TV news: weaknesses or manipulation?

Abstract

This work tries to answer some of the questions we ask ourselves everyday, whenever we make use of television to meet our information needs. The TV news programme, «that strange product», as Bourdieu would put it, «that suits everyone, that confirms already known things, and that above all leaves intact our mental structures», knocks on our door a few times a day and often we devote to it those important moments in our lives, in other words, the moments with the largest audience, the prime time. Understanding what happens around us means we have to assume the obligation to form ourselves in order to abandon the illusion that we live in that plural, free and democratic society that it is daily spread across the media..