Decoding Television

by Duc Nguyen

The decoding task of television messages, even in its most salient state, is a complex undertaking. Stuart Hall attributed the difficulty of “televisual” translation to the nature of the medium. “Since the visual discourse translates a three-dimensional world into two-dimensional planes, it cannot, of course, be the referent or concept it signifies. The dog in the film can bark but it cannot bite.”(Hall,95 )

Decoding visual messages from television news magazine show such as 60 Minutes presents a mountainous challenge. The decoder must climb the peaks with entrenched opposite view in order to break down the wall of dominant ideological construction. In another word, the ideological deconstruction of television visual texts requires more than an inquiring mind. It demands the operation of an “oppositional code” reader to assemble a concrete indictment against its reading. Sarah Stein examined the “ideological underpinnings” of 60 Minutes by analyzing the usage of the visual images that “could often contradict the verbal and escape the containment of the objective word.” Through the examination of the format and construction of three separate episodes of 60 Minutes, the author claimed that the show promoted “hegemonic messages.” Stein believed that 60 Minutes tuned viewers into a “world that still plays by the rules: where the journalist– heroes are still smarter than the…