Legibility and Hierarchy of the Sources in the Televisual Information

The research represents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the news in the main television news reports (the most important information synthesis broadcasting for a day, covering the “prime-time” period) broadcasted by five Romanian television channels: TVR1, PRO TV, Antena 1, Antena 3, Realitatea TV, on a period of ten days. Starting from the theory of the media communication contract developed by Patrick Charaudeau and using a research grid, we were able to establish a hierarchy of the sources employed by each television under analysis. The manner of presenting and using the sources represents a testimony regarding the editorial policy and the relationship the journalists maintain with each cathegory of possible sources. As a result of our research, we noticed, that the television channel Realitatea TV relies its information broadcasting on official identified sources, like the national channel TVR 1, while the PRO TV television chooses mostly non-institutional sources. From correlating the sources with the experience domains, there is an obvious orientation towards political topics of the Realitatea TV channel, while PRO TV is defined as a television channel which favors information from the social sphere. The politics finds only a fourth place in the editorial choice of this television channel (PRO TV). Also, PRO TV is the television that employs the most diversified unconventional sources, while there is a surprising enough dominant orientation of the national television channel TVR 1 towards topics from the political sphere, and not towards citizen democracy topics.