RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

transposition of living data for the act itself of communication and its socio-psychological dimension? A fundamental of our answers to these questions must be that the TV picture is the determining agent of the TV production and the TV production is a symbolic reproduction of a specific reahty - living events; for this reason the TV production can appear in the role of a timely news presentation. This consideration focus focusses our discussion on the assertion that the vehicle of an entertainment production, in the case of TV as in no other medium, can provide, aside from the aesthetic, an up-to-the-minute poUtical and cultural experience. This is, of course, our main thesis. If it can be verified, we will have demonstrated as well that the invention of television made it possible for the first time in media history for entertainment productions to serve as vehicles for informing mass audiences on day-to-day poUtical, economic and cuitural events. No other communication technology can do this. Up until television, news coverage of current political and cultural events took place exclusively through the press, including the spoken press of radio transmission, and the press is a vehicle of interpersonal communication, unUke the entertainment production which is the vehicle of filmed events, theater shows, radio dramatizations, etc. The appearance of television opened a whole new dimension of possibilities for entertainment productions or shows in the realm of news and information. Before the invention of television, the show as the vehicle for the dissemination of information or knowledge required the ”middleman” of simulation, involved the reconstruction of reality. The show as the vehicle for communication between a mass audience and reality could go no further than reconstituted reality, and that, we know, is only a derived level of living reality. The TV production makes a break with established experience in regard to the show as a vehicle for man to address reality. Direct TV transmission meant establishing a direct relationship between the active act of communication and the living reality which is