Siegfried Kracauer writes in Theory of Film,
This framing, this subjectivity, is naturally a part of television news broadcasting. Television news, however, by associating itself with professional journalism, treacherously represents itself as "objective." Television news is complicated by other factors as well, resulting in interpretation that is often unsophisticated and one-dimensional. To begin with, television must report all of its "news" within a strict timeframe (CBS expanded its evening news broadcast from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes on September 2, 1963, becoming the first network to do so). Reports are necessarily brief. The result is fragmented presentation of dynamic images rather than coherent analysis. Associations are made between these fragmented "stories" that emphasize relatedness rather than relevance. As Hallin argues, television, which "forces much more of the news into the unity of a story line-and therefore of a world view," has a penchant for ideology.9 This phenomenon is fundamentally linked to the presence of the television news anchor, a person whose integrity and moral authority enable them to guide viewers through the events of the day, often by making connections for the viewer and by providing neat little summaries tied to a specific perspective (during Vietnam, the American policy perspective). One of television's defining characteristics is that it communicates symbolically, frequently within the context of ideology. In other words, television "deals not so much with issues as with symbols that represent the basic values of the established political culture."10 Anderegg argues that each night Vietnam was presented as "a tactile video-audio construct, a tight matrix of specific, easily recognized signs."11 Furthermore, television (whose primary function during the Vietnam era was entertainment) elides the distinction between news and entertainment, creating the admixture "infotainment." The aggregate result is that television news provides brief, "entertaining" segments that are presented to the viewer without context or critical analysis, the subtext of which is unavoidably ideological.