Television and the Visual Construction of Reality

Television added the visual to radio’s auditory reach, and in doing so transformed the relationship between seeing and believing. The Vietnam War became “the living room war” — the first conflict whose brutality was broadcast directly into American homes, and the footage arguably shifted public opinion against the war more effectively than any protest movement. Television demonstrated that the visual image carries an evidentiary weight that text and audio cannot match. To see something on television was, for most of the twentieth century, to know it was real.

In the Middle East, the launch of Al Jazeera in 1996 shattered the monopoly that state-controlled television stations had held over visual narratives in the Arab world. For the first time, Arabic-speaking audiences had access to independent reporting, live debate, and images that their own governments would have preferred to suppress. Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Second Intifada, the Iraq War, and the Arab uprisings demonstrated that television could be a tool of counter-narrative as well as state narrative. But it also demonstrated the limits: the channel faced accusations of bias from every direction, and the governments it challenged responded with censorship, jamming, and diplomatic pressure.

The relationship between television and truth was always more complicated than it appeared. Editing, framing, sequencing, and captioning all shape what the viewer understands — the camera does not simply record; it argues. AI-generated video and deepfake technology have now broken the last remaining link between the visual image and the real. When it becomes trivially easy to produce photorealistic footage of events that never happened, the evidentiary status of the image collapses entirely.

What does it mean for journalism, for human rights documentation, for historical evidence, when seeing is no longer believing? How do societies maintain shared understandings of reality when the tools for fabricating it are freely available? Television taught us the power of the visual image — AI is teaching us its fragility.