Beauty and truth. The aesthetic practice of news and the media prosumer

The rationality of modern aesthetics is not limited to art but extends to news. However, an ideological approach to news aesthetics remains, at best, unfulfilled. By applying a global South approach, this paper offers an alternative understanding of how television platforms employ aesthetic value. It first offers an ideological description of news aesthetics—that is, the conversion of an incident into a media event by the creation of popular appeal, and its mythification in society. By situating the media prosumer in this ecosystem, it exposes the bond between presented beauty and absented truth, arguing that this conflicted relationship marks the essence of news aesthetics. This theory-building paper explores the relationship between aesthetics and the production of news. Based on this premise, four features of news aesthetics are propounded. Using a case study, it illustrates how these features operate in tandem to suture a media prosumer’s truth that may be quite different from reality.