When I'm working in Canberra I've the opportunity to be able to watch Sky News on Foxtel, the Australian pay television channel. I have the TV on all day whilst I'm working, often flicking to Fox News to watch the Republican rage against what they interpret as the darkness all around them for some comedy.

This presence of television in my life indicates the reality of the decline of print and the ascendancy of electronic media. The replacement of the printed word by the image and the voice substitutes immediate, powerful one-dimensional pictures and simple continuities for the ironies, ambiguities, and complex structures fostered by print and idealized in literature

What I've noted about this 24 hour live news form of television is that it presupposes, and presents itself as, being 'live broadcasting', in the sense of it being the present electronic production of the image.

The components of this presupposition are:
-- first, the mirror fantasy that the image we are seeing is direct (i.e., that it functions as if it were not "produced," by way of a particular technics or technology of representation, but were somehow an unmediated, straightforward presentation; and,

-- secondly, the fantasy that the image is direct for me (as if it were unproblematically addressed to me, presented to me, in a here and now that I share with the imaged event, such as the media conference by the Prime Minister.

These presuppositions form the presumed ontology of television as "live" broadcasting. Very often what is live in the here and now is anything but, as it is delayed. So we have a numbing of the sense of what history was as well as a a numbing of what the present could be.