What is News?
Notes from lecture given by
Anthony Cawley 20-2-2002
All the journalists in the
world could not possibly cover all the events in the world on a given day. So
why are some events covered and others not?
reflecting the real world or
creating a version of the real world: Reporting facts v constructing reality
Common sense assumption that the facts speak for themselves
Not simply a neutral presentation of all the facts: gathering of
information involves selection and interpretation
Deciding what’s news – it
isn’t an arbitrary choice, that anything can and will be considered news and
worthy of broadcast/publication. What is news falls into predictable, if
implicit, patterns.
The notion of news sense –
an instinctive knowledge of what is or is not news – not an instinct but a
deeply internalised set of news values that are common to most journalists
News values: many different
models, but in general terms, news values can be reduced to the following:
1: Timeliness
2: Proximity
3: Prominence
4: Consequence
5: Human interest
(Curtis MacDougall: Interpretative
reporting, New York: Macmillan 1987)
Other models:
The press covers symbolic
events
The press covers the
formerly famous
The press covers the easy
The press covers tasteful
matters
The press covers stories
that can win it prizes
The press covers political
friends favourably and enemies unfavourably
The press doesn’t cover
stories that reflect badly on people in its good graces
The press does not examine
privileged cultural beliefs
Other considerations for what can be published as news:
Ethical considerations. Is
it in the public interest? For example, a celebrity scandal is of interest to
the public, but is it in the public interest? For a celebrity who actively
courts publicity in the media, where does their right to privacy begin, e.g.
Naomi Campbell. Is knowing the details of her treatment for cocaine addiction
in the public interest?
A political scandal, on the other hand, is more likely to be in the public interest because it could have direct consequences for the public, e.g. in the way government in their country is run.
The Courts.
Libel: the publication of a malicious falsehood that lowers someone’s reputation in the eyes of a third party
Libel a constant worry for media. Losing a libel case is costly, because the media organisation will probably have to pay its own legal costs, the defendant’s, and be hit for damages. Some people, e.g. former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and singer Van Morrison, are considered very litigious. Copy about them is likely to be examined by the office lawyers before publication.
Can the person afford to
take a libel case?
Influences on the news
agenda
Klaus Bruhn Jensen: “The
news depiction of social reality has been decisively shaped by economic,
political and organisational forces at various levels of the social structure”
(Making sense of the news, 1986, page
22)
The who, what, where, when,
why and how of journalism:
What stories are being told?
Why?
How are these stories being
told?
What alternative ways could
these stories be told?
Whose stories are not being
told?
Why not?
Philip Schlesinger, Putting Reality Together, described the
media as “…a system at work, operating with a determinate set of routines…”
(page 47)
The system: newsroom
structure
From bottom to top:
A hierarchical structure is
in place to produce news, and it is difficult for an individual reporter to
operate outside this. It places a level of restraint on the freedom of
journalists. Stories can be spiked, cut or spun according to the decisions of
people higher up in the media structure: sub-editors, news-editor, editor.
Contradiction: 4th
estate role of the media, helping to preserve democracy by keeping the
citizenry informed of important events and acting as a check on government
actions. Yet media organisations themselves are very undemocratic. Reporters
can lose control over their copy once it has been passed to the next line in
the production process, e.g. sub-editors, news-editor, editor
The journalist: not just a
neutral conveyor of news but actively shapes news by deciding what to report,
who to quote, what angle to take.
Objectivity a high value in
journalism, but often ‘objective’ decisions are subjective ones based on deeply
internalised ideologies or biases.
Herbert Gans: “Every
reporter operates with certain assumptions about what constitutes normative
behaviour, if not good society, and the more 'objective’ he tries to be, the
more likely those assumptions will remain concealed.”
Journalists, as a grouping,
tend to be middle-class in social background, position and aspiration, and they
tend to have adopted a middle-class cultural capital.
Self-censorship: as
journalists internalise the values of media organisations, they develop an
‘instinct’ for what will and will not be published, what to promote and what to
neglect. There will usually be some dissenting views within a media
organisation. These can be marginalized, however, by denying certain people
promotions, spiking their copy, et cetera.
Gate Keeping: usually not as overt as the ‘conspiracy theory’ scenario.
The routines of journalism and news production pushes certain stories into the
spotlight and others to the margins. Usually, active suppression of information
is not necessary.
What appears as news is
often down to pragmatic issues such as what can be finished by a deadline: news
is produced in cycles known as newsdays, and within these cycles, journalists
work under tremendous time pressures. The news agenda can shift during the day,
as events occur.
Philip Schlesinger, Putting Reality Together, “…journalists
write for other journalists, their bosses, their sources, or highly interested
audiences. The ‘total’ audience, however, remains an abstraction…” (page 107)
The importance of being
first – the myth of the scoop
News as a construct:
Different news agendas for
different media
Broadsheet newspaper:
emphasis on the process news, politics, economics
Tabloid: emphasis on
personal news, human interest, entertainment, ‘and finally’ stories.
Infotainment.
Different ways of presenting
news:
-
tabloid uses
shorter, snappier sentences, emotive pictures, greater use of colour
-
broadsheet uses
longer, more complex sentences, less pictures, less use of colour, more austere
-
in television
news, the position of a camera shot can change the emphasis of news. E.g.
Glasgow media group – placing a camera in the middle of a group of strikers
portrayed them as violent and unreasonable, compared to the quiet calm of
management who were filmed in their offices
-
inverted pyramid,
a contrived method of telling a story, emerged because newspapers had limited
space and needed to convey the most important information to people as quickly
as possible
-
The soundbyte
culture: journalists have limited space (print) or time (broadcast), so an
articulate source who can encapsulate a view in a couple of sentences is more
likely to be reported. The soundbyte culture means that it is difficult to
fully explain complex ideas or ideologies, or to justify something that is
outside the ‘norm’. Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, argued that the
soundbyte culture prevented the media from engaging in real critical debate
about the nature of society. Instead, an underlying elite consensus in the news
propagated the status quo.
-
Hegemony - This is a term used by
Antonio Gramsci to describe how the domination of one class over others is
achieved by a combination of political and ideological means. Although
political force—coercion—is always important, the role of ideology in winning
the consent of the dominated classes may be even more significant. The balance
between coercion and consent will vary from society to society, the latter
being more important in capitalist societies. . . . Hegemony is unlikely ever
to be complete.
-
Personification:
most prominent in tabloid media, as it can be used to simplify complex
processes or create a deeper feeling of empathy with a story. It is easier to
explain processes through personalisation. A broadsheet might contain a story
about the impact on industry of the economic downturn; a tabloid could
personalise it by interviewing someone who has lost their job.
E.g., coverage of the man
who shot himself in Fitzgibbon Street Garda station. Irish Times, an impersonal account of the facts. The Star, front page interview with the
member of the public who witnessed the shooting, under the headline: “I saw man
shoot himself in head.”
“Persons can be identified
and described in concrete ways, they act in a short time-span and provide an
object for identification by the reader, listener and view…there is a distinct
tendency in the news to identify the actions of social movements, political
parties or national governments with the actions of their leaders” Galtung and
Ruge (‘Structuring and selecting news’, The
manufacture of news. Deviance, social problems and the mass media, 1979)
Channels through which news
gathering flows: press releases, press conferences, authoritative sources
News as second hand
experience:
“News is not what happens,
but what someone says has happened. Reporters are seldom in a position to
witness events first hand. They have to rely on accounts of others” (Leon V.
Signal, ‘Sources make the news’, in Reading
the News)
Sources are vital to a journalist’s work. Selection and access to sources shapes the news.
Criteria for selection of
sources:
Authority: the higher a
person ranks in an organisation, the more likely they are to be a source. This
also depends on the status of the organisation, whether it is considered
legitimate (e.g. government) or dissident. Often related to the wealth of the
organisation. Glasgow media group – account of striking miners in Britain –
noted the tendency of media to lend more weight to the opinions of employers’
representatives than strikers’.
Herbert Gans (Deciding what’s news, 1980): Divide the
people quoted in the news into knowns
and unknowns.
Knowns: made up the majority of news, between 70 and 85
percent. They comprised powerful political or industrial figures.
Unknowns:
made up the minority of the
news. Mostly people without political power or status, such as protestors or
victims (e.g. of crime).
Availability: often a
pragmatic concern. If a deadline is looming – and one almost always is – and a
source cannot be contacted, the journalist will move onto another source.
‘Quote who you can get.’ Organisations that make spokespersons or sources
readily available to the media are more likely to have their views reported in
the news.
Expert sources and the
journalist as an ‘instant expert’
–
journalists
usually have no formal training for stories that require detailed knowledge,
e.g. health or science stories. In such circumstances, journalists often accept
with little critical appraisal the views and statements of ‘experts’. There is
also a tendency to simplify complex scientific processes – e.g. the sudden
‘breakthroughs’ of medical science are more likely to be the culmination of
years of laborious research.
Limitations of news
coverage:
The media tends not to cover ordinary, everyday events, which can lead to distortion of the public’s perception of certain groups.
For example, Palestinian
reaction to the events of September 11th.
Coverage of Africa –
famines, wars, civil unrest – no good news from the continent
The immediacy and timeliness
of news means it has difficulty covering slowing moving, but important, trends
and processes
Mort Rosenblum, Who Stole the News: “Newspapers have
their own limitations. Most offer only pieces of the mosaic without an overall
pattern to give them meaning…slow moving trends, with a far more lasting impact
on American lives, can all but go unnoticed.” (page
4-5)
Readings:
Philip Schlesinger, Putting Reality Together. Published:
Routledge, 1989
Rosenblum, Mort, Who Stole the News?, Published: John
Wiley & Sons, 1993
Robert Karl Manof, Reading the news : a Pantheon guide to
popular culture. Published: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Making sense of the news: towards a theory
and an empirical model of reception. Published: Aarhus University Press,
1986.
David Randall, The universal journalist. Published:
Pluto Press, 2000.
Stanley Cohen and Jock
Young, The manufacture of news. Deviance,
social problems & the mass media. Published: Constable/Sage, 1979
Glasgow University Media
Group, Bad. Published: Routledge,
1979
Glasgow University Media
Group, More Bad News. Published: Routledge, 1981