NEWS
CONTENT
News stories are potentially touching
the lives of millions of people – through radio, TV and the internet.
Percentages
of News Categories in One Day of International News of the News Agencies
1.
Foreign relations
2.
Economic affairs
3.
Domestic political
4.
Military and political violence
5.
Sports
6.
Crime
7.
Accidents and disasters
8.
Science, health, education, culture
9.
Human interest
10.
Other …Source: Schramm and Atwood, 1981,
p. 59-60
Agenda
Setting
I have an opinion if you
went to catch your audience see your agenda what a public provide it. This is
aground base of media life because audience is a media asset which you lose
them never excite it. Agendas application of preparation leads to tie you audience.
Agenda setting is audience heart bit sound. One and all must listen and join
you only concern and hear him/her along with a part of body in the media
house. If he the media shares audiences’
agenda every person only looks on you. Largely
based on what the media decide to tell us. More specifically, the result of
this mediated view of the world is that the priorities of the media strongly
influence the priorities of the public. Elements prominent on the media agenda
become prominent in the public mind.
Agenda
setting refers to the idea that there is a strong correlation between the
emphasis that mass media place on certain issues (e.g., based on relative
placement or amount of coverage) and the importance attributed to these issues
by mass audiences (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). The public agenda – the focus of
public attention – is commonly assessed by public opinion polls that ask some variation of the
long-standing Gallup Poll question, “What is
the most important problem facing this country today?”. The power of the news media to set a nation’s
agenda, to focus public attention on a few key public issues, is an immense and
well-documented influence. Not only do people acquire factual information about
public affairs from the news media, readers and viewers also learn how much
importance to attach to a topic on the basis of the emphasis placed on it in
the news. Newspapers provide a host of cues about the salience of the topics in
the daily news – lead story on page one, other front page display, large
headlines, etc. Television news also offers numerous cues about salience – the opening
story on the newscast, length of time devoted to the story, etc. These cues
repeated day after day effectively communicate the importance of each topic. In
other words, the news media can set the agenda for the public’s attention to
that small group of issues around which public opinion forms. Comparisons of the media agenda in the weeks
preceding these opinion polls measuring the public agenda yield significant
evidence of the agenda-setting role of the news media.
Agenda setting is the process of the mass media presenting
certain issues frequently and prominently with the result that large segments
of the public come to perceive those issues as more important than others.
Simply put, the more coverage an issue receives, the more important it is to
people. Agenda setting has proved to be a theory that is deep and wide,
applicable for more than the 30-year lifespan that is the mark of a useful
theory. It has been called the theory “most worth pursuing” of mass
communication theories (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999, p. 225).
An important point in the book is that agenda setting is not the
result of any diabolical plan by journalists to control the minds of the
public, but “an inadvertent by-product of the necessity to focus” the news
(McCombs, 2004, p. 19). Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television have a
limited amount of space and time, so only a fraction of the day’s news can be
included. It is this necessary editing process, guided by agreed-upon
professional news values, that results in the public’s attention being directed
to a few issues and other topics as the most important of the day.
HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
Agenda setting owes its original insight to Lippmann (1922), who
discussed how media messages influence the “pictures in our heads,” but
contemporary scholars have greatly expanded on that idea. Ironically, Lippmann
was not optimistic about journalism’s ability to convey the information that
citizens needed to govern themselves effectively. Twenty years later, research
into the effects of mass communication also painted a dismal picture. Study after
study showed that mass media had little to no effect on people (Berelson,
Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1948). This
was the era of the “limited media effects” paradigm, a major shift from earlier
belief in the power of the press, a time when propaganda was thought to work
like a “magic bullet” to change people’s attitudes, beliefs, and even behavior.
The later emergence of evidence for an agenda-setting role of the media was one
important link in a chain of research that would signal a paradigm shift in the
way we look at the effects of mass media. With high correlations between the
media and public agendas established, the next step was to show a causal
connection and the time sequence. Were the media setting the public agenda, or
the public setting the media agenda?
The second major project was a panel study conducted-panel
interviews explored how people learned about issues in tandem with content
analyses of the media messages. Another important insight generated by the
early studies was the limited number of issues the public considered important
at any point in time. From dozens of issues competing for public attention,
only a few rise to importance due to the limits on the public’s attention,
time, and ability to focus on more than five to seven issues at a time.
Nevertheless, the agenda-setting role of the news media plays an important part
in focusing people’s attention on the problems that government and public
institutions can work to
resolve. Without agreement on what is important, societies would struggle to
accomplish public good.
Beyond the Election
Studies
Agendas moved through
different pillares, angels and directions. Moving beyond elections, Eaton (1989) examined 11 issues,
including unemployment, nuclear disaster, poverty,
and crime, over 41 months in the late 1980s and found similar agenda-setting effects. Among the earliest of the non-election topics studied
was the civil rights movement (Winter & Eyal,
1981). Twenty-three years of the ebb-and-flow of news coverage and the
corresponding changes in public
opinion provided powerful evidence that agenda setting occurred in arenas other than elections. Other issues that reflect media
agenda setting include the federal budget deficit
(Jasperson, Shah, Watts, Faber, & Fan, 1998); the economy (Hester &
Gibson, 2003); environmental issues (Salwen, 1988; Chan, 1999); and
health issues, including HIV/AIDS (Pratt, Ha, &
Pratt, 2002) and smoking (Sato, 2003). Agenda setting also has been documented for local issues (Palmgreen & Clarke, 1977; Smith, 1987),
not just national ones. Is agenda setting a uniquely American phenomenon? Not
at all, Agenda setting has been confirmed across the
world at national and local levels, in elections and non-elections, with newspapers and television.
The appearance of agenda-setting effects does require reasonably
open political and media systems, however. In countries where the media are controlled
by the government and one political party dominates, agenda setting by the
media does not occur. In Taiwan in 1994, this happened with the broadcast
media; all three TV stations were government-controlled. This was not the case,
however, for the two independent daily newspapers in the same election (King,
1997). This comparison of media systems, with other factors remaining constant,
is a powerful endorsement of the public’s ability to sort out what news is real
and what is not.
A Second Level of
Agenda-Setting Effects: Attribute Agenda Setting
The original concept of agenda setting, the idea that the issues
emphasized by the media become the issues that the public thinks are important,
is now referred to as the “first level” of agenda setting. Whereas first-level
agenda setting focuses on the amount of media coverage an issue or other topic
receives, the “second-level” of agenda setting looks at how the media discuss
those issues or other objects of attention, such as public figures. Here the
focus is on the attributes or characteristics that describe issues, people or
other topics in the news and the tone of those attributes.
The general effect is the same: the attributes and tone that the
media use in their descriptions are the attributes and tone foremost in the
public mind. The first level of agenda setting is concerned with the influence
of the media on which objects are at the center of public attention. The second
level focuses on how people understand the things that have captured their
attention. Using Lippmann’s phrase “the pictures in our heads,” first-level
agenda setting is concerned with what the pictures are about. The second level
is literally about the pictures. The two dimensions of the second level are the
substantive and affective elements in these pictures. The substantive dimension
of attributes helps people discern the various aspects of topics. For example,
in news coverage of political candidates, the types of substantive attributes
include the candidates’ ideology, qualifications, and personality. Particular
characteristics often arise in specific campaigns; for example, corruption was
important in the 1996 Spanish election (McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, & Llamas,
2000); ability to
get things done and cutting taxes were key issues in the 2000 US
presidential election primaries
(Golan & Wanta, 2001). Even non-election issues can show
differences in attributes at different times. In the case of issues, on the
topic of the economy, for example, inflation is important some times, while
unemployment or budget deficits may be more salient at others.
Within these substantive characteristics, each can take on an
emotional quality, an affective tone that can be positive, negative, or
neutral. It is important to know whether a particular candidate is described
positively, negatively, or neutrally on substantive attributes such as morality
and leadership ability, not just how often those substantive elements are
mentioned in connection with a candidate.
Mc- Combs, Lopez-Escobar, & Llamas (2000) found second-level
agenda-setting effects regarding the qualities of the candidates in the 1996
Spanish national election. In a laboratory experiment in the United States,
Kiousis, Bantimaroudis, and Ban (1999) found that the public’s perceptions of
candidates’ personalities and qualifications mirrored the manipulated media
portrayals used in the study.
There is a news maker personality influence in the agenda of the
public. Also impact in media portrayal and public agenda of impacts. In sum, the news media have a
substantial influence on the content of the public agenda, and the phrase “setting the
agenda” has become commonplace in discussions of journalism and public opinion. Which aspects of an issue are covered in the
news – and the relative emphasis on these various
aspects of an issue -- makes a considerable difference in how people view that issue. From the pattern of the total news
coverage, the public learns what journalists consider
the important issues are and who the prominent public figures of the day are.
Comparison with Framing Framing differs
significantly from these accessibility-based models. It is based on the
assumption that how an issue is characterized in news reports can have an
influence on how it is understood by audiences.
‘‘framing’’
refers to modes of presentation that journalists and other communicators use to
present information in a way that resonates with existing underlying schemas
among their audience (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996).
In
fact, framing, for them, is a necessary tool to reduce the complexity of an
issue, given the constraints of their respective media related to news holes
and airtime (Gans, 1979). Frames, in other words, become invaluable tools for
presenting relatively complex issues, such as stem cell research, efficiently
and in a way that makes them accessible to lay audiences because they play to
existing cognitive schemas. As a micro construct, framing describes how people
use information and presentation features regarding issues as they form
impressions.
An
explication of the relationships between agenda setting (and priming) and
framing needs to bridge levels of analysis and answer (a) how news messages are
created, (b) how they are processed, and (c) how the effects are produced. The
development of a conceptual model that adequately explains the three effects
should therefore address the relationships among them related to these three
questions. Failing to do so will leave the field with a confusing set of
concepts and terminologies.
Agenda-setting
tradition has identified how issue agendas are built in news production (Cobb
& Elder, 1971). Similarly, researchers in framing have identified the
social forces that influence the promulgation of frames in news messages.
Frame
building and agenda building refer to macroscopic mechanisms that deal with
message construction rather than media effects. The activities of interest
groups, policymakers, journalists, and other groups interested in shaping media
agendas and frames can have an impact on both the volume and character of news
messages about a particular issue.
There is considerable debate in scholarly circles about the
differences between attribute agenda setting and framing. Some say they are
different; others say they are not. Framing has been defined as “the way events
and issues are organized and made sense of, especially by media, media professionals,
and their audiences” (Reese, 2001, p. 7). To frame is “to select some aspects
of a perceived reality and make them more salient to promote a particular
problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment
recommendation” (Entman, 1993, p. 52). Both framing and attribute agenda
setting call attention to the perspectives of communicators and their
audiences, how they picture topics in the news and, in particular, to the
special status that certain attributes or frames can have in the content of a
message. If a frame is defined as a dominant perspective on the object—a
pervasive description and characterization of the object then a frame is
usefully delimited as a very special case of attributes.
What emerged was a different version of media effects in which
the relative amount of increased salience for the attributes among newspaper
readers, when compared to persons unaware of the issue, largely paralleled the
media agenda.
By far the best documented consequence of object and issue salience is the
priming of perspectives that subsequently
guide the public’s opinions about public figures.
By
calling attention to some matters while ignoring others, television news [as
well
as the other news media] influences
the standards by which governments,
presidents, policies, and candidates
for public office are judged.
The
psychological basis of priming is the selective attention of the public. People
do not, indeed, cannot, pay attention to everything. Moreover, in making
judgments – whether in casting a ballot
on election day or simply in responding to a pollster’s question – people use simple rules of thumb and intuitive
shortcuts.
Mass Communication plays
an important role in our society its purpose is to inform the public about
current and past events. Mass communication is defined in “Mass Media, Mass
Culture” as the process whereby professional communicators use technological
devices to share messages over great distances to influence large audiences.
Within this process the media, which can be a newspaper, a book and television,
takes control of the information we see or hear. The media then uses gate
keeping and agenda setting to “control our access to news, information,
and entertainment” (Wilson 14). Gate keeping is a series of checkpoints that
the news has to go through before it gets to the public. Through this process
many people have to decide whether or not the news is to be
seen or heard. Some gatekeepers might include reporters, writers, and editors.
After gate keeping comes agenda setting.
Consequences of
Agenda Setting
The consequences of agenda setting for the public’s opinions,
attitudes, and behavior—the “so what” question. As part of this effort,
scholars have linked agenda setting research with studies of “priming” that examine
the effects of media agendas on the public’s opinions as well as the public’s
concerns. This focus on the consequences of agenda setting for public opinion
can be traced back at least to Weaver, McCombs, and Spellman (1975,p. 471), Willnat
(1997, p. 53) argued that the theoretical explanations for these correlations,
especially between agenda setting and behavior, have not been well developed,
but the alliance of priming and agenda setting has strengthened the theoretical
base of agenda-setting effects by providing “a better understanding of how the
mass media not only tell us ‘what to think about’ but also ‘what to think’”
(Cohen, 1963).Attitudes
and behavior are usually governed by cognitions – what a person knows, thinks, and
believes. Hence, the agenda-setting function of the mass media implies a potentially massive influence whose full
dimensions and consequences have yet to be investigated and appreciated.
STATE OF THE ART
Once the basic relationship between the media agenda and the
public agenda was established, a
second phase of research began—the exploration of factors that
weaken or strengthen agenda setting effects. The search for these contingent
conditions that modify agenda-setting effects is broadly divided into two
groups: audience characteristics and media characteristics, such
as the differences between TV and newspapers discussed previously. Here we
emphasize the individual differences found among audience members.
Need for Orientation
“Need for orientation,” a psychological concept that describes
individual differences among people in their desire to understand a new
environment or situation by turning to the media, was introduced in the 1972
Charlotte presidential election study. Need for orientation is defined in terms
of two lower-order concepts, relevance and uncertainty. Relevance means that an issue is personally
or socially important. Uncertainty
exists when people do not feel they have all the information they need about a
topic. Under conditions of high uncertainty and high relevance, need for
orientation is high and media agenda-setting effects tend to be very strong.
The more people feel that something is important, and they do not know enough
about it, the more attention they pay to news stories. Conversely, when the
relevance of a topic is low, and people feel little desire for additional
information, need for orientation is low and media agenda-setting effects typically
are weak (Takeshita, 1993). Recently, the concept of need for orientation has
been expanded by Matthes (2006) to explicitly measure both orientation toward
topics, the first level of agenda setting, and orientation toward aspects (or
attributes) of those topics, the second level of agenda setting. Members of the
public are not slaves to the media agenda.
Need for orientation is related to another individual
difference—education. Individuals with higher levels of education are more
likely to experience greater need for orientation.
Obtrusive Issues
The media, of course, are not the only source of information
people have about public affairs.
Personal experience and conversations with other people are two
other important sources. For most of the issues discussed so far, people have
no direct experience. Unless you have been a soldier in Iraq, you have to
depend on the media for your information about conflict in that country. But
not all issues are this out-of-reach. Anyone who has ever been laid off from a
job does not need the media to know something about unemployment. When people
have direct, personal experience with an issue, that issue is said to be “obtrusive” for them, and they usually
do not need more information from the media (Zucker, 1978). Unobtrusive issues, those with which
people have little to no personal experience, are the ones most likely to
become important to people if they are high on the media’s agenda.
The same issue can be obtrusive for some people and unobtrusive
for others; the unemployment issue, for example. For obtrusive issues that
people experience in their daily lives, media coverage does not have much power
to set an agenda, but for issues with which people do not have direct personal
experience media coverage is much more influential in determining how important
the issues are to those people. Some issues are mostly obtrusive or unobtrusive
for everyone. Foreign affairs, the environment, energy, government spending,
drug abuse, and pollution are unobtrusive for most people, for example, whereas
local road maintenance, the cost of living, and taxes are largely obtrusive.
Other issues, such as unemployment, are somewhere in the middle, and the
strength of agenda setting depends on whether a person has ever been unemployed
or known someone who has. These middle-range issues underscore the importance
of measuring obtrusiveness on a continuum rather than as a dichotomous
variable.
New Arenas
While elections and political campaigns are prominent settings
for agenda-setting studies, there is considerable evidence for agenda-setting
effects in many other settings. These ranges from business news (Carroll &
McCombs, 2003), religion (Harris & McCombs, 1972), foreign relations,
(Inoue & Patterson, 2007), and healthcare (Ogata Jones, Denham, & Spring
ston, 2006). Some studies have extrapolated an agenda-setting effect from news
to entertainment media (Holbrook & Hill,2005). Almost any topic you can
think of can be studied from an agenda-setting perspective.
Most agenda-setting studies examine the content of the media as
defined by words. However
a few have included visuals, such as photographs or television
video, and found evidence for visual agenda-setting effects. Famines,
starvation, and drought in 1984 in Ethiopia and Brazil were roughly comparable,
but compelling photographs and video were widely available only for Ethiopia,
which then benefit ted from massive coverage and international relief efforts
(Boot, 1985).most sources available
arena is more expose to agenda.
Agenda Melding/setting/
Agenda-setting
story is how news reports portray, and how people understand, issues. Research
in framing may certainly inform how those processes work and how they influence
agenda setting. In the news in some research raises the importance of
considering how people think about people and objects (issues). a unique
contribution to understanding the processes underlying framing, priming, and/or
agenda setting and the differences between them. We are especially looking for
papers that do not merely provide descriptive analyses of media frames or media
agendas.
We
believe the field will benefit from greater precision and, hopefully, agreement
over basic terms and concepts. Framing is and maximizes the internal validity
of a study because it restricts framing very narrowly to an effect of
presentation and modality. As a result, however, it may also limit the external
validity of the concept, given that the effects of messages in the real world
are likely an outcome of both content and framing.
There is growing evidence that audiences mix agendas from
various media meld them and so are influenced by a mixture of agendas. Agenda
setting establishes a connection between medium and audience but scholars
recently have moved to incorporate audiences and the media choices they make
within the general hypothesis of agenda setting. Audiences have choices and
those choices rise from their own established values and attitudes and, as we
have seen, their need for orientation. Audiences use general news media, and
they also use a variety of specialized media
That fit their personal lifestyles and views, such as talk radio
or television shows. Agenda-setting research has established that journalists
and editors have great power to shape the main topics of importance to
audiences, along with many details of those topics. But we also know that many people
use Web sites or other news sources to supplement that initial picture and to
find views on events that fit their own expectations. This effort, from the point
of view of the audience, is called agenda
melding.
This suggests the importance of audience involvement to complete
the message. The audience melds personal feelings associated with certain
language elements with the message itself. The media set the agenda, but the
audience also melds with the agenda in conformance with their established
values and attributes. Agenda-melding suggests the important role of audiences
in blending, adapting, and absorbing messages. It gives more power to express their views about the agenda and to take
a good lesson share to other browsers.
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
Public Opinion Polls plus Content Analysis
Often overlooked are the methodological contributions of the first
agenda-setting study in Chapel Hill. This 1968 study combined two methods, a
content analysis and a survey of public opinion, and it established the idea of
a time-lag. Agenda-setting studies today still routinely measure and rank-order
the number of stories on specific issues in the media using content analysis,
then survey the public to ascertain their views on what are the “Most Important
Problems” of the day the MIP question which also are rank-ordered. Using
Spearman’s rank-order correlation coefficient, the media’s agendas of most
important issues are correlated with the public’s agendas of important issues.
Time and again, in countries around the world, the rankings are highly significant
and strong typically around +.55 or greater (Wanta & Ghanem, 2000).
Establishing Causality
One of the frequent criticisms of the content analysis plus
survey method of studying agenda
setting is that a one-time correlation study cannot definitively
show causality. Even though the early studies were careful to measure the media
content before the public opinion surveys, questions still remain about which
came first, public opinion that influenced what the media covered, or media
coverage that influenced public opinion. Thus, agenda setting has looked to two
other methods to supplement its basic research by establishing a
cause-and-effect sequence. Both longitudinal studies and experiments satisfy
the necessary condition for demonstrating time-order.
Lag Time
Delay: an amount of time that passes between two connected
events.
Additional methodological research investigates the time
lag—that is, the optimal time that an issue must be covered in the media before
the public considers it as important. Research has identified a variety of lag
times for different issues—one month was the optimal time for the civil rights issue
(Winter & Eyal, 1981), but Wanta, Golan, and Lee (2004) used a 9-1/2-month
time lag for their study of international news because stories about foreign
countries are found less frequently than stories of domestic issues.
Differences in individual issues are important, of course, but the optimum
range of time for the media agenda to influence the public agenda is one to
eight weeks, with a median of three weeks. Longer is not always better when it
comes to the amount of time required for the media agenda to influence the
public agenda, however. Agenda-setting effects, of course, also decay, taking
anywhere from eight to 26 weeks to disappear entirely (Wanta & Hu, 1994).
Measuring Object and
Attribute Salience
The now-classic agenda-setting question, the “Most Important
Problem,” was born in the 1930s
When the Gallup organization began asking Americans to name the
most important problem facing the country. This open-ended question provides a
convenient way for scholars to assess the salience of the problems on the
public agenda. Typically, no more than five to seven issues, those with the
greatest number of people saying they were the most important, end up being
used in agenda-setting studies; issue categories ranked lower tend to have too
few people for any meaningful analysis. One frequently used threshold for an
issue’s inclusion is that 10 percent or more of the public surveyed identify it
as a “most important problem.”
Age Historical Analysis
Surveys that asked people about the most important problems
facing the country only date back
to the 1930s, yet there is evidence of historical agenda-setting
effects dating as far back as the
Founding of the British colonies (Merritt, 1966) and the
Spanish-American War (Hamilton, Coleman, Grable, & Cole, 2006). Given the
strong evidence from the 1960s on, even historians feel comfortable
extrapolating to the past.
DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The rise in popularity of the Internet is the most obvious and
important new frontier for agenda setting research. Little is known so far
about the effect of Web sites, blogs, and social networking sites on the public
agenda of important issues. Some speculate that with the Internet come more diverse
sources of news with little consensus on issues, a situation that could alter
agenda setting as we know it. Couple that with the explosion of cable TV and
radio channels via satellite, and the predictions seem dire.
There is, quite simply, not much original journalism being
conducted in the online environment.
Bloggers and blogging have been receiving considerable
publicity. But are they reporting or repeating? Murley and Smith (2004) found
that about one-half of bloggers scavenge their news
Sum up
Agenda setting as defined in “Mass Media, Mass Culture”
is the process whereby the mass media determine what we think and worry about.
Walter Lippmann, a journalist first observed this function, in the 1920’s.
Lippmann then pointed out that the media dominates over the creation of pictures
in our head, he believed that the public reacts not to actual events but
to the pictures in our head. Therefore the agenda setting process is
used to remodel all the events occurring in our environment, into a
simpler model before we deal with it. Researchers Maxwell McCombs and
Donald Shaw have then followed this concept.
McCombs
and Shaw as pointed out by Littlejohn have best described the agenda setting
function in their book Emergence
of American Political Issues. In this book the authors point out
that there is abundantly collected evidence that editors and
broadcasters play an important part as they go through their
day to day tasks in deciding and publicizing news. “This impact
of the mass media- the ability to effect cognitive change among individuals, to
structure their thinking- has been labeled the agenda-setting function of mass
communication. Here may lie the most important effect of mass
communication, its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In
short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but
they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about.” (McCombs and
Shaw, 5)
The common assumption of agenda- setting is that the ability of
the media to influence the visibility of events in the public mind has
been a part of our culture for almost half a century. Therefore the concept of
agenda setting in our society is for the press to selectively choose what we
see or hear in the media.
Agenda Setting has two levels. As mentioned in Theories of Communication, the
first level enacts the common subjects that are most important, and the
second level decides what parts of the subject are important. These two levels
of agenda setting lead path into what is the function of this concept. This
concept is process that is divided into three parts according to Rogers and
Dearing in their book Agenda
Setting Research. The first part of the process is the importance
of the issues that are going to be discussed in the media. Second, the issues
discussed in the media have an impact over the way the public thinks, this is
referred as public agenda. Ultimately the public agenda influences the policy
agenda. Furthermore “the media agenda affects the public agenda, and the public
agenda affects the policy agenda.” (Littlejohn, 320)
The
researchers found out that there was a relationship between the media agenda
and the public agenda. These studies are for the purpose of looking at the
media issues and determining whether these issues are important. Other factors
that affect agenda setting these may be the combination of gatekeepers, editors
and managers, and external influences. These external influences may be from
non media sources, government officials and influential individuals. These
factors affect the agenda setting process to an extent that depending what
power each factor may have will eventually influence the media agenda. For
example “if the media has close relationship with the elite society, that class
will probably affect the media agenda and the public agenda in turn”
(Litlejohn, 321).
This theory of agenda setting as I have mentioned above has many useful uses in
our society. First of all it gives the media power to establish what news we
see or hear and what part of the news is important to see or hear. This
concept of agenda setting in Littlejohn’s book is explained as the
idea of issue salience as a media effect is intriguing and important. Therefore
agenda setting is used for many purposes to establish the media agenda and to
retrieve the opinion of the public. Also agenda setting is very important in
the political aspect because the public agenda influences the policy agenda
which means that candidates will try to focus on issues that the public wants
to hear about. In conclusion the agenda setting theory has many beneficial uses
in our society and it is part of our communication.
News Values and
Selectivity
Deirdre
O’Neill and Tony Harcup
WHAT IS NEWS?
News, according to Jackie Harrison (2006, p. 13), is that which
“is judged to be newsworthy by journalists, who exercise their news sense
within the constraints of the news organizations within which they operate.”
This judging process is guided by an understanding of news values a
“Somewhat mythical” concept, according to John Richardson (2005,
p. 173)—which is “passed down to new generations of journalists through a
process of training and socialization” (Harrison, 2006, p. 153).
News, the reporting of current
information on television and radio, and in newspapers and magazines.
Analysis of the values and processes involved in the selection
of news is one of the most Important areas of journalism studies as it goes to
the heart of what is included, what is excluded, and why. As we shall see, it
is also claimed that by shedding light on the values inherent in news selection
we can help illuminate arguments about the wider role(s) and meaning(s) of
journalism within contemporary society.
NEWS VALUES: A “SLIPPERY CONCEPT”
News values are
general guidelines or criteria that determine the worth of a news story and how
much prominence it is given by newspapers or broadcast media. They are
fundamental to understanding news production and the choices that editors and
other journalists face when deciding that one bit of information is news while
another is not. According to former Times and Sunday Times
Editor, Harold Evans, a news story…
… is about
necessary information and unusual events
… should be based
on observable facts
… should be an
unbiased account
should be free from the reporter’s opinion Evans,
Harold
‘’ Editing and Design: Volume 1’’ (1972)
However, the
selection of news stories is subject to a wider range of influences than this
simple basic definition. According to the
National Council for the Training of Journalists, the accrediting body for vocational
training in print journalism within the UK, “news is information—new, relevant to the reader, topical and perhaps
out of the ordinary.” Similar definitions are to be found in numerous practitioner
accounts of the journalistic craft. The key consideration when selecting a
story is usually very simple, argues former Fleet Street editor Alastair
Hetherington (1985, pp. 8–9). It boils down to the question: “Does it interest me?” For Evans,
meanwhile, “news is people” (as cited in Watson & Hill, 2003, p. 198). Not,
however, all of the people all of the time, but people doing things
(Harcup, 2004, p. 31). What sort of things? “The unexpected and dramatic, not the run-of-the-mill,” answers Times journalist Mark Henderson
(2003). Yet news can also be predictable (Harcup, 2004). For David Randall
(2000, p. 23), news is “the fresh,
unpublished, unusual and generally interesting.” However, the operation of
news values should not be compared with a
scientific process, and Randall acknowledges that news selection is subjective;
indeed, that subjectivity “pervades
the whole process of journalism.”
“News values” are one of the most opaque structures of meaning
in modern society Journalists speak of “the news” as if events select
themselves. Further, they speak as if which is the “most significant” news
story, and which “news angles” are most salient are divinely inspired. Yet of the
millions of events which occur daily in the world, only a tiny proportion ever
become visible as “potential news stories”: and of this proportion, only a
small fraction are actually produced as the day’s news in the news media. We
appear to be dealing, then, with a “deep structure” whose function as a
selective device is un-transparent even to those who professionally most know
how to operate it.
TAXONOMIES
OF NEWS VALUES
Information arrives
in the newsroom from a wide range of sources minute by minute. A news
editor cannot report all this material, so he must be selective and filter out
information that is not newsworthy. Because he is in competition with
other news outlets, he highlights only those stories he considers to be of
greatest interest to his readers or audience. Reports, which are interesting
and newsworthy, are distinguished by a broadly agreed set of characteristics
called ‘’news values’’. These values provide journalists with a
mechanism to sort through quickly, process and select the news from that vast
amount of information made available to them.
In practice, when a
journalist makes a judgment as to whether a story has the necessary ingredients
to interest his readers, he will decide informally on the basis of his
experience and intuition, rather than actually ticking off a checklist.
Even so, many studies of news production show that most of these factors are
consistently applied across a range of print, broadcast, and online news
organizations worldwide. One of the best known lists of news values was drawn
up by media researchers Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge. They analyses
international news stories to find out what factors they had in common, and
what factors placed them at the top of the news agenda worldwide. Although
their research was conducted over three decades ago 1965, virtually any media
analyst's discussion of news values will refer to most of the characteristics
they list. This list provides a kind of scoring system: a story which scores
highly on each value is likely to come at the start of a television news
bulletin, or make the front page of a newspaper. The values they identified
fall into three categories:Impact,identification, Pragmatics.
Lists of news values sometimes labeled as news factors or news
criteria—such as those drawn up by Galtung and Ruge (1965) and Harcup and
O’Neill (2001) have been described as “useful as an ad hoc set of elements with
a partial explanatory value,” although such lists “probably cannot constitute a
systematic basis for the analysis of news” (Palmer, 2000, p. 31).
Their article critiqued the reporting of three major foreign
crises in the Norwegian press, and proposed some alternative approaches to
reporting conflict. As part of this process they asked, “How do events become
news?” It was in an effort to answer this question that Galtung and Ruge
presented 12 factors (summarized below) that they intuitively identified as
being important in the selection of news:
• Frequency: An event that unfolds
within a publication cycle of the news medium is more likely to be selected
than a one that takes place over a long period of time.
• Threshold: Events have to pass a threshold before being recorded at all;
the greater the intensity (the more gruesome the murder or the more casualties
in an accident), the greater the impact and the more likely it is to be
selected.
• Unambiguity: The more clearly an event can be understood and interpreted
without multiple meanings, the more likely it is to be selected.
• Meaningfulness: The culturally familiar is more likely to be selected.
• Consonance: The news selector may be able to predict (due to experience)
events that will be newsworthy, thus forming a “pre-image” of an event, which
in turn increases its chances of becoming news.
• Unexpectedness: Among events meaningful and/or consonant, the unexpected or rare
event is more likely to be selected.
• Continuity: An event already in
the news has a good chance of remaining in the news (even
if its impact has been reduced) because it has become familiar
and easier to interpret.
• Composition: An event may be included as news less because of its intrinsic
news value than because it fits into the overall composition or balance of a
newspaper or news broadcast.
• Reference to elite nations: The actions of elite nations are seen as more consequential than
the actions of other nations.
• Reference to elite people: Again, the actions of elite people, likely to be famous, may be seen
by news selectors as having more consequence than others, and news audiences
may identify with them.
• Reference to persons: News that can be
presented in terms of individual people rather than abstractions is likely to
be selected.
• Reference to something negative: Bad events are generally unambiguous and newsworthy. Winfried
Schulz (1982) developed the work of Galtung and Ruge by carrying out a content analysis
of newspapers, examining domestic and apolitical news, as well as foreign news.
He proposed six different dimensions to news selection, which he
further broke down into 19
news factors: status (elite nation, elite institution, elite person); valence (aggression, controversy, values,
success); relevance (consequence,
concern); identification (proximity,
ethnocentrism, personalization, emotions);
consonance (theme, stereotype, predictability);
and dynamics (timeliness,
uncertainty, unexpectedness).
the driving forces behind news values contained assumptions
about audience interest, professional duty, and actuality (or a pictorial
imperative whereby picture value is a selection criterion, making TV a strong news
medium by virtue of its ability to depict events as they happen or have
happened). This approach was also taken by Golding and Elliott (1979) who argued
that news values were often imbued with greater importance and mystique than
they merit. For them, news values derived essentially from occupational
pragmatism and implicit assumptions, which they described as audience, accessibility, and fit. This involved consideration
of whether an event/issue was important to the audience, would hold their
attention, be understood, enjoyed, registered or perceived as relevant; the
extent to which an event was known to the news organization and the resources
it would require to obtain; and whether the event fitted the routines of
production and made sense in terms of what was already known about the subject.
Informed by this analysis, Golding and Elliott suggested the following
selection criteria (pp. 115–123):
• Drama: This is often
presented as conflict, commonly as opposing viewpoints.
• Visual attractiveness: They discuss this in terms of images for television though, of
course, images are also relevant to newspapers. “A story may be included simply
because film is available or because of the dramatic qualities of the film” (p.
116).
• Entertainment: In order to captivate as wide an audience as possible, news
producers must take account of entertainment values that amuse or divert the
audience. These include “human interest” stories and the actors in these
whimsical and bizarre events may be celebrities, children and animals.
• Importance: This may mean the reported
event is greatly significant for a large proportion of the audience, but it
also explains the inclusion of items that might be omitted on the criteria of
other audience-based news values.
• Size: The more people
involved in a disaster, or the bigger the “names” at an event, the
more likely the item is to be on the news agenda.
• Proximity: As with size, this
derives partly from audience considerations and partly from accessibility since
there is cultural and geographical
proximity. The first depends on what is familiar and within the experience of
journalists and their audience, while the second may depend on where
correspondents are based. As a rule of thumb, nearby events take precedence
over similar events at a distance.
• Negativity: “Bad news is good
news... News is about disruptions in the normal current of events not the
uneventful” (p. 120). Such news provides drama and shock value which attracts
audiences.
• Brevity: A story that is full
of facts with little padding is preferred (particularly important for broadcast
news).
• Recency: Competition between news outlets puts a “premium” on exclusives
and scoops.
Also daily news production is within a daily time frame so that
news events must normally occur within the 24 hours between bulletins (or
newspaper editions) to merit inclusion.
• Elites: Clearly big names
attract audiences, but there is circularity in that big names become famous by
virtue of their exposure.
• Personalities: Since news is about
people, this is reflected in the need to reduce complex events and issues to
the actions of individuals.
An essentially similar definition of newsworthiness in terms of
the “suitability” of events was produced by Herbert Gans (1980). Allan Bell
(1991) went further and argued for the importance to story selection of
co-option, whereby a story only tangentially related could be presented in
terms of a high-profile continuing story; predictability, whereby events that
could be pre-scheduled for journalists were more likely to be covered than
those that arrived unheralded; and pre-fabrication, the existence of ready-made
texts, such as press releases. Sigurd Allern (2002, p. 145) arrived at similar
criteria by distinguishing between “traditional” news values and what he
described as “commercial” news values. He suggested that traditional news
values do not, in themselves, explain the selection process and, since “news is
literally for sale,” they need to be supplemented with a set of “commercial news criteria.” The market
is crucial to the output of any news organization, yet this is not usually made
explicit or taken into account when discussing the selection and production of
news. But it is also more than this: for Allern there are three general factors that govern the selection and production of news,
one of which is competition.
The second concerns
the geographical area of coverage and type of audience. For
Allern, this is more than just proximity,
whereby events nearby are more interesting than distant ones.
The third of Allern’s general
factors is the budget allotted to news
departments, which is an expression of the company’s financial objectives. The reality—rarely acknowledged in
journalism textbooks—is that budget constraints mean that managers are far more
often focused on financial control than winning professional recognition. The cheapest type of news is that
produced by what BBC journalist Waseem Zakir coined as “churnalism”—rewrites of press releases, press statements, copy from news agencies and from organised
bureaucratic routine sources such as regular
calls to the police, fire service, courts, local government and other
public bodies (Harcup, 2004, pp. 3–4). A recent academic Study of “converged”
digital newsrooms within the UK regional press, in which newspaper journalists produce
audio-visual material as well as text for their company’s online presence, has found
that this trend towards cheap and recycled news is likely to continue unless
managements adopt an alternative model of investing in journalism (Williams
& Franklin, 2007). Informed by such factors, Allern presented a
supplementary list of commercial news values:
• The more resources it costs to follow up a story or expose an
event/issue, the less likely it will become a news story.
• The more journalistically a potential news item is
prepared/formatted by the source or sender, the greater the likelihood that it
will become news.
• The more selectively a story is distributed to news organizations,
the more likely it will become news.
• The more a news medium’s strategy is based on sensationalist
reporting in order to attract public attention and the greater the opportunity
for accentuating these elements in a potential Story, the more likely a story
is to be used.
In general, the treatment of stories differed, with the quality
press concentrating on policy, background and a wider range of reactions and
the popular press on human interest angles (Palmer, 2000).
From the national newspapers examined, Harcup and O’Neill (2001,
p. 279) proposed a new set of news
values. They found that news stories must generally satisfy one or more of
the following requirements to be selected:
• The Power Elite: Stories concerning powerful individuals, organizations or
institutions.
• Celebrity: Stories concerning people who are already famous.
• Entertainment: Stories concerning
sex, show business, human interest, animals, an unfolding drama, or offering
opportunities for humorous treatment, entertaining photographs or witty
headlines.
• Surprise: Stories that have an
element of surprise and/or contrast.
• Bad News: Stories with particularly negative overtones, such as conflict
or tragedy.
• Good News: Stories with particularly positive overtones such as rescues and
cures.
• Magnitude: Stories that are perceived as sufficiently significant either in
the numbers of people involved or in the potential impact.
• Relevance: Stories about issues,
groups and nations perceived to be relevant to the audience.
• Follow-up: Stories about subjects already in the news.
• Newspaper Agenda: Stories that set or fit the news organization’s own agenda.
All such taxonomies
of news values must “remain open to inquiry rather than be seen as
a closed set of values
for journalism in all times and places” (Zelizer, 2004, p. 55); and further research
is needed to measure the extent to which the above news values apply to other
forms of media, in different societies, and how they may change over time.
NEWS
VALUES: CONTEXT AND LIMITATIONS
Exploration of
news values may help us to answer the question, “What is news?” but it has frequently
been argued that the concept of news values offers only a partial explanation
of the journalistic selection process. Whilst acknowledging that a set of
common understandings exists among journalists, Lewis (2006, p. 309) believes
that any rationale for what makes a good story has an arbitrary quality,
because journalism requires comparatively little training and no depth of
understanding. News selection is not based merely on intrinsic aspects of
events, but also on external functions, including occupational routines and
constraints, and ideology whereby news is “a socially determined construction
of reality” (Staab, 1990, p. 428).
For Wolfgang Donsbach (2004), understanding the psychology of
news decisions by journalists is key to understanding news selection.
Evaluative judgments such as news values by Definition lack objective criteria
they are based on value judgments which can be verified nor falsified.
Other
academics argue that news values themselves can be seen as an ideologically
loaded way of perceiving—and presenting—the world. For Hall (1973, p. 235),
although the news values of mainstream journalism may appear to be “a set of neutral, routine practices,”
they actually form part of an “ideological
structure” that privileges the perspectives of the most powerful groups within
society. Robert McChesney (2000, pp. 49–50, 110) highlights the way in which a
journalistic emphasis on individual “events” and “news hooks” results in less
visible or more long-term issues being downplayed, with individualism being
portrayed as “natural” and more civic or collective values being treated as
“marginal.”
In their
“propaganda model,” Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky ([1988] 1994, p. 298) go
further, suggesting that “selection of topics” is one of the key ways in which
the media fulfill their “societal purpose” of inculcating “the economic,
social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic
society and the state.” According to their model, five filters—identified as the concentration of media
ownership; the influence of advertising; the over-reliance on information from
the powerful; “flak” against transgressors; and an ethos of anti-communism—
combine to produce “the news fit to print” (p. 2). Debate and dissent are
permitted, but only within a largely internalized consensus.
For Wolfgang Donsbach (2004), understanding the psychology of
news decisions by journalists is key to understanding news selection.
Evaluative judgements such as news values by definition lack objective criteria
they are based on value judgements which can neither be verified nor falsified.
UNIVERSAL NEWS VALUES
Some news organisations use the term 'News
Values' to describe a different concept: the ethical standards expected of
journalists in their work.
These ground rules spell out the good
practice journalists should apply as they gather and process news stories. They
are simply a code of ethics or canons of good and responsible journalism. These
guidelines attempt to ensure the integrity of the journalist and guarantee the
reliability of the news story. Both professional journalism associations and
individual news organisations often make these rules freely available so that
the public may know what to expect from their journalists.
The Associated Press state
their commitment to so-called news values, such as not plagiarizing,
misidentifying nor misrepresenting themselves to get a story, nor paying
newsmakers for interviews, avoiding conflicts of interest that may compromise
accuracy, and maintaining their commitment to fairness.
The BBC lists the following values:
• Truth and accuracy
• Impartiality and diversity of opinion
• Editorial integrity and independence
• Serving the public interest
• Fairness
• Balancing the right to report with respect for privacy
• Balancing the right to report with protection of the vulnerable
• Safeguarding children
• Being accountable to the audience
• Impartiality and diversity of opinion
• Editorial integrity and independence
• Serving the public interest
• Fairness
• Balancing the right to report with respect for privacy
• Balancing the right to report with protection of the vulnerable
• Safeguarding children
• Being accountable to the audience
Studies have also examined the universality of news values: are they
changed by socio-economic, cultural and political differences? Investigating
news values in different countries, Chaudhary (1974) compared the news judgments
of American and Indian journalists. Despite being culturally dissimilar,
journalists of English language newspapers in democratic countries used the
same news values. However, Lange (1984) found that the socio-political
environment in which journalists operated—including the severe sanctions for
criticizing the government that some Third World journalists face did affect
their news values. He found that the less
developed a nation, the more emphasis on direct exhortations in the news, the more emphasis on news stories set in the future, the more emphasis on
news stories about co-operation and
the more emphasis on positive
evaluations of the news subjects—the type of reporting often described as
development journalism (Rampal,1984; Chu, 1985).
In a study of the role of national identity in the coverage of
foreign news in Britain, the United States and Israel, news values became
subordinate to national loyalties (Nossek, 2004). While there is an assumption
that adherence to news values is implicitly more “professional,” eliminating
bias, political or otherwise, this can be problematic in that news values may
create uniformity, negativity and reduction to stereotypes (Ndlela, 2005), as
well as presenting obstacles for non-Western journalists.
Wu (2000) found that news values alone could not explain
coverage—economic interest, information availability and production cost of
international news were also at work in determining the volume of information
from abroad.
AN ALTERNATIVE
APPROACH
Their recommendations to journalists amount to a critique—and a
rejection—of the news values that have traditionally guided much Northern news
coverage of the South:
• Avoid catastrophic images in favor of describing political,
structural and natural root causes and contexts.
• Preserve human dignity
by providing sufficient background information on people’s social, cultural,
economic and environmental contexts; highlight what people are doing for themselves.
• Provide accounts by the people concerned rather than
interpretations by a third party.
• Provide more frequent and more positive images of women.
• Avoid all forms of generalization, stereotyping and
discrimination. (NGO-EC Liaison Committee, 1989)
CONCLUSION
The concept of news values, then, can help us to understand the
ways in which some phenomena become identified as “events” and the ways that
some of those “events” are then selected to become “news.” The concept of news
values also helps us to explore the ways in which certain elements of the
selected “events” will be emphasized whilst others will be downplayed or
excluded.
Definitions of news are
not fixed. Many lists of news values have been drawn up, and news values can
change over time, from place to place, and between different sectors of the
news media.
For example, Galtung and Ruge put great emphasis on the
“frequency” with which events occur; yet, as technology changes many of the
ways in which news is produced and received, criteria such as “frequency” may
become increasingly irrelevant in the world of continuous deadlines required by
the production of online and 24-hour news. For these news media, however, “recency”
(Golding & Elliot, 1979) and “competition” (Gans, 1980; Bell, 1991; Allern,
2002) may become more dominant selection criteria, as well as the “type of
audience” (Golding & Elliott, 1979; Gans, 1980; Allern, 2002) in an
increasingly fragmented news market. This and other perceived changes in news
values suggest that the topic will remain a fruitful one for journalism scholars
for many years to come. For, whatever the technology and media involved—and notwithstanding
the growth of user-generated content, blogs, and online news aggregators—the process
of news journalism will still involve selection. And, although many journalists
tend to refer to the need for an instinctive “nose” for news selection, most
academic researchers in the field would argue that it is probably not possible
to examine news values in a meaningful way without also paying attention to
occupational routines, budgets, the market, and ideology, as well as wider
global cultural, economic and political considerations.
News values will continue to be
subjected to scrutiny by academic researchers for the reasons indicated above.
Future research projects could usefully explore the impact of online
journalism, mobile telephony and podcasting on decisions about news selection
and, indeed, on definitions of news. Technological developments mean that news
producers can now more accurately gauge the relative popularity of particular
stories online; the ways in which such knowledge may impact upon news selection
should be an area of increasing critical scrutiny. Many scholars are already
turning their attention to the role of so-called “citizen journalism” or
“user-generated content” within the media, and a fruitful area of research is
likely to be the ways in which the availability of such material results in
variations in news values. At the same time, continuing study of the news
values of 24-hour broadcast news (itself a relatively recent phenomenon) will
help shed further light on the changing journalistic environment of the 21st
century. However, “old media” such as newspapers are likely to remain fertile
areas of study, including comparisons of local, regional, national and
international news outlets; comparisons between genre and/or different delivery
platforms. Historical comparisons of news values could help inform what has
come to be known—in the UK at least—as the “dumbing down” debate. There is also
a great deal of potential in extending the study of news values and selection
decisions to incorporate other areas of research, such as the potential impact
on news of changes in the journalistic workforce in terms of gender, race or
social class. Another area ripe for further investigation is the interaction between
news selection and the sources used or privileged in news production; this
issue could also usefully include exploration of the claims of alternative
media to offer alternatives both to mainstream news values and to the
mainstream cast of sources.
Nature, Sources, and Effects of News Framing
Robert M. Entman, Jörg Matthes, and Lynn Pellicano
Framing is an individual psychological process, but it is also
an organizational process and product, and a political strategic tool.
Therefore, the main argument of this chapter is that framing scholars need to
focus on the political sources of frames and the full range of their effects,
including the feedback of initial impacts on further frame production. To
pursue this argument, the chapter is organized as follows: After clarifying the
terms frames and framing, we present a diachronic
process model of political framing that expands framing theory beyond the focus
on individual effects.
CLARIFYING FRAMES AND
FRAMING
It comes as no surprise that social scientists are very far from
consensus on what exactly “frame” and “framing” mean. There are two basic
genres of definition. Some define framing in very general terms, roughly
following Gamson and Modigliani’s frequently quoted definition of framing as the “central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an
unfolding strip of events” (1987, p. 143). However, to treat a frame as a
central idea or a story line provides an insufficient basis for consistent
measurement or theory. The second genre of definition specifies what frames
generally do, especially issue frames. This includes defining problems, making
moral judgments, and supporting remedies (Entman, 1993, 2004). Drawing on
functional specifications seems preferable because it enables analysts to draw
clearer measurements and inferences that distinguish framing from themes,
arguments, assertions, and other under-theorized concepts.
One useful suggestion when using the more fine-grained genre is
distinguishing between issue-specific frames and generic frames (de Vreese,
2005). Issue-specific frames are
pertinent only to specific topics or events; that means every issue has
different issue-specific frames. Examples are Reese and Buckalew’s (1995)
in-depth analysis of local television coverage about the
Persian Gulf War, or Shah, Watts, Domke and Fan’s (2002)
computer-aided content analysis of the Monica Lewinsky debate. Moreover, the
attributes in second level agenda
setting can also be understood as issue-specific frames (McCombs, 2005).
Generic frames transcend thematic limitations as they can be
identified across different issues and contexts. Prime examples of generic
frames are Iyengar’s (1991) episodic and thematic frames. When news is framed
episodically, social issues are constructed around specific instances and
individuals. Semetko and Valkenburg’s study of European politics (2000)
suggested five generic frames: conflict, human interest, economic
consequences, morality, and responsibility. Other suggestions include
Entman’s (2004) differentiation between substantive and procedural framing,
with the latter focused on evaluating political strategy, “horserace” and power
struggles among elites, rather than on the substantive nature and import of
issues, events and actors. Framing
processes occur at four levels: in the
culture; in the minds of elites and professional political communicators; in
the texts of communications; and in the minds of individual citizens (Entman,
1993, 2004). An initial graphic overview of the political framing process
appears in; Culture
Schemas in minds of elites and publics,
Frames in texts of literature, film, news, education
Communicator Networks, Elites’
strategic frames, Media’s non-strategic frames, Communication Texts, News,
Infotainment Blogs/Websites,
F2F communication, Public Opinion
Indicators, Non Strategic
Communication Poll responses, votes, Strategic framing Social movements, blogs; All concern places are framing.
What Is a “Frame”?
What differentiates a framing message, or “frame” in a
communication from a plain persuasive message or simply an assertion? A frame repeatedly invokes the same objects and traits, using identical or synonymous words and symbols in
a series of similar communications that are concentrated in time. These frames function to promote an interpretation of a problematic
situation or actor and (implicit or explicit) support of a desirable response,
often along with a moral judgment that provides an emotional charge. Here
again framing is distinguished from
other communication by its
diachronic nature. A framing message has particular cultural resonance; it
calls to mind currently
congruent elements of schemas that were
stored in the past. Repeating frames
over time in multiple texts gives a politically significant proportion
of the citizenry a chance to notice, understand, store and recall the mental
association for future application.
FRAMING: THE RESEARCH
LITERATURE
Origins of Framing Research
Walter Lippmann, arguably the progenitor of framing theory,
observed that for most people, “the world that have to deal with politically is
out of reach, out of sight, out of mind” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 18) Citizens, in
other words, do not acquire much of their political knowledge from personal
experience. Instead, they get most of their information from the media and the
elites the media portray. As the chief means of symbolic contact with the
political environment, the media wield significant influence over citizens’
perceptions, opinions and behavior.
Given that ordinary persons use frames to organize their
thoughts on the world’s simple daily events, it is no surprise that they will
respond to framing when it comes to the more distant, complicated events of
politics. As Lippmann (1922) observed, “Of public affairs, each of us sees very
little, and therefore, they remain dull and unappetizing, until somebody, with
the makings of an artist, has translated them into a moving picture” (p. 104).
Strategic Framing
As suggested above, political leaders recognize the power of
framing to strategically shape public discourse and public understanding, and
try to exploit it to their own advantage, especially to promote a future course
of action (Benford & Snow, 2000). According to this view, framing involves
both the strategic communication of one’s own frame, and competition with other
communicators’ frames.
Likewise, social movement theorists understand framing as a strategy
for social movements to mobilize the public. In this context, frames are defined
as “action oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate
the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization“ (Benford &
Snow, 2000, p. 614). As Snow and Benford (1992) argue, successful frames must
diagnose a problem (diagnostic framing), propose solutions and tactics
(prognostic framing), and motivate for action (motivational framing). Frames
are not understood as individual schemas, but as collectively shared patterns
of a social group. These collectively shared frames are identified by the
analysis of movement documents, interviews with movement members, or an
analysis of media content (Johnston, 1995).
Journalistic Framing
In contrast to research on strategic framing, less is known
about the professional frames that guide informational processing and text
production by journalists. A professional journalistic frame is a “schema or
heuristic, a knowledge structure that is activated by some stimulus and is then
employed by a journalist throughout story construction” (Dunwoody, 1992, p.
78).
Journalistic frames can be described on an individual level
(i.e., the individual frame of a journalist), and on a newsroom level (i.e.,
frames shared by journalists in a newsroom).
Framing scholars argue that journalists prefer information that
is consistent with their journalistic frames (Scheufele, 2006). In times of
routine coverage, journalistic frames are applied to incoming information. As a
consequence, frame-consistent information is more likely to be used for the
construction of a news report than inconsistent information. However, key
events can shift existing journalistic frames and even replace these frames.
Therefore, in contrast to other influences on news selection and news
construction (e.g., news values), journalistic frames can be shifted and
changed after the occurrence of key events (Scheufele, 2006; Brosius & Eps,
1995).
Frames in Media Content
Frame analysis has become a very lively and important
methodology. In essence, frame analysis examines the selection and salience of
certain aspects of an issue by exploring images, stereotypes, metaphors, actors
and messages. However, studies differ in their ways of extracting frames from
the media content. Four broad approaches can be roughly distinguished (Matthes &
Kohring, 2008): a qualitative approach, a manual-holistic approach, a
manual-clustering approach, and a computer-assisted approach.
Qualitative Approach- A numbers of studies
try to identify frames by providing an interpretative account of media texts
(Downs, 2002; Reese & Buckalew, 1995). Rooted in the qualitative paradigm,
these studies are based on relatively small samples that should mirror the
discourse of an issue or event. Typically, frames are described in-depth, and
little or no quantification is provided. Pan and Kosicki’s (1993) approach to frame
analysis can be considered subclass of qualitative studies. In these linguistic
studies frames are identified by analyzing the selection, placement and
structure of specifi c words and sentences in a text (see also Esser & D’Angelo,
2003). Usually, the unit of analysis is the paragraph, not the article.
Researchers have to construct a data matrix for each individual news text. In
this matrix the signifying elements for each individual proposition are
analyzed. The basic idea is that specific words are the building blocks of
frames (Entman, 1993). Pan and Kosicki distinguish structural dimensions of
frames: metaphors, examples, key sentences, and pictures.
Manual-Holistic Approach- The essence of this method is that frames are manually coded as
holistic variables in a quantitative content analysis, whether inductively or
deductively.
In inductive manual-holistic studies, frames are first generated
by a qualitative analysis of some news texts and then coded as holistic
variables in a manual content analysis. For instance, Simon and Xenos (2000)
conducted a thorough analysis of a sample of newspaper articles in the first step
in order to generate six working frames. Subsequently, these frames were defi
ned in a codebook and coded in a quantitative content analysis. In a similar
vein, Husselbee and Elliott
(2002) coded several frames in their study about the coverage of
two hate crimes.
Manual-Clustering Approach- These studies manually code single variables or frame elements
in standard quantitative content analysis. These variables are subsequently
factoror cluster-analyzed. In other words, rather than directly coding the
whole frame, splitting up the frame into separate variables or elements is
suggested. Following this process, a factor or cluster analysis of those
elements should reveal the frame. In a study by Semetko and Valkenburg (2000),
each news story was analyzed through a series of twenty questions to which the
coder had to answer “yes” or “no.” A factor analysis of those twenty items
revealed five factors that were interpreted as frames.
Computer-Assisted Approach- In contrast to the manual-clustering and the manualholistic approach,
neither holistic frames nor single frame elements or variables are manually coded
in the computer-assisted studies. As a prime example of computer-assisted frame
analysis,
Miller, Andsager and Riechert (1998) suggest frame mapping.
Based on the notion that frames are manifested in the use of specific words,
the authors seek to identify frames by examining specific vocabularies in
texts. Words that tend to occur together in texts are identified with the help
of a computer. For example, the words charity, charities, charitable, and money
form the “charity-frame” (Miller et al., 1998). In fact, there is no manual
coding at all. A few other studies have advanced computer-assisted content
analysis by moving beyond the grouping of words. For instance, Shah et al.
(2002) used a computer program to create comparatively sophisticated syntactic
rules that capture the meaning of sentences. In other words, their study
enabled an analysis of meaning behind word relationships.
Framing Effects
Public opinion scholar James Druckman (2001b) emphasizes two
types of frames—frames in communication and frames in thought—that work
together to form a framing effect. Both are concerned with variations in
emphasis or salience. Frames in communication—often referred to as “media
frame”—focus on what the speaker or news text says; such as how an issue is
portrayed by elites, while frames in thought focus on what an individual is
thinking; such as the value judgment of an issue. It might be preferable to use
“schemas” to refer to frames in thought, to minimize confusion with frames in
communication. Frames in communication often play an important role in shaping
frames in thought. For example, the considerations that come to mind after
exposure to a media frame may affect how individuals form their opinion on a
given issue. This is what Druckman defines as a framing effect. He identifies
two distinct types of framing effects; equivalency
framing effects and emphasis (or issue) framing effects.
Equivalency framing: Equivalency framing effects cause people to alter their
preferences when presented with different, but logically equivalent, words or
phrases. Such framing effects have been largely the province of psychological
research. Kahneman and Tversky’s (1984) “Asian disease problem” offers perhaps
the most widely cited example of equivalency framing effects. Levin, Schneider
and Gaeth (1998) refer to equivalency framing effects as valence framing effects,
that is, wherein a frame casts the same information in either a positive or
negative light.
They develop a typology to distinguish among what they believe
are three types of valence framing effects: risky choice framing, attribute framing, and goal framing.
Finally, goal framing refers to manipulating a goal of an action
or behavior to affect the persuasiveness of the communication. Goal framing,
they argue, can be used to focus on a frame’s potential to provide a benefit or
gain, or on its potential to prevent or avoid a loss. Both the positive and
negative frame should enhance the evaluation of the issue. Goal framing,
however, is concerned with which frame will have the greater persuasive impact
on achieving the same end result. Multiple studies have shown that a negatively
framed message emphasizing losses tends to have a greater impact on a given
behavior than the logically equivalent positively framed message emphasizing
gains (e.g., Meyerowitz & Chaiken, 1987).
Emphasis (or Issue) Framing: Druckman (2001a, 2001b) argues that an “(emphasis) framing
effect is said to occur when, in the course of describing an issue or event, a
speaker’s emphasis on a subset of potentially relevant considerations causes
individuals to focus on these considerations when constructing their opinions” (2001a,
p. 1042).
Although both equivalency and emphasis framing effects cause
individuals to focus on certain aspects of an issue over others, the
information subsets presented in emphasis framing are not logically identical
to one another.
PSYCHOLOGY OF FRAMING
Since the literature has shown that framing can have a significant
effect on how people make decisions and formulate opinions on any given issue
or event, it is important to understand the psychological processes that
underlie such effects.
Framing as Persuasion
Some of the existing literature on framing suggests that such
effects occur via persuasion. As limited-capacity information processors (Fiske
& Taylor, 1991), individuals cannot possibly consider everything they know
about an issue or event at any given moment. This allows room for persuasion, a
process that takes place when a communicator successfully revises or alters the
content of one’s beliefs by providing them with new information or additional
considerations that replace or
supplement favorable thoughts with unfavorable ones, or vice versa (Nelson
& Oxley, 1999).
Framing as an Extension of Priming
Other research suggests that framing is an extension of the
priming literature, with accessibility as the main psychological mechanism
underlying framing effects (e.g., Zaller, 1992; Kinder & Sanders, 1996).
Since people cannot consider everything they know about an issue or event at any
given moment, they will consider a subset of all potentially relevant
information by relying on what is accessible, easily retrieved, or recently
activated in their minds, according to the “cognitive accessibility model”
(Zaller, 1992). Cognitions that are accessible will be “top of the head,” and
therefore are more likely to influence opinion than inaccessible cognitions. It
is in this sense that Kinder and Sanders (1996) suggest framing works through
the temporary activation and enhanced accessibility of concepts and
considerations in memory. They state that the extent to which a consideration
is accessible can alter the criteria by which people can render judgments about
an issue, person or event.
The recent framing literature stresses the importance of three
attributes for a notable framing effect to occur: availability, accessibility, and applicability (Chong &
Druckman, 2007a, 2007b; Price & Tewksbury, 1997).
Citizen Incompetence?
The cognitive accessibility model could be read as painting a
pessimistic picture of citizens as basing their political opinions on arbitrary
or elite-manipulated information (Druckman, 2001b). However, evidence indicates
that public opinion is not shaped only by “mere accessibility.” Nelson and
colleagues (Nelson, Clawson, et al., 1997; Nelson & Oxley, 1999; Nelson,
Oxley, et al., 1997) are the leading proponents of the argument that framing is
about more than just accessibility. According to this line of research, frames
do more than make certain considerations accessible; they suggest which of the
many, possibly conflicting, considerations should predominate when forming opinions
on an event or issue.
FRAMING EFFECTS: A CRITIQUE AND NEW SYNTHESIS
This section elaborates on the points that have been the focus
of the most recent research on framing effects: whether strong prior attitudes
preclude significant framing effects on public opinion; whether competition
between frames logically entails minimal framing consequences; and whether
framing messages can still have major political influence even without
affecting individuals’ opinions.
Framing Effects and
Prior Attitudes
Framing and Public Opinion
When elites engage in a contest to shape frames in the media, it
is often as a way of influencing other elites’ perceptions and predictions of
public opinion and thus their political calculations This influence of media
frames works along at least three different paths: through effects on citizens’
responses to pollsters’ questions about the matter (not necessarily on
citizens’ actual attitudes); through elites using news frames directly to draw
inferences about the current and likely future state of public opinion; and
through elite assessments of how competing elites will react to all of this.
CONCLUSION
Framing research has continually raised critical concerns about
the ability of elites to manipulate the public, as well as the possibility of
democracy itself. For instance, Entman (1993, p. 57) argues: If by shaping
frames elites can determine the major manifestations of “true” public opinion
that are available to government (via polls or voting), what can true public
opinion be? How can even sincere democratic representatives respond correctly
to public opinion when the empirical evidence of it appears to be so malleable,
so vulnerable to framing effects?
To the extent that elites have no way of determining precisely
what “real” public opinion is, they must rely on shorthand indicators such as
polls and news texts that are themselves susceptible to framing effects.
Regardless of whether framing truly affects actual majority opinion—or whether
true public opinion is manipulated by elites—framing is likely to have
political effects through the impacts of framing on poll responses and on the
emphases of the media. These observations suggest that direct framing effects
on individuals’ opinions may not yield the most relevant data for drawing
inferences about the quality of democratic citizenship. Therefore, the
literature would gain greatly from expanding the purview of framing beyond the
focus on individual opinions to framing as a larger diachronic and
socio-political process.
These observations are not meant as suggestions to abandon the
study of framing effects on individual policy opinions. Instead, they point to
a need to broaden the study of framing effects, while connecting them to larger
questions of democratic theory. These include but also transcend questions
around whether subjects who resist framing messages prove their competence as
democratic citizens. Research should focus as much on frame quality and elite
quality as citizen quality. We could devote more attention to whose frames are
most available, under which conditions, and how framing both guides elites’
responses to indicators of public opinion, and helps elites shape those
manifestations. Such research would illuminate the production and circulation
of frames and the feedback loops that trace the flow of political power among
competing media, competing elites, and mass publics.
News, Discourse, and
Ideology
Teun A. van Dijk
DISCOURSE STUDIES
The new cross-discipline of discourse studies has developed since the mid-1960s in most of
the humanities and social sciences. This development has taken place more or
less at the same time as, and closely related to, the emancipation of several
other new interdisciplines in the humanities, such as semiotics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics,
and psycholinguistics. Yet, although initially “discourse analysis,” just like
semiotics, was based on concepts from various strands of structural and
functional linguistics, its later developments were inspired by new
developments in the social sciences.
Although a vast cross-discipline such as discourse studies can
hardly be summarized, some of its main tenets are as follows (for details and a
wealth of further references, see Schiffrin, Tannen,
& Hamilton, 2001; Van Dijk, 1997, 2007):
1. contrary to traditional linguistics, the study of discourse
is not limited to formal grammars or abstract sentences, but focuses on natural language use of real language
users in real social situations of interaction and communication.
2. The unit of analysis is no longer the word or sentence, as in
traditional grammars, but the structures and strategies of “whole” written or
spoken discourses or communicative events.
3. Discourses, analyzed as complex phenomena in their own right
(as is also the case for communication), are described at many levels of structure and made
explicit in terms of a large variety of theories and (sub) disciplines, such as
discourse grammar, semantics, stylistics, rhetoric, conversation analysis,
narrative analysis, argumentation analysis, pragmatics, semiotics, and so on.
These levels may be described by more local, micro level analyses, on the one
hand, and by more global, macro-level analyses, on the other.
One basic principle of these analyses is that of sequentiality: Each unit at each
level (word, sentence, meaning, speech act, turn, etc.) of discourse is
produced, interpreted and analyzed as being conditioned by previously
interpreted units. As we shall see, this also applies to the analysis of news
reports.
4. Discourses are not limited to a “verbal” dimension only, but
also have paraverbal and non-verbal dimensions, such as intonation, gestures
and face work, on the one hand, and other “semiotic” dimensions such as sounds,
music, images, film and other multimodal aspects, on the other hand. In other
words, discourse is now understood as a complex multimodal event of interaction
and communication.
5. Discourses as language use also presuppose cognitive aspects
of production and comprehension, involving various kinds of mental strategies,
knowledge, mental models and other representations in memory.
6. Discourses are studied in relation to various kinds of
“situation,” such as interactional, social, communicative, political,
historical and cultural frameworks, interpreted by the participants as relevant
“contexts.”
7. Discourses are also being studied in the social sciences as
social practices that play a crucial role in the reproduction of society in
general, and of social communities or groups and their knowledge and
ideologies, in particular. As such, discourse analysis has also contributed to
the study of the reproduction of racism and other forms of domination and social
inequality in society. Indeed, large domains of society, such as politics, the
mass media, education, science and law, largely consist of many discourse
genres and communicative events in their respective contexts. Thus, scholars in
the social sciences often study text or talk, sometimes without awareness of
the discursive nature of their data.
We see that the scope of (the objects of) discourse studies has
been gradually extended in the last decades, from words to sentences and from
sentences to discourses; from syntax to semantics
to pragmatics; from microstructures to macrostructures, from
monological texts to talk in interaction; from verbal text and talk to
multimodal communicative events, from text (and talk) to context, from social
discourse and interaction to underlying cognitive processes and
representations, and from individual discourse to social systems and domains of
discourse and communication.
IDEOLOGY
Many of the observations made above for the complex object of
discourse, also apply to the concept of ideology, which equally needs a
multidisciplinary approach. This approach may be summarized in the following
points (for detail, see Van Dijk, 1998):
1. The original notion of ideology as a “science of ideas”
(proposed by Destutt de Tracy at the end of the 18th century) soon received a negative connotation, reflected also
in the vague concept of “false consciousness” used by Marx and Lenin. This
negative meaning has dominated both the study as well as the political
applications of the concept of ideology until today, as we know from the work
of Mannheim, Lukács, Althusser, Hall, Thompson and Eagleton, among many others.
2. Traditional approaches to ideologies largely ignored the discursive and cognitive dimension of ideology,
despite the fact that ideas (beliefs) and hence ideologies are mental
representations, and that ideologies are largely (re)produced by text, talk and
communication.
3. A new, multidisciplinary
approach to ideology should integrate a theory of ideology as a form of social cognition (as is also the case
for knowledge), a theory of the role of discourse
in the expression and reproduction of ideology, and a theory of the functions
of ideology in society, for
instance in the (re)production of social groups
and group relations.
4. such a theory should not define ideologies as inherently
negative, because ideologies as socially shared by groups are not only used to
legitimate power abuse (domination), but also to bolster resistance, as is the
case for the socialist, feminist or pacifist movements.
5. Ideologies are not just any kind of social beliefs, but the
fundamental, axiomatic beliefs underlying
the social representations shared by a group, featuring fundamental norms and values (such as those of freedom, justice, equality, etc.)
which may be used or abused by each
social group to impose, defend or struggle for its own interests (e.g., freedom of the press, freedom of the market, freedom from discrimination,
etc.).
6. Ideologies may be seen as the basis of the (positive) self-image of a group, organized by fundamental
categories such as the desired (valued, preferred) identity, actions, norms and
values, resources and relations to other groups. Characteristic of such
ideological structures is the polarization between (positive) us (the in group),
and (negative) them (the outgroup). Thus, journalistic (professional)
ideologies are defined in terms of typical actions of news making, values such
as press freedom, objectivity, fairness or the protected resource of
information, as well as the relations to the readers, sources, news actors and
the state.
7. Ideologies control more specific socially shared attitudes of groups (for instance, a
racist ideology may control racist attitudes about immigration, integration,
legislation, and so on).
8. Attitudes (such as that on immigration, divorce, abortion,
death penalty, and other important social issues) are general and abstract, and
may be more or less known and shared by their members who may “apply” them to
form their own personal opinions about
specific social events. These opinions may however be influenced by various
(sometimes contradictory) ideologies as well as by personal experiences. That is, unlike
relatively stable social group attitudes, personal opinions are unique and
contextual: They always depend on the person and the situation at hand.
9. Ideologically influenced personal opinions about concrete
events (such as the war in Iraq, or a terrorist bomb attack) are represented in
mental models, held in Episodic
Memory (part of Long Term Memory, as part of people’s personal experiences).
10. These ideologically
biased mental models are the basis of ideological discourse, and may
influence all levels of such discourse, from its sounds or visuals, to its
syntax, topics, meanings, speech acts, style, rhetoric or interactional
strategies.
11. Since the underlying ideologies (and the social attitudes
and personal opinions influenced by them) are generally polarized, this also tends to be the case for ideological
discourse, typically organized by emphasizing the positive representation of Us
(the ingroup) and the negative representation of Them (the outgroup)—and its
corollary (mitigating the negative representation of Us and the positive
representation of Them). We call this combination of general discursive
strategies the “Ideological Square.”
12. Discourse usually does not express ideologies directly, but
via specific group attitudes about social issues and personal opinions about
specific events, and under the influence of the communicative situation as
subjectively defined by the speakers or writers, that is, by their personal context models. Such context models
may block or modify (mitigate or amplify) underlying ideological beliefs, when
language users adapt to the situation, the audience, and so on. This also
explains why ideologies are not always detectable in specific situations (Van
Dijk, 2008, 2009).
While “news stories” seem to be “stories,” they do not have the
same schematic (superstructural) organizations as do everyday stories told in
conversation: Everyday stories are more or less chronological, whereas news
reports are organized by other principles such as relevance, importance and
recency.
What comes first is the headline and lead, the most important
information of the discourse, a summary, as in many conversational stories, but
then the story in a news report is delivered in installments the most important
information of each category comes first, followed by the less important
information of each category. Also, the formal
(“syntactic“) categories of a news schema (such as Summary or
Commentary) should not be confused with the semantic categories of news
discourse (such as action, actor, etc.), because this would mean that news
discourse has a segment in which only information about an actor is given,
which is usually not the case: such information is provided together with
information about events or actions.
NEWS AS IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
News structure analysis shows us where and how ideologies
preferably manifest themselves in news reports. We have seen above that our new
sociocognitive approach explains how underlying ideologies control more specific
group attitudes and how personal mental models of journalists about news events
control activities of news making, such as assignments, news gathering,
interviews, news writing, editing and final make up.
These news making activities are ultimately controlled by the
specific, ongoing context model of the journalists about the relevant aspects
of the social and political situation. Such context models of news making
include current setting (location, deadlines, etc.), news participants
(reporters, editors, news actors, sources, etc.) and their roles, as well as
current aims, and the social knowledge and ideologies of the participants. This
also means that whatever other professional and social ideologies (including
norms, news values, etc.) may be at work in news production, the constraints of
the now relevant context, as defined by the participants, are the crucial
filter that makes news more or less appropriate in the current social and
political situation.
IDEOLOGY
IN CLASSICAL STUDIES OF NEWS
Given the predominantly social approaches to news discourse, one
would expect a vast literature on the ideological nature of news. Surprisingly,
nothing is less true. Among the many thousands of articles on media and news in
the database of the Social Science Citation Abstracts (World of Knowledge),
there are at present (July, 2007) only a dozen titles that feature both
keywords “news” and “ideology.” And even the few articles whose titles suggest
ideological news analysis, hardly deal with ideological news structures in much
detail.
What about books? Some of the classical books on news and
newsmaking published since the end of the 1970s do feature sections on
ideology, but in those studies such accounts of ideology are more general typically
summarizing (neo) Marxist approaches and their influences, rather than
integrating the notion in detailed and systematic ideological analyses of news
in the press. This is not surprising, because classical theories of ideology
were never developed, whether theoretically or practically, to account for
language use, discourse and communication.
CONTEMPORARY
STUDIES OF NEWS AND IDEOLOGIES
The ideological backlash in the America of presidents Reagan and
Bush—father and son—during the 1980s and 1990s was soon disturbed by the Gulf
War and then 9/11 and the Iraq war—giving rise to renewed ideological critique
of the news media. Whereas communism and anticommunism defined the ideologies
of the Cold War, and the media had to confront the new ideologies of
resistance, namely those of feminism, antiracism and pacifism, the last decade
has seen the substitution of anticommunism by a compound mixture of
antiterrorism and anti-Islamism, with a continuing undercurrent of old
anti-Arab racism.
NEWS PRODUCTION AND IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL
Not only is there a lack of an explicit theory of ideology, but
we do not have at our disposal a detailed theory of discourse and a
sociocognitive theory that explains how ideologies control processes of news
production. Whatever the value of existing studies for our understanding of
news production routines, news values or power relationships, they remain
theoretically incomplete when it comes to providing a detailed account of the
ideologies involved and the structures of news that are controlled by them.
Given the aims of this chapter and this section, we shall now focus more on
ideologically controlled news structures in general terms, rather than on the
nature of the ideologies themselves, or on the (vast quantity of) individual
authors and studies.
Racism and the News
International research on racism and the mass media has
consistently shown that despite considerable variation among countries, periods
and newspapers, the press continues to be part of the problem of racism, rather
than its solution. These ideological influences of racism on news making may be
summarized by the following main findings of research
1. Hiring: Many forms of ethnic bias defined below are crucially influenced
by the fact that in all white-dominated
societies, ethnic journalists are discriminated against in hiring, so that most
newsrooms are predominantly white. And those (few) minorities being hired will
tend to be recruited not only for their outstanding professionalism, but also
because their ethnic ideologies (and especially their moderate antiracism) do
not clash with those of the editors.
2. News values: Events are attributed higher news values
if they are about “our own” people or when “our own” people are involved,
whether or not these are “closer” geographically.
3. Beats and sources: in ethnic or racial conflicts,
white elite sources are consistently given priority, attributed higher credibility,
found more reliable and (hence) are more likely to be quoted as such.
4. Selection: Available news stories are more likely to be selected for
inclusion not only if they are about people like us (see News values), but also
when they are consistent with prevalent ethnic and racial stereotypes, as is
the case for rioting blacks in the UK, black dictators in Africa or the
terrorism of (Arab) Islamists.
5. Salience (placement and lay-out):
News stories about ethnic-racial others (minorities, immigrants, refugees,
etc.) are distributed over the newspaper and the page not only by criteria of
relative social or political importance or relevance, but also by ethnic-racial
criteria: As a general rule, news about bad actions of them, especially against
(people like) us, is more salient than the reverse.
6. Topics: Whereas (people like) Us may be represented as actors in
virtually all kinds of news stories and on a large variety of social, political
and economic topics, the coverage of Them tends to be limited to a few issues
and topics, such as immigration, integration and race relations, crime, violence
and deviance, cultural conflicts and entertainment (music, sports).
7. Perspective: Another global constraint on news
stories is the ethnocentric perspective in the description of news events.
Ethnic conflicts, problems of integration and cultural differences, for
instance, tend to be represented from “our” (white) perspective, for instance in
terms of Them not being able or wanting to adapt to Us, instead of vice versa.
8. Formats, order and foregrounding: Whereas topics are the global
meaning of discourse, schemas define their overall format and order, such as
the distinction between Headlines,
Leads, and other categories of news (Main Events, Context,
Background, History, Reactions, etc.). We find that negative actions and events
of ethnic minorities or other non-
European Others, for example, are not only preferably placed in
the prominent positions of Headlines and Leads (because they are defined as
topics), but also fore grounded in the overall order and categories of news
reports.
9. Quotation: Given the ethnic bias of beats and source selection and
evaluation, it may be predicted that those who are quoted as reliable sources
or spokespersons tend to be our (white) elites, rather than their elites or
spokespersons.
10. News actor and event description: Ethnic Others tend to be described
more often in negative terms, whereas people like Us tend to be described
positively or more neutrally, even when engaging in negative actions.
11. Style: at the more manifest levels of style, such as the selection of
words, sentence syntax and other variable expressions of underlying global topics
and local meanings, we find that lexical items used to describe others and
their actions tend to have more negative connotations.
12. Rhetoric: All properties of news described above may be emphasized or
de-emphasized by well-known rhetorical figures, such as metaphors, hyperboles
and euphemisms. Thus, the arrival of Others in Our country is consistently
represented in terms of large quantities of threatening water: waves, floods, etc. and their immigration as invasion, etc. On the other hand, Our racism will usually be described
in terms of mitigating euphemisms, for instance in terms of popular discontent or as political populism, or reduced to less negative
notions such as discrimination,
national preference or bias.
Nationalism
in the News
Journalists often identify not only with a language but also
with a nation state, and in nationalist ideologies, the positive self-image is
in terms of us in our country,
on the one hand, and Them in
(or from) other countries, on the other hand, as we also have seen for racist ideologies,
with which nationalist ideologies are closely related. In nationalist
ideologies, identity is crucial, and associated with a complex system of
positive characteristics about how we are, about our history and habits, our
language and culture, national character, and so on (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl,
& Liebhart, 1998).
The norms and values associated with nationalism are those of
patriotism and loyalty especially made relevant in times of crisis or war. And
the typical (“good“) actions recommended by nationalist ideologies is to defend
the nation against invaders and foreign influences, both military and economic
as well as cultural (language, arts, etc.). The most precious resource of the nationalist,
thus, is on the one hand, “our land,” territory, etc., and on the other hand
the symbolic resources of “our” culture, language, etc.
Sexism and the News
Much of what has been said above regarding racist ideologies and
their influence on the news also applies to patriarchal gender ideologies such
as sexism or male chauvinism. By definition, the structure of the dominant
ideology of sexism as an ideology is also polarized, as between us (men) and
Them (women), and especially between us (“real” men) and Them (feminists).
However, sexist ideologies are not limited to men, but may also be shared by
those women who agree with (at least some) sexist attitudes. The structures of
sexist ideologies are thus polarized between positive self-descriptions of men
(e.g., as strong, independent, etc.) and other-descriptions of women (e.g., as
weak, dependent, etc.), hence defining opposed identities, the characteristic activities
of men vs. women, different norms and values, and different resources that define
the power position of men in society.
CONCLUSIONS
As is the case for most public discourse, the news is imbued
with ideologies. A detailed study of such ideologies in the mass media and
other forms of public elite discourse contributes to our insights into their
very reproduction in society. The review of theoretical and empirical research in
this chapter leaves no doubt about the prominent role of the news media in the
(re)production of ideologies in society. The evidence shows that on the whole,
despite some variation between different (liberal vs. conservative, and popular
vs. elite) newspapers, these dominant ideologies are associated with the very
position and power of white, male, middle class journalists working within a
corporate environment. Women, poor people, workers, black people, immigrants,
and all those who have no access to, and control over public discourse are thus
largely ignored, or represented negatively when seen as a problem or a threat
to the social mainstream. To sustain existing powers, polarized (us vs. them)
ideologies are necessarily aligned along fundamental dimensions of society,
such as those of class, gender, and race (and the same is true for age and
sexual orientation). The elites that control the access to, and the contents and
structures of public discourse, and that of the mass media, in particular, thus
also are able to control the formation and reproduction of the very ideologies
that help to sustain their power.
Rethinking News and
Myth as Storytelling
S. Elizabeth Bird and
Robert W. Dardenne
In 1988, we explored the idea that news is not merely objective
reporting of fact, but also a form of storytelling that functions in a
mythological way (Bird & Dardenne, 1988). We argued that journalists
operate like traditional storytellers, using conventional structures to shape
events into story and in doing so define the world in particular ways that reflect
and reinforce audiences’ notions of reality. Journalism, more than myth, is
part of rational discourse that facilitates informed citizenship; nevertheless,
we argued that we must better understand the narrative construction and
mythological function of news to fully comprehend the ideological way in which
it operates in any culture.
THE CONTEXT
Journalism scholars critique news in many ways, but a central
thread involves questions around truth and accuracy. The ideal of objectivity
holds that particular journalistic techniques can produce accurate, if not
necessarily complete, accounts of events. News “bias” suggests that a “true” account
potentially exists, but that various influences lead journalists to produce
other than objective reports. Journalistic ideals of objectivity differ from
those of positivistic social sciences, but the philosophical approach is
similar.
We distinguish between the two clearly related ideas of “news as
myth” and “news as storytelling.”Myth has been defined in hundreds of ways,
although all definitions address the functional role of myth in providing
enduring narratives that help maintain a sense of continuity and order in the
world, regardless of whether these narratives describe fantastical gods and
creatures, or “real” people. Individual news stories don’t function like
individual myths, but as a communication process, news as a body may function
like myth.
NEWS AS MYTH
We distinguish between the two clearly related ideas of “news as
myth” and “news as storytelling.” Myth has been defined in hundreds of ways,
although all definitions address the functional role of myth in providing
enduring narratives that help maintain a sense of continuity and order in the
world, regardless of whether these narratives describe fantastical gods and
creatures, or “real” people. Individual news stories don’t function like
individual myths, but as a communication process, news as a body may function
like myth. As we wrote in 1988, “Myth reassures by telling tales that explain
phenomena and provide acceptable answers; myth does not necessarily reflect an
objective reality, but builds a world of its own” (p. 70). For example, one
function of myth is to explain that which cannot be easily explained—the rise
and fall of the stock market and the economy, or even the weather—as well as
more intangible things, such as notions of morality, appropriateness, and
fairness.
Discussion of the mythological frame focuses on universalities,
which helps advance an understanding of the communal, celebratory role of news.
News plays a cultural role analogous to that of myth by using familiar,
recurring narrative patterns that help explain why it seems simultaneously novel,
yet soothingly predictable.
NEWS AS STORYTELLING
Appreciation of news as myth provides a framework to attain a
deeper cultural understanding of news if we root analyses in the particular.
The universal impulse toward story or storytelling seems as strong as ever in
contemporary culture. Consider professional wrestling, which enhanced its
popularity and involved fans in interactive debate by adding sometimes
elaborate storylines to its conventional conflict between two simplistically
“good” or “evil” protagonists (McBride & Bird, 2007).
Reality television, which grew out of “tabloid TV” news, seeks
to engage viewers by employing essentially a series of mini-stories, which,
like news, bask in the aura of “truth.” A “story” is different from a simple
chronological account, because it seeks coherence and meaning; a story has a
point, and it exists within a cultural lexicon of understandable themes.
WHOSE STORY?
Whose story is being told? Archetypal, mythic analysis cannot
answer that question because it assumes that at some level they are all “our
stories.” Effective news speaks to the audience through story frames that
resonate. News/myth, in invoking ancient characters and themes, clearly unifies
people around shared values. Mythological analyses almost by definition affirm
the status quo, because that is what myth does. And here lies the danger of
journalists functioning like bards, who themselves served those in power.
Stories help construct the world, and those in power benefit from constructing
the world in specific ways—engaging the audience, but also overshadowing or
eliminating competing narratives.
Some stories, however, actively feed the agendas of those in
power, and more acute danger comes from conscious manipulation by those who
supply the mortifies upon which journalists build those narratives. High profile
narratives of terrorism and war provide dramatic examples. Those in power
desperately need to define the story of the deeply contested Iraq war and their
skill in framing it in familiar, resonant themes greatly increases their
chances of success.
Story is compelling, not only for readers but also for the
press. Any government administration finds it easier to frame stories to its
advantage than to win over the press and the people with analysis and reason.
This is politics, and it is what governments do. But this does not explain why
the press often uncritically accepts those framings; after all, one might argue
that the duty of the press is to resist them. But, the pull of “weapons of mass
destruction,” or “shock and awe,” or “surge,” or a homespun hero is powerfully
compelling and comforting for journalists and audiences alike.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Story, we have discovered after two decades, is not less complex.
Scholars productively explored myriad texts to discover image, representation,
mythic and traditional theme, and other qualities of myth and story. As Zelizer
(2004, p. 132) points out, journalism scholars have found narrative approaches
fruitful “in the mainstream press, on television news, and in the alternative
journalistic forms of tabloids, reality television, and the internet.” This
interesting and important work (only a fraction referenced here) can propel us
toward further significant findings valuable to both news and society.
A better understanding of the future of journalism’s narrative
role requires consideration of the greatly changed news environment. Even into
the first decade of the 21st century, most people continue to get most of their
news through mainstream corporate media, and those media appear to adopt
official government narratives more than counter them. However, proliferation
of cable
Robinson (2007) explores this change in her case study of the
Spokane, Washington, Spokesman Review’s
coverage of a pedophilia scandal involving its mayor. She described a
coherent, conventional story
that fit many familiar narrative frames emerging over the course of a month’s long investigation. However, simultaneous
with the printed story, a “cyber newsroom” on the paper’s own Web site made available interviews, documents, and
multiple forms of information, and
people dissected and analyzed the information, often offering their own
sometimes radically different
versions of the “official” stories. Readers, interacting with journalists, the
news content, and other
readers, helped form an online news narrative:
The
Commercialization of News
John H. McManus
INTRODUCTION
DEFINING
COMMERCIALIZATION
JOURNALISM practice wields such enormous powers and calls for the
highest standards of ethics and commitment to truth. Ethics and truth in
journalism have assumed global concern as scholars recognize that their basic
constituents of objectivity, accuracy, fairness and balance have merely assumed
mythical qualities as journalists battle to assign credibility to their news
stories. Tuchman (1978: 2) describes objectivity as ‘facticity’ (a mechanism which
allows the journalists to hide even from themselves the ‘constructed’ and
‘partial’ nature of their stories). Commercialization are almost as old as the practice of making
money by selling news. Where news has been produced by business enterprises for
more than a century and a half, and where almost all news is produced to earn a
profit. To be concerned with commercialization implies that absent such taint,
profit-seeking news media can act in the public interest. So a definition of commercialization
carries with it the controversial assumption that business-based journalism can,
in fact, serve the public under certain conditions.
Making that assumption, I will define the commercialization of
news as any action intended to boost
profit that interferes with a journalist’s or news organization’s best effort
to maximize public understanding of those issues and events that shape the
community they claim to serve. The Mercury News’ priorities for its most read page during March
2005 seem much more oriented toward maximizing profit than public sense-making.
The war in Iraq was both an issue and a series of events with far greater
impact on the South San Francisco Bay region than one woman’s failed scam, no
matter how bizarre or entertaining.
HISTORICAL
CONTEXT
As Marion Marzolf’s (1991) lively history of American press
criticism describes, the conflict between the public service goals most news
media proclaimed as their mission, and the demand of their owners for the
greatest return on their investment has existed since the early days of the Penny
Press in the middle of the 19th century. That was when business took over
sponsorship of news from political parties and small printers. Commercialism
ebbed over much of the 20th century as codes of ethics were adopted
and the education levels and professional aspirations of journalists rose. But
during the last two decades, and particularly during the last several years, as
competition for readers and advertisers on the Internet has intensified,
commercial interference appears to be rising, at least in American news media.
Since the mid-1980s the corporations
that produce news in the United States have begun to treat it less as a public
trust and more as a commodity, simply a product for sale (Auletta, 1991; Bagdikian,
1992; Downie & Kaiser, 2002; Hamilton, 2004; Kaniss, 1991; Lee &
Solomon, 1991; McManus, 1994; Merritt, 2005, Patterson, 2000; Squiers, 1993;
Stepp, 1991; Underwood, 1993).
This economic
rationalization of journalism has been exacerbated by the splintering of
mass audiences as consumers took advantage of emerging news and entertainment
choices offered first by cable and satellite television, and later by the
Internet. Paradoxically, at the same time as these new technologies open a
cornucopia of content from comedy to Congressional hearings, and democratize expression
by offering almost everyman (and woman) a chance to express themselves to
almost everyone, they undermine the financial foundation of the news providers
democracy requires, especially in the United States. an economic analysis of
news predicts a temporary decline of journalism’s expensive but vital watchdog
function, less diverse coverage of a professional caliber as fewer owners
exercise greater economies of scale over more newsrooms, and an erosion of
ethical standards as public relations copy and advertising are “repurposed” as
news. But if we understand how market forces shape news, we can propose
remedies to ensure a steady supply of the kind of journalism participatory government
requires.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE LITERATURE OF COMMERCIAL NEWS BIAS
The Social Critics
The first to decry commercial contamination of news were social
critics. Many were themselves journalists. Edward Ross in 1910, Will Irwin in
1911, and Upton Sinclair in 1920 decried the fakery, sensation and bias of the
Yellow Press. The founder of German newspaper research, Karl Bücher (1926),
described the influence of advertising in US newspapers. Later George Seldes
(1938), at mid-century A. J. Leibling (1961) , and more recently
Robert Cirino (1971) and Edward Jay Epstein (1973) documented structural business
interference in the practice of journalism.
Perhaps the clearest assessment of an inherent conflict of
interest between the economic and public service aspects of news media came
from the Hutchins Commission (1947), assembled and funded by Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce
after World War II: “The press is caught between its desire to please and
extend its audience and its desire to give a picture of events and people as
they really are”(p. 57).
The Media Monopoly, the number of
global firms controlling most informational media drops. Ownership is critical,
Bagdikian (1992, p. xxxi) argues: Many of the corporations claim to permit
great freedom to the journalists, producers and writers they employ. Some do
grant great freedom. But when their most sensitive economic interests are at
stake, the parent corporations seldom refrain from using their power over
public information.
Another former journalist, Doug Underwood, warned of the
economic rationalization of newspapers in the 1980s. He described the changes
in newsroom management and news content as “green eyeshade” journalists were
displaced by managers with business degrees in When MBAs Rule the Newsroom (1993).
The Media Economists
While each of these social critics examined economic pressures
on news, none used economics as a tool or developed theories of commercial
bias. Most of their economic research was designed not to critique media
performance, however, but to assist and train managers for the industry
(Underwood, 1993). In fact, until very recently economics was generally not
seen as a useful tool for analyzing journalistic responsibility. Former Stanford
media economist James N. Rosse put it bluntly in 1975:
The primary content of newspapers today is commercialized news
and features designed to appeal to broad audiences, to entertain, to be cost
effective and to maintain readers whose attention can be sold to advertisers.
The result is that stories that may offend are ignored in favor of those more
acceptable and entertaining to larger numbers of readers, that stories that are
costly to cover are downplayed or ignored and that stories creating financial
risks are ignored.
“the failure to invest in the newsroom could be a form of
slow-motion suicide, where a company’s disinvestment gradually alienates core
readers and reduces the attractiveness of newspapers as advertising outlets”
(Chen, Thorson, & Lacy, 2005, p. 527).
Lacy isolates three trends that have boosted commercialism
during the past half century:
1. The decline of newspaper competition;
2. The growth of alternative information and advertising sources
in the form of cable television and the Internet;
3. The growth of
public [stock] ownership of news media.
The Political Economists
During the 1970s, a new way of examining news commercialism was
emerging. It focused on the intersection of politics and media and came to be
known as the political economy of the media. From Gramsci (1971) through
“Frankfurt School” theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1972) to the “cultural studies”
approach of Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, European scholars puzzled over
why poor and working class people would support leaders whose policies kept
them down. Political economists pointed to the media as a prime suspect.
In an influential 1974 essay, Murdock and Golding wrote, “The
part played by the media in cementing the consensus in capitalist society is
only occasionally characterized by overt suppression or deliberate distortion”
(p. 228). Rather, the routines of news work lead to systematic distortions that
label anything threatening to the status quo as illegitimate or ephemeral.
Journalistic objectivity, they argued, narrowed the margins of most debates to
just two alternatives, neither of which threatened existing class
relationships. “Most generally,” they wrote, “news must be entertainment; it
is, like all media output, a commodity, and to have survived in the
market-place must be vociferously inoffensive in the desperate search for large
audiences attractive to advertisers” (p. 230).
THE STATE OF THE ART
A number of scholars worldwide constitute the state of the art
in understanding commercial pressures on news. Rather than giving a few
paragraphs to each, it may be more coherent to concentrate on key contributions
of four researchers who have made a career examining the commercialization of
news.
My research combines my background as a journalist with my
education as a social scientist. It poses a dynamic tension between the norms
of socially responsible journalism and those of basic market economics to
explain the daily workings of reporters and editors.
The
Political Economy Critique
The media, McChesney holds, are both a product of this way of
thinking and promoters of it. As a consequence, we think we live in a world of
informational plenty—the market provides hundreds of television channels,
thousands of magazines and books and millions of Web sites. But of all these
seemingly independent outlets, most of those attracting the largest audiences
are owned by a few transnational companies and serve a commercial purpose,
selling audience eyeballs to advertisers. Not surprisingly, content that
empowers citizens and reports critically on government—and particularly
corporate—power is rare. What media cover least, he says, is their own
concentrated ownership and hyper commercialism.
In The Problem of the
Media (2004), McChesney builds on his argument that media reform is
primarily a political problem. He argues that government policies have
encouraged exploitive media to flourish and that new policies are needed to
create media supportive of democracy. To do so, he must dismantle the dominant
neoliberal myth that profit-seeking corporations operating in “free” markets
are the natural, ideal, even inevitable producers of news in a democracy.
That myth rests on two propositions, one political and one
economic:
• Government should not be involved in creating or regulating
news media because it might use this power for propaganda and censorship. The
American Founding Fathers recognized this conflict and forbade it in the First
Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press from Congressional control. Thus
“free enterprise” should operate news media with minimal or no regulation.
• Businesses compete in free markets, so they must give the
public what it wants or suffer a loss of audience to others who will.
To the first proposition, McChesney responds that the authors of
the First Amendment were concerned
with government censorship of news, but were not attempting to restrict news to the private sector. The press of the day, he notes, was run by
political parties and small printers. “The notions of entrepreneurs and free markets were almost entirely
absent in the early republic,” he writes,
“as was the idea that the press was or should be a commercial activity set up
solely to meet the needs of
press owners” (p. 30). The First Amendment was meant to protect robust public
discussion of important ideas and events, not to create a franchise for
corporations to do whatever they wish.
McChesney responds to the proposition that markets give people what they
want in five ways:
First, he says, it is based on a flawed premise—that there is
robust competition among media. Rather than engage in the competition Adam
Smith envisioned, media and other businesses attempt to buy out, merge, or
partner with competitors to the extent government anti-trust regulators permit.
They also try to erect barriers to market entry by forming chains, as in
newspapers and broadcast networks, or large conglomerates that can bring the
resources of many industries down on any new competitor.
Second, McChesney casts advertisers, not consumers, as the
media’s most important customers.
“This changes the logic of media markets radically, since the
interests of consumers must be filtered through the demands of advertisers” (p.
189). Third, he argues that markets encourage uniformity; every producer plays
to the lowest common denominator of consumer preferences in order to maximize
audience. This is problematic for news, which should seek out diverse
perspectives. Fourth, consumers can only value what they are offered. “Media
markets may ‘give the people what they want,’ but will do so strictly within
the limited range of fare that can generate the greatest profits” (p. 199).
Finally, McChesney argues, markets are inherently undemocratic;
they always favor the wealthy over other strata of society. The more money
consumers have, the greater their choices and ability to purchase quality
goods. In a democracy, every citizen should have equal access to civic
information.
A Business Critique
In Commercial Culture:
The Media System and the Public Interest (2000), Bogart rejects the
argument that the shortcomings of the media can be blamed on the public because
the market gives people what they want. Like McChesney, he urges a federal
media policy that makes greater room for democratic processes than the current
market arrangement.
The individual means of mass communication from the book to the
compact disk have been submerged into an interlocked system dominated by a
disturbingly small number of powerful organizations Entertainment increasingly overshadows
information, blurring the difference between what is real and what is not, and
thus weakening the public’s will and capacity to confront the world and its
problems. (p. 4)
Because all of these formerly separate media TV, radio,
newspapers, books, magazines, movies, video disks and tapes are expected to
promote each other, Bogart maintains, the independence of news departments in
such conglomerates has been compromised. Bogart’s career gives him particular
insight into advertising’s distortion of culture: Contemporary American culture
is commercial because, overwhelmingly, it is produced for sale to meet
marketing requirements Commercial
culture assigns no value or meaning to communications apart from their market
value—that is, the price that someone is willing to pay for them. (p. 66)
Advertising’s hyperbole and distorted world view—of well-off,
handsome actors gaining happiness from consuming products—affect all social and
political discourse, Bogart argues. Advertising pulls our attention away from
common issues—clean air and water, affordable housing and transportation—and
focuses it on personal possessions. When not selling, Bogart writes, the media
do two things: They inform and they entertain. But even when trying to inform,
the emphasis is on entertainment, he argues, because that generates a larger
audience than information. With all its great resources and formidable talent,
television journalism has been forced to conform to the rules of show business.
It gives us a vivid first hand view of great events, but that view is often
fragmentary and distorted. (p. 175)
This model postulates a “news production environment”
constituted by national and regional culture, laws and regulations, and available
technology. Within that, the news departments of media firms compete in four
key markets:
• For investors/owners who
trade capital for profit and perhaps influence over content.
• For advertisers who
trade money for public attention to their wares.
• For consumers who
trade subscriptions fees or simply “pay” attention for desirable content.
• For sources who
supply the raw material of news information in return for public attention
(which might yield influence) and influence over content.
I examined how each of these markets function compared to the
conditions Adam Smith (1776) and his modern followers list as necessary to
activate “the invisible hand” that spins the lead of self-interest into the
gold of public benefit. Four conditions must be met:
1. Buyers and sellers both act rationally in their self
interest; and
2. Buyers can distinguish between high and low quality; and
3. The market offers real alternatives; and
4. The transaction
generates no negative externalities—harm to parties outside the transaction.
Two theories of news selection flow from this model. The first
follows the norms of socially
responsible journalism (Hutchins, 1947). The second maximizes return to
shareholders/owners; it is essentially a cost-benefit analysis for various
types of news stories. The probability of an event or issue becoming news in a socially responsible news outlet is:
• Proportional to the expected consequence of the story in terms
of helping people make sense of their environment, and
• Proportional to the size of the audience for whom it is
important.
Under an economic selection
model, however, the probability is:
• Inversely proportional to harm the information might cause
major advertisers or the parent corporation, and
• Inversely proportional to the cost of uncovering it, and
• Inversely proportional to the cost of reporting it, and
• Directly proportional to the expected breadth of appeal of the
story to audiences’ advertisers will pay to reach.
These two selection logics conflict more than coincide as they
shape the organizational culture of a given newsroom. Where managers can
moderate profit demands of owners/investors, journalism norms do better. In
others, economic demands prevail. The more the economic, or market, model of
news selection is followed, the less valuable the news becomes as a resource
for citizens because:
• What is most expensive to uncover and report—sometimes because
those in power want it hidden—is often what is most newsworthy.
• News departments not only suffer pressure to avoid negative
reporting on large advertisers— auto dealers, real estate developers, grocery
chains, etc.—there is positive pressure to increase ad revenue by creating
content designed to whet consumers’ appetites—sections and segments about new
cars, home and garden improvements, food, travel, night life, etc.
• Rich and poor, young and old, all citizens deserve coverage of
issues affecting them. But rational advertisers seek the upscale and those in
prime buying years. Market-driven editors will commit scarce reporting
resources to please those groups at the expense of the others because
advertisers contribute about 80% of paid newspaper revenues and 100% of free
paper and broadcast revenues.
The Economics of Quality Journalism
media setting audience
preferences rather than satisfying them,
Baker argues that people use media to discover and develop content preferences
as much as to express already
formed preferences. For that to occur they must first be exposed to diverse offerings—content they may
not yet know they value. To the extent the market restricts choices to the content most profitable
for advertisers and media owners; it does not give people what they want.
Individuals are tremendously benefited or harmed if the country makes wise or
stupid decisions about welfare,
warfare, provision of medical care, the environment, and a myriad of other
issues. These harms or benefits
depend on the extent and quality of other
people’s political participation.
The media significantly influence this participation. (p. 45)
Economic theory predicts that when a producer is not able to
capture some of the value of the product, it is under-produced. Since
deterrence of corruption is entirely uncompensated, and what builds deterrence
investigative reporting is very expensive and little compensated as competitors
are able to offer the revelations almost immediately, economic theory provides
an explanation of why it is so rare.
METHODOLOGICAL TRAPS IN CONCEPTUALIZING AND MEASURING
COMMERCIALISM
Every research viewpoint has its blind spots. Because economics
usually tries to explain consumer and producer behaviors by itself, there is a
tendency to over-rely on it. This seems inappropriate when trying to explain
journalism, which, although increasingly dominated by economic concerns, still
retains vestiges of a professional ethos.
It is certainly possible that media adopt a liberal perspective
to reach the viewers advertisers most desire, but if indeed most news outlets
are liberal it could also be explained by noneconomic factors, such as liberal
bias among journalists. Or it could be that news media are not liberal. Young
women may notice little political bias because they pay little attention,
according to Hamilton’s data, to any political news.
A second methodological trap is that it can be easy to ascribe
economic motives to contradictory media behaviors. If concentrated ownership of
newspapers, for example, leads to sameness of editorial products in a region,
we can claim the owner is optimizing profit. One reporter’s story can run in a
dozen nearby papers because the owner saves money by reducing “redundant”
coverage and staff. Owning all the papers in the region, the owner need not
worry about consumers purchasing another paper.
DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
If we have learned anything from recent research, it is that
relying on unregulated markets will not render the quality or quantity of news
that participatory government requires to flourish.
Here, I suggest two major directions for research:
1) Exploration of
non-market, or at least nonprofit, financial models for news providers; and
2) Analyses leading to
remedies for the infirmities of markets for news products.
The breakdown of the business model of mainstream media, the
rapid adoption of broadband
Internet connections in developed nations and the development of
low cost digital broadcast equipment creates an exciting opportunity for
establishing new low cost news media because it:
• Eliminates the need for multi-million dollar presses,
increasingly expensive paper, and fleets of delivery trucks—which together
consume about two thirds of the average newspaper’s revenues;
• Eliminates the requirement for a government license and a
multi-million dollar transmitter to disseminate news in video and audio format;
• Reduces the cost of
news-gathering and presentation.
The market for sources might
operate more in the public interest if reporting costs were minimized. Given
the increasing power exercised by corporations, how might government increase
corporate reporting requirements to allow journalists greater opportunities
The market for
advertisers might operate more in the public interest if methods were
developed to weaken its influence over content. Bagdikian has suggested a tax
on all media advertising, for example, which might be used to subsidize public
affairs reporting. McChesney has advocated a strong journalists’ union that
might resist ethical violations such as running ads as news. Such ideas require
elaboration.
Sad to say, there has not been as favorable a time to study the
commercialization of news since the Yellow Press around the turn of the 20th
century. Instances abound. On a more hopeful note, the revolution in digital
communication technologies makes this the most exciting time to study the
economics and regulation of news media. The business models underpinning
virtually all mainstream news media are breaking down. What could be more rewarding
than figuring out how to fix or replace them?
References
Allern, S. (2002).
Journalistic and commercial news values: News organizations
as patrons of an institution and market actors. Nordicom Review, 23(1-2),
137-152.
Bell, A. (1991). News values. In The language of news media,
Language in society (pp. 155-160). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Dimmick, J. (1974). The gate-keeper: An
uncertain theory. Journalism
Monographs, 37,
1-45.
Eilders, C. (2006). News factors
and news decisions: Theoretical and methodological advances in
Germany. Communications, 31(1), 5-24.
Galtung, J., & Ruge, M. H. (1965). The
structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus
crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64-90.
Gans, H. J. (1979). Deciding what news is: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC
Nightly News, Newsweek and Time. New York: Pantheon Books.
Golding, P., & Elliott, P. (1999). Making
the news. In H. Tumber (Ed.), News:
A reader (pp. 112-120). New York: Oxford University Press.
Gregory, J., & Miller, S. (1998).
Making news out of science. In Science in public: Communication, culture, and credibility (pp.
108-114). New York: Plenum.
Handbook_of_Journalism_Studies__International_Communication_Association_Handbook_ Edited by Karin Wahl-Jorgensen Thomas Hanitzsch
No comments:
Post a Comment