Lecture 4 Flashcards
Artikel Boukes & Vliegenthart Patterns of news values
News Values
“Faced with limitations of time and space, journalists need to convince both their editors and the audience of the newsworthiness of their stories”
News values: aspects of a story that make it ‘newsworthy’
Inherent characteristic of the news event
Constructed by the journalist
Many different lists proposed since Galtung & Ruge (1965)
Criticism: Usually based only on what is published (positive evidence),
and many news values too vague to operationalize (Harcup & O’Neil 2016)
Eilders (2006): newsworthiness has (evolutionary) psychological roots
Identified 7 values
- Personification / human interest
- Negativity
- Elites / celebrities
- Impact and relevance
- Controversy / conflict
- Proximity
- Continuity
Hypotheses and Methods
How do news values differ for different categories of news outlets?
Popular newspapers: more personification & negativity
Quality newspapers: more controversy, impact, elite
Regional newspapers: more proximity & personification
Financial newspapers: overall less, except impact
Method:
Manual content analysis (see table 1)
8 newspapers, all news about the economy (keyword search
onclusions
News value importance differs between news types
→ Newsworthiness is not universal, differs between organizations/audiences
Limitations:
Only print newspapers
Only analysis of published content (positive evidence)
No regard for e.g. prominence, popularity of articles
News has the issue of bias
Ø People are especially likely to see bias when they are emotionally involved in a conflict.
Third principle:
There is no such thing as objective journalism (nor can there be). Ø It’s not whether the media are bias (they are), but how they are biased.
Media does not merely reflect what is happening in the political world, they transform it into a product called news. This transformation follows certain norms and rule the ensure, among other things as large an audience as possible.
Media don’t just cover events:
News is a decision, not a given;
Journalists transform events into news;
Bias is a systematic distortion (=transformation)
Cultural bias versus ideological bias
News values:
News is about the abnormal
News is a ‘selection’: limited channel capacity (limited prominence)
Central to understanding selection decisions is the identification of the values that guide journalist’ news judgement in practice
News is a product (of journalistic choices)
News is always a choice:
Which events to cover in limited space (channel or audience capacity)
Which sources / viewpoints to use
Which words to use to describe something
→ Journalists produce news out of events
News values
= relate to aspects of events and actors, or to aspects of news gathering and processing.
Proximity: geographical and cultural familiarity
Positivity or negativity
Conflict (winners and losers)
Impact/ relevance
Celebrities/ elite/ centre/ core
Sex/ scandal
Sensation
Novelty/ unexpectedness
More news values:
- Frequency = sudden occurrence (that fit with practices) are more likely to be reported than gradual, long term trends or processes at inconvenient times.
- Timeliness = events that just happened, are current, ongoing, or are about to happen are newsworthy.
- Unambiguity = clear implications, single interpretation, no need to understand complex background in which the events take pace.
- Personalization = agency (not structure), events portrayed as actions of individuals, or ‘human interest’ involving specific, “ordinary” people, not generalised masses.
- Consonance = fit with expectations and knowledge, frame and outlook of journalists
News production and bias
In producing news, cultural, organizational, and individual choices
all influence the outcome
–> “Hierarchy of influences” (Shoemaker & Reese 1996/2014, Mediating the Message)
There is no ground truth, so those choices are never complete neutral
→ News always displays some distortion (or ‘bias’)
This distortion is systematic, which has consequences for society/politics
News is not a mirror of society, but a “laughing mirror” (Cook 2005, Governing with the news)
See also Wolfsfeld ch. 4
2 types of bias:
Cultural bias = every news story is rooted in a certain time and place (powerful bias because it’s invisible, it’s natural and familiar)
Ideological bias = easier to recognize
Cultural bias in the news
- Ideological bias most obvious: political preference of organization/journalist
(co-)determines news choices
–> Can perceive even balanced news as biased against you:
Hostile Media Effect (Perloff 2015 MCS A Three-decade Retrospective on the Hostile Media Effect)
Every news medium in the world operates within a certain cultural context that is reflected in every news item that is produced.
This is why many in the field of communication say that news is a “social construction.”
News happens where there are journalists
Cultural bias does not only have an effect on which countries we hear about it also has an influence on what we hear about them.
Why news never could be objective:
The decisions made by news editors are based primarily on assumptions about what they assume their particular audience—and their potential audience— wants to hear about
Can journalists objectively report the news? Should they even try?
Hierarchy of influences:
Social system: social cleavage, hegemonic ideology
Social institutions: state, audiences, recourses/funding, technology, mediatisation
Organization: news production, self-censorship, newsroom dynamic
Routines in workplace, values and norms
individual background/identity, traits, characteristics (type of people that become journalists)
Principle of representative deviance
people know that news deals with the deviant and unexpected. But if most of the information people get from the news is negative, few can resist coming to the logical conclusion that these stories provide an accurate description of the country.
News Frames
= organizing devices journalists use to tell a coherent story.
To understand how cultural bias influences the way news stories are told is to think about news frames.
News frames serves 2 important functions for journalists:
1. It operates like a powerful search engine as journalists go out in search for stories that fit the frame.
- Tools for providing meaning to events.
The constructions of news frames:
Journalists construct news frames by trying to find a narrative fit between existing frame sand the events they are covering.
They take down the one that appears to be the most appropriate for the events they are covering.
Competing frames: 2 or more frames on the shelf.
News frames: additional lessons
Example of the PMP circle: change in media coverage (dominant frame) leads to further political change.
Some events, especially major events, can provide important advantages to certain political actors and disadvantages for others.
When only one frame is dominate: more sensible frames are ignored
New frames have an impact on public opinion and public policy
News media are agents for constantly reminding us why we hate our enemies (e.g.
Islamic terrorists)
What to cover (agenda) and how to cover it (framing
Frames constructed by elites, especially for new (sub)topics
Existing frames influence coverage of same or related topics (narrative fit)
Certain frames make some solutions/policies more acceptable than others
(war on terror, war on drugs, reconstruction mission in Afghanistan, …)
News frames: additional lessons
Example of the PMP circle: change in media coverage (dominant frame) leads to further political change.
Some events, especially major events, can provide important advantages to certain political actors and disadvantages for others.
When only one frame is dominate: more sensible frames are ignored
New frames have an impact on public opinion and public policy
News media are agents for constantly reminding us why we hate our enemies (e.g.
Islamic terrorists)
What to cover (agenda) and how to cover it (framing
Frames constructed by elites, especially for new (sub)topics
Existing frames influence coverage of same or related topics (narrative fit)
Certain frames make some solutions/policies more acceptable than others
(war on terror, war on drugs, reconstruction mission in Afghanistan, …)
Framing: Entman
To frame is [emphasize] some aspects of a perceived reality and [..] to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described
Entman, R. M. (1993) Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm, Journal of Communication, 43(4): 51-8.
News frames reinforce people’s beliefs about deviant (=afwijkende) and extremist groups within our country.
Successful way for the news media to define deviants: is to ignore them.
If the news media were truly “objective” or even “fair,” then they should provide equal coverage to all political partie
The new media and cultural bias
New media sites give more of an illusion of diversity than actual diversity. - Provide more and easier access to international news.
More pervasive:
Cultural context of organization/journalist/audience co-determines news choices
–> American news differs from Dutch / Chinese / Iranian news
Representative Deviance
News is about the unexpected / abnormal (“deviant”)
Proximate / important countries receive a lot of coverage,
including routine coverage (≈front door?)
Other countries only get attention is something very newsworthy happens
and this is often negative (≈back door?)
Representative deviance = people think the deviant (news) is representative (true)
Cultural bias: the more culturally distance, the more negatively the bias is. Ø Outgroup homogeneous.
Our-group homogeneity = tendency to perceive members of an out-group as all alike or more similar to each other than members of the in-group.
Framing
select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.
From broadcasting to narrowcasting.
Fragmentation of audiences, combined with more partisan/ ideological product differensation.
Hostile Media Effect
= active audience select and interpret news based on their own values and predispositions (bias)
Selective exposure: audiences are increasingly likely to receive information that’s customized to their personal tastes, interests and political viewpoints to the possible exclusion of other information.
Exposure to partisan sources (e.g. Fox News) has a negative impact on people’s political knowledge.
Hyper-personalization
= algorithmic gatekeepers and recommendation systems replace human selection.
Narrow-casting, niche news and selective exposures:
Part of the public can tune out completely from politically relevant news.
Types of bias:
Distortion bias = purposeful distortion
Content bias = one-sided coverage
Decision bias = mindset of journalist Having the same framing, becomes bias.
(Entman, 1993): frames typically include a particular problem definition, a specific causal interpretation, a certain moral evaluation and a treatment recommendation.
Frames are ideologically laden: packages of truth claims about reality
Frames compete (in the pluralistic view) or dominate (in critical analyses)
Words are connected to frames: words are not neutral – words active frames in your brain
The more often the frame is activated, the stronger its gets: it becomes common sense
Frames are meaning givers that select
Events that so not fit the frame are less likely to be selected
Journalists construct news through a narrative fit between existing frames and events
Ideological bias in the news
Difficult to measure
Cultural bias is a more powerful influence on how news is constructed, because it’s for the most part invisible (what makes it more effective).
Commercial bias = refers to the tendency of journalists to choose, highlight and create dramatic news stories.
Conclusions
Objective news does not (and cannot) exist
–> Capacity is limited: News is always a choice (what to cover, which sources)
–> Words have meaning: News is always ‘framed’
–> there is no ‘ground truth’: All news is distorted (biased)
–> Distortions are systematic (laughing mirror)
Bias can be ideological or cultural
- -> Cultural bias is more pervasive and harder to detect
- -> Representative deviance: people see the deviant (news) as representative
Framing can change how we think about an issue
