Media - News Construction Flashcards
Why do some stories make the news and not others?
- Social construction - society has imposed narratives or created something
- Interactivity - how much people can interact with the media
- Newsworthy - can something be portrayed in the news?
- News values - what does the news value and what is newsworthy based on these (news that meets all the values is newsworthy)
- Churnalism -
- Window of the world - it opens our eyes to what is happening on local, national and global scales - some people have more influence over what picture is in the window
SYNOPSIS of ownership:
> Links to postmodernism - can there be news values in a globalised culture?
> Links to Marxism and pluralists -
owners control and reinforce their ideology through news values and look to create news that gives profits
> Links to hegemonic Marxists -
- journalists reinforce ideology through their socialisation
Elements of the selection and presentation of the news
1) News values/ worthiness - what is regarded as interesting to the audience
2) Bureaucratic constraints - the logistics of collecting news
3) Ownership - who owns the company and what their values are
McQuail (1992) - socially manufactured news that is a selective process, and sometimes journalists go searching for news - equally, they gate keep the stories they present and let through
- We only know what we are allowed to know
Galtung and Ruge - selection and presentation of news
Galtung and Ruge (1970):
They identified a set of news values which are used by journalists when selecting news stories
1) Extraordinary / unexpectedness
2) Threshold
3) Unambiguity
4) Reference to elite persons
5) Reference to elite nations
6) Personalisation
7) Frequency
8) Continuity
9) Negativity
10) Composition
Galtung and Ruge - News values (1-3)
Extraordinariness:
- Rare, unpredictable and surprising events have more newsworthiness than routine events because they are extraordinary; disasters and deaths of celebrities, especially if they are young fit, fit this criteria
- Past examples - Michael Jackson, Chadwick Boseman, Cameron Boyce; unexpected
Threshold:
- The bigger the size of the event, the more likely it is that it will be nationally reported - there is a threshold below which an event will fail to be considered worthy of attention and will be not be reported; such as reporting murders but not robberies
- ‘Half a million strike and Tories confront Hunt’ - BBC News
Unambiguity:
- Events that are easy to grasp are more likely to be reported than those that are open to multiple interpretations, or where understanding of the news depends on first understanding the complex context of an event - most stories don’t appear because they are ‘too complicated for the average person’ (Columbia Journalism Review 2000)
- Example; Belfast park Stabbing - Northern Ireland ITV
Galtung and Ruge - News values (4-6)
Reference to elite persons:
- The famous and powerful (those at the top of the socio-economic hierarchy) are often seen as more newsworthy than those who are regarded as ordinary - the ‘cult of celebrity’ has developed that has extended the definition of who counts as worthy of public interest, so that celebrity gossip is increasingly front page news, particularly for tabloids (The Sun)
- Meghan Markle and Prince Harry (Spare)
- Zahawi’s sacking due to taxes
Reference to elite nations:
- This relates to the cultural proximity of news; stories about people who speak the same language, look the same and share the same cultural values / preoccupations receive more news coverage than those people who do not - events in Britain are more likely to be covered in British newspapers
- Zahawi’s sacking and Putin’s threat to kill Johnson
- ‘Hospitals at home, asylum hotel racism’
- ‘Economy shrinks’
Personalisation:
- If events can be personalised by referring to a prominent individual or celebrity associated with them, they are more likely to be reported - consequently, journalists often try to reduce complex events and politics to a conflict between two personalities, and in British politics this is often presented as a Labour-Conservative showdown
- Examples - PMQ reporting - Starmer’s recent criticisms on industrial action pointed at Sunak’s failure to do anything to prevent their disruption
Zahawi’s sacking and Tories confronting Hunt at PMQs
Galtung and Ruge - News values (7-10)
Frequency:
- This refers to what Dutton (1997) calls the time span taken by the event - murders, motorway pile ups and plane crashes happen suddenly and their meaning can be quickly established - however, structural social trends are often outside of the frequency of a daily paper because they occur slowly and invisibly over a long period of time. Inflation, for example, may only be reported when the government publishes figures
- Cost of living crisis - reporting of inflation statistics
- Met Police corruption investigations
Continuity:
- Once a story has become news, and is running, it may continue to be covered for some time, because news teams are already in place to report the story, and because previous reporting may have made the story more accessible to the public
- Tyre Nichols case - racial injustice case
Negativity:
- Bad news is regarded by journalists as more exciting and dramatic than good news and is seen as attracting a larger audience - generally, good news is less entertaining and interesting than stories about death, tragedy, bankruptcy, violence, damage, natural disasters, political upheaval or simply extreme weather conditions are therefore always rated above positive stories
- The threshold for bad news is well below the threshold for good news, because it normally incorporates other news values and is unambiguous, unexpected, occurs in a short time and may be big
- ‘Cardiac Arrest in the news headlines’
- ‘Half of foods in our diets add to cancer risk’
Composition:
- Most news outlets attempt to balance the reporting of events, so that when there has been a lot of ‘bad news’, some news of a more positive nature, especially human interest stories, may be added - if there is an excess of foreign news, the least important one may have to make way for an inconsequential item of domestic news
- Hunt may freeze fuel duty to reduce costs and effect of cost of living crisis
The ‘window of the world’ - statistics
Ofcom 2022 -
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/241947/News-Consumption-in-the-UK-2022-report.pdf
Main points -
- Younger people are more likely to use social media to find their news, with newspaper reach doubling between ages 16-44 when online journals are included
- Most young people use social media, most people above 44 use traditional news outlets
- TikTok’s reach for news has increased from 2020 (1%) to 2022 (7%). Half of its user base (for news) are aged 16- 24.
- Different age groups consume news very differently; younger age groups are much more likely to use the internet and social media for news, whereas their older counterparts favour print, radio and TV.
- Reach of print/online newspapers has seen a decrease from 2020 (47%) to 2022 (38%). The decrease is driven by decreases in print (online newspaper reach remains steady) which have likely been exacerbated by the pandemic.
- Five of the top six TV channels (including BBC One which remains the top news source across platforms) saw decreased reach from 2021 among online adults.
- Attitudes towards news generally remain consistent with 2020 (across measures such as quality, accuracy, trustworthiness and impartiality) for TV, radio, social media, newspapers and online, with TV performing strongest, and social media performing least well.
- Social media is overtaking traditional channels for news among teens. Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are now their top three most used sources for news. Meanwhile many sources have seen decreases since 2021, with reach of BBC One/Two decreasing to 24% in 2022 (down from 35% in 2021).
Selection and presentation of news - Harcup and O’Neill
- Updated Galtung and Ruge’s values after studying British newspapers
Concluded the following criteria for deciding on newsworthiness:
1) Power of elites
2) Celebrity value
3) Entertainment value
4) Surprise
5) Bad news
6) Good news
7) Magnitude
8) Relevance
9) Follow-ups
10) Media agendas
Harrison (2006) compiles a similar list but adds elements of media or journalistic practice such as the availability of pictures or film, the need for balance and the potential for sensationalism.
Spencer-Thomas (2008)
Spencer-Thomas (2008):
- News Values - criteria that determines the worth of a news story and how much prominence it is given by newspaper and broadcast media.
Brighton and Foy - criticism
They state that news values are ‘unconscious elements’ that are intangible and informal due to the diversity of today’s media (new media, may no longer be relevant to the time, relative culture etc, diversified ownership - obvs evaluations of this is globalisation and conglomerates).
1) Criticise all of the above lists because their compilers assume that there is a consensus or general audience to what is newsworthy
- However, this is unlikely, due to the media industry that features several types of news outlets; putting television together is a lot harder than putting a newspaper together, and audiences are too made up of a very diverse range of people in terms of education, social class, ethnicity and so on, and may be attracted to news outlets that meet their needs
- The news needs of the typical Sun reader may be different to that of someone who regularly watches Channel 4
2) They also point out that cultural expectations about news vary from country to country - Mexican audiences are different to British audiences. They also Galtung and Ruge for only studying Norwegian news and point out broadcast news programmes were in the first ‘flush’ of youth, and newspapers are still publications and the interest did not exist - they have not accommodated new nesw values for trans-national broadcasting, and so the values may no longer be relevant
3) They finally argue that journalism is undergoing change and that traditional news values may no longer be relevant in the age of spin doctors, churnalism and citizen journalists - this makes the concepts outdated
What is circular reporting?
- Circular reporting, or false confirmation, is a situation in source criticism where a piece of information appears to come from multiple independent sources, but in reality comes from only one source. In many cases, the problem happens mistakenly through sloppy reporting or intelligence-gathering.
- This often happens when multiple news websites report the same story
- Examples of misinformation spreading due to circular reporting include the autism and vaccination scandal
Evaluating news selection - Spin Doctors
- Some powerful groups may attempt to circumvent news values altogether and use their influence either to plant or to shape news stories sympathetic to their cause
- For example, since 1884 political reporters (the lobby) based at Parliament have been fed news by government ministers on the understanding that they do not identify the specific source of this information
- The last three governments have also appointed an unprecedented number of press officers, or spin doctors, whose role is to meet journalists in order to manage the news stories so they are favourable to government
- As a result, the existence of both lobby journalism and spin doctors challenge the idea that all news stories are the product of news values
- Some news stories are clearly constructed to favour particular political points of view - for example, partygate news reporting was heavily controlled by parliament in 2021 and 2022 as revealed by the Sue Gray report (BBC News)
As a critic of news values:
- This challenges Galtung and Ruge because it suggests that news is constructed in a way that benefits the ruling class / owners, and that there is no consensus on news values as the news values are actually just producing stories that benefit the elite and that news is manipulated past these values. It is therefore a Marxist critique of news values, as they do not benefit the proletariat but reinforce the FCC as the ruling class manipulates the news for their own protection.
Evaluating news values - Churnalism
- Many viewers and readers rather naively believe that news stories are generated by journalists pounding the streets looking for newsworthy stories - in reality, in order to save costs, news companies have made thousands of journalists redundant and now uncritically source news from cheaper outlets such as the press association (PA) or Reuters, which sell brief reports of world or national news 24 hours a day
- Davies - journalists should be renamed ‘churnalists’ because they are largely engaged in uncritically churning out facts or stories given to them by government spin doctors and particularly public relations companies working for celebrities or corporate interests
He notes that where journalists were once active gatherers of news, they have now become more passive processors of unchecked, second hand material, contrived by PR people to serve a political or commercial interest - Davies suggests that up to 80% of stories in tabloids come from official sources rather than journalists gathering information first hand
- Philips - agrees with Davies, points to widespread practice of reporters being asked to rewrite stories that have appeared in other newspapers or on BBC and Sky and to lift quotes and case histories with no attribution
Messner and DiStaso (2008) - US journalists often quote bloggers who derive their information from uncobborated sources, particularly rumours on social media - The implication of churnalism is that news stories are characterised by uniformity, reducing the choice of news available to the news reader - no chance to see other sides of the story; all the headlines are the same (e.g. all about Zahawi’s sacking’
Churnalism cont.
- Becker also discussed the idea of a hierarchy of credibility, meaning that the media attaches the greatest importance to the views of the powerful and influential individuals and groups such as senior politicians, senior police officers, civil servants or business leaders and bankers rather than ordinary people
- Hall suggests that these people are primary definers who regularly feature in the media as experts and are in a position to set the news agenda and influence what journalists define as the news and how they present it
- The media are for example likely to consult the police and Home Office for comments on crime policy or bankers for economic policy - views of primary definers appear more responsible and reasonable to journalists than less powerful, extremists who present challenges to existing society
- Manning - suggests journalists are under increasing pressure from market competition to use primary definers as a cheap and readily available source of news, as governments and large businesses are forever trying to manipulate the media and amage the news through their press and public relations departments
- Journalists tend to be somewhere in the moderate centre ground of politics and so ignore or treat unfavourably what they regard as extremist or radical views
- The GMG illustrate that journalists tend to be mainly white, male and middle-class and they broadly share the interests and values of the dominant ideology and this influences whose opinions they look for comment, the issues they think are important and how they are presented and explained - they often favour the views of the dominant and powerful
- Journalists like to keep their jobs simple and so they often produce articles base don information from news agencies to reduce costs without fact checking
Critic of news values:
- This challenges Galtung and Ruge because it suggests that the volume of news is more important than the quality of it - journalists no longer critically assess their stories, but instead try to mass produce the most news the fastest, without any regard to continuity or thresholds. This links to the profit driven media proposed by Pluralists and the journalistic reproduction of hegemony spoken about by the GUMG. Also links to postmodernism and the ideas of relative truth.
Evaluation of news values - Citizen journalism
- The development of the internet, digital and satellite technology, smartphones and social networking sites and the 27.8 million blogs that have been set up since 1999 have led leading blogger Matt Drudge to observe a new form of journalism which is an increasingly important source of news
- In the UK, the term refers to anyone who posts even one story or paragraph on a mainstream news site
- For example, BBC viewers are encouraged to text information or send pictures and video clips of news direct to the BBC newsroom via their mobile phones such as during the 2015 Paris riots
Critic:
This challenges Galtung and Ruge because the news owners are no longer the ones controlling the news, and so these citizen journalists may not have the same hegemonic news values and they create a more relative version of the truth. It is a postmodern critique of news values, by explaining the diversity of media ownership in a postmodern and new media society.
