Week Twenty Four - Newsworthiness Flashcards
Billions of simultaneous events in the world …
Billions of simultaneous events in the world – which ones become news?
Choices need to be made about which stories to cover and how
Two main approaches to understanding why media representations come to be as they are (Reiner, 2007)…
Crime news as ‘hegemony in action – a reflection of the dominant social order/ideology – focus on the powerless, sympathetic to the justice system, favouring the status quo
Crime news as cultural conflict
Twelve News Values structure crime news…
Threshold Predictability Simplification Individualism Risk Sex Celebrity or high-status persons Proximity Violence or conflict Visual spectacle or graphic imagery Children Conservative ideology and political diversion
Threshold
Events have to meet a certain level of perceived importance or drama in order to be considered newsworthy.
The threshold of a potential story varies according to whether the news reporters and editors in question work within a local, national or global medium.
In other words, petty crimes such as vandalism and street robberies are likely to feature in the local press (and will probably be front page news in rural or low-crime areas) but it takes offences of a greater magnitude to meet the threshold of national or international media.
In addition, once a story has reached the required threshold to make the news, it may then have to meet further criteria in order to stay on the news agenda, and media frequently keep a crime wave or particular crime story alive by creating new thresholds
Predictability
It goes without saying that an event that is rare, extraordinary or unexpected will be considered newsworthy
Like the thresholds outlined above, unpredictability gives a story novelty value
In particular the media’s ‘discovery’ of ‘new’ crime is often sufficient to give it prominence
But equally, a story that is predictable may be deemed newsworthy because news organisations can plan their coverage in advance and deploy their resources (e.g. reporters and photographers) accordingly
Crime itself is frequently spontaneous and sporadic, but news media know in advance if a government minister is to announce a new initiative to combat crime or the Home Office is due to release its annual crime statistics and will plan their coverage before the event has actually occurred.
This is also true of criminal trials, which can contain an element of predictability. Media organisations can estimate the time that a criminal case will remain in court, and having deployed personnel and equipment, they are likely to retain them there until the end of the trial. Hence a degree of continuity of coverage is also assured.
Another aspect of predictability is that, for the most part, the media agenda is structured in an ordered and predictable fashion. Having set the moral framework of a debate, those who work in the media will rarely do a U-turn and refashion it according to a different set of principles. Put simply, if the media expect something to happen it will happen, and journalists will usually have decided on the angle they are going to report a story from before they even arrive at the scene.
Simplification
Events do not have to be simple in order to make the news (although it helps), but they must be reducible to a minimum number of parts or themes.
This process of simplification has several aspects.
First, news reporting is marked by brevity in order that it should not strain the attention span of the audience.
Second, the range of possible meanings inherent in the story must be restricted. Unlike other textual discourses - novels, poems, films and so on - where the capacity of a story to generate multiple and diverse meanings is celebrated, news discourse is generally not open to interpretation and audiences are invited to come to consensual conclusions about a story (Galtung and Ruge, 1965/1973). Immediate, or sudden events, such as the discovery of a body or an armed robbery, are likely to be reported because their ‘meaning’ can be arrived at very quickly, but crime trends, which are more complex and may take a long tim to unfold, are difficult to report unless they can be marked by means of devices such as the release of a report or official statistics. In other words, a ‘hook’ is required on which to hang such stories in order that they fit with the daily or hourly time-span of most media
Not only does news reporting privilege brevity, clarity and unambiguity in its presentation, but also it encourages the reader, viewer and listener to suspend their skills of critical interpretation and respond in unanimous accord. As far as crime news is concerned, this usually amounts to moral indignation and censure directed at anyone who transgresses the legal or moral codes of society.
Individualism
The news value individualism connects simplification and risk.
Individual definitions of crime, and rationalizations which highlight individual responses to crime, are preferred to more complex cultural and political explanations.
The media engage in a process of personalization in order to simplify stories and give them a ‘human interest’ appeal, which results in events being viewed as the actions and reactions of people
Consequently, social, political and economic issues tend only to be reported as the conflict of interests between individuals (the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, for example), while the complex interrelationship between political ideology and policy may be embodied in a single figure, such as the ‘Drug Tsar’. The effect of this is that ‘the social origins of events are lost, and individual motivation is assumed to be the origin of all action’ (Fiske, 1987: 294)
Both offenders and those who are potentially offended against are constructed within an inidividualist framework. Put simply, the criminal is usually described as being ‘impulsive, a loner, maladjusted, irrational, animal-like, aggressive and violent’ (Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001: 6) - all qualities which allude to the offender’s autonomous status and lack of normative social ties
Risk
Given that the notion of modern life being characterised by risk has become such a widespread and taken-for-granted assumption, it is suprising to find that the media devote little attention to crime avoidance, crime prevention or personal safety.
The exception to this is if a message about prevention can be incorporated into an ongoing narrative about a serious offender ‘at large’, in which the story will be imbued with a sense of urgency and drama (Greer, 2003).
The vast majority of serious offences, including murder, rape and sexual assualt, are committed by people known to the victim.
There are also clearly discernible patterns of victimisation in certain socio-economic groups and geographical locations.
Yet the media persist in presenting a picture of serious crime as random, meaningless, unpredictable and ready to strike anyone at any time.
Such discourse as exists in the media regarding prevention and personal safety invariably relates to offences committed by strangers, thus implicitly promoting stereotypes of dangerous crimes prepared to strike indiscriminately.
In today’s more risk-obsessed and retributive times, crime stories have become increasingly victim centered.
Percieved vulnerability is emphasised over actual victimisation so that fear of crime might be more accurately concieved as a fear for personal safety.
Sometimes, the media exploit public concerns by exaggerating potential risks in order to play into people’s wider fears and anxieties.
Following the September 11th terrorist attacks in America, the British media fuelled a vision of apocalyptic meltdown with a serious of stories ranging from terrorist plots to target the UK, to warnings about falling meteorites heading for earth.
Yet it must be remembered that audiences are not passive or undiscriminating . Many crime scares and moral panics simply never get off the ground, and while it might be argued that the media fail to provide the public with the resources to independently construct alternative frameworks, people’s sense of personal risk will usually correspond to their past personal experiences and a realistic assessment of the likelihood of future victimisation above and beyond anything they see or hear in the media.
Sex
One of the most salient news values - especially in the tabloid press, but also to a significant degree in the broadsheets and other media - is that of sex.
Studies of the press by Ditton and Duffy (1983) in Strathclyde, by Smith (1984) in Birmingham, and by Greer (2003) in Northern Ireland, reveal that newspapers over-report crimes of a sexual nature, thus distorting the overall picture of crime that the public recieves, and instilling exaggerated fears among women regarding their likelihood of being victims of such crimes.
Ditton and Duffy (1983) found that when reporting assaults against women, the press frequently relate sex and violence, so that the two become virtually indsitinguishable.
Furthermore, the over-reporting of such crimes was so significant that in Strathclyde in March 1981, crimes involving sex and violence accounted for only 2.4% of recorded incidents, yet occupied 45.8% of the newspaper coverage
So interlinked are the themes of sex and violence, and so powerfully do they combine to illustrate the value of ‘risk’, that the prime example of newsworthiness is arguably the figure of the compulsive male lone hunter, driven by a sexual desire which finds its outlet in the murder of ‘innocent’ victims
As such, sexually motivated murders by someone unknown to the victim invariably receive substantial, often sensational, attention. On the other hand, sexual crimes against women where violence is not an overriding component of the story (bluntly, sex crimes that are non-fatal) and sexual assaults by someone known or related to the victim are generally regarded as routine and pedestrian routine and ‘pedestrian’ and may contain only limited analysis.
Moreover, the sexually motivated murder of prostitutes - who do not conform to media constructions of ‘innocent’ victims - also invariably receive considerably less coverage than those of other women
Celebrity or high-status persons
The obsession with celebrity is evident everywhere in the media and a story is always more likely to make the news if it has a well-known name attached to it
Put simply, the level of deviance required to attract media attention is significantly lower than for offences committed by ‘ordinary’ citizens because a certain threshold of meaningfulness has already been achieved
As such, a ‘personality’ will frequently be the recepient of media attention even if involved in a fairly mundane or routine crime that would not be deemed newsworthy if it concerned an ‘ordinary’ member of the public
Whether they are victims or perpetrators of crime, celebrities, their lives, and their experiences are deemed intrinsically interesting to the audience
Even otherwise under-represented categories of crime such as libel, perjury and embezzlement are guaranteed widespread media attention if they have a ‘name’ associated with them
However, it is sexual deviance that dominates the news agenda of the tabloids, and a celebrity or high-status person who unexpectedly takes personal and professional risks by engaging in a sexual deviant act is an enduring feature of news in the postmodern mediascape, providing a titillating juxtaposition of high life and low life for an audience who, it is assumed, lead conventional and law-abiding ‘mid lives’
Convicted criminals can also become media ‘celebrities’ by virtue of the notoriety of their crimes. Sometimes criminals are cast as folk devils by the media, and they are deemed newsworthy long after their convictions because the mass media take a moral stance on public distaste and revulsion towards their crimes.
It is not just those who represent showbusiness and notorious crime who are elevated to visibility in the news. High-status individuals in ‘ordinary’ life (businesspeople, politicians, professionals, the clergy and so on) are also deemed newsworthy and are frequently used to give a ‘personal’ angle to stories that otherwise might not make the news.
Proximity
Proximity has both spatial and cultural dynamics. Spatial proximity refers to the geographical ‘nearness’ of an event, while cultural proximity refers to the ‘relevance’ of an event to an audience
These factors often intertwine so that it is those news stories which are perceived to reflect the recipient’s existing framework of values, beliefs and interests and occur within geographical proximity to them that are most likely to be reported.
Proximity obviously varies between local and national values. For example, a relatively ‘ordinary’ crime like mugging or arson may be reported in local media but might not make the national news agenda unless it conforms to other news values, for example, it was especially violent involved in a celebrity.
The converse of this trend is that events that occur in regions which are remote from the centralised bases of news organisations or in countries that are not explicitly linked to the UK or US rarely make national news
Cultural proximity also changes according to the political climate and cultural mood of the times. There was little media coverage of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, but more recently Iraq has rarely been out of the news
Cultural proximity also pertains to the individual actors in any crime story that receives global coverage. When individuals from different nations are involved, any country’s media can appear to ‘take sides’ to a degree that might, at best, be classified as patriotism and, at worst, xenophobia.
Violence or conflict
The news value which is arguably most common to all media is that of ‘violence’ because it fulfils the media’s desire to present dramatic events in the most graphic possible fashion.
Even the most regulated media institutions are constantly pushing back the boundaries of acceptable reportage when it comes to depicting acts of violence because it represents a basic violation of the person and marks the distinction between those who are of society and those who are outside of it
Only the State has the monopoly of legitimate violence, and this ‘violence’ is used to safeguard society against ‘illegitimate’ uses
However, violence has become so ubiquitous that - although still considered newsworthy - it is frequently reported in a routine, manner with little follow-up or analysis. Unless a story involving violence conforms to several other news values or provides a suitable threshold to keep aive an existing set of stories, even the most serious acts of violence may be used as ‘fillers’ and consinged to the inside pages of a news paper.
Yet whether treated sensationally or unsensationally , violence - including violent death - remains a staple of media reporting.
Visual spectacle or graphic imagery
Television news is generally given greater credence by the public that newspapers, partly becuase it is percieved to be less partisan than the press, but also because it offers higher quality images which are frequently held to demonstrate the ‘truth’ of a story or to verify the particlar angle from which the news team has chosen to cover it.
As described above violence is a primary component of news selection. But there are many different types of violence and it tends to be acts of violence that have a strong visual impact and can be graphically presented that are most likely to reciebe extensive media coverage
Children
Any crime can be lifted into news visibility if violence becomes associated with it, but three decades later it might be said that any crime can be lifted into news visibility if children are associated with it
