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)