Sociology of News
Stephen D.
Reese
University
of Texas
Since World War II, the field has
progressed from the simple response that “news is what the ‘newspaperman’ says
it is” to trying to account for a range of explanatory factors. These can be usefully thought of as a
“hierarchy of influences,” (Reese 2001) starting with an individual’s personal
attitudes and biases but adding other, more systemic layers that include professional
routines, organizational structures and other institutional relationships, as
well as the broader social and cultural environment.
This research regarding the
influences on news, although growing,
has attracted some of the attention traditionally paid to the more dominant
questions concerning the influences of
news.
Development of the
Idea
A number of historical factors account for this
imbalance of attention. The
working-class background of most pre-WWII journalists made the newsroom seem
like a less worthy object of serious scholarly attention when compared to other
institutions. The notion that news
simply holds up a mirror to society (now less defensible) also worked to make
the sociology of news seem unnecessary.
Beginning in the 1950s Warren Breed (1955) and David
Manning White (1950) were among
the first scholars to break with the media effects tradition and examine the
influences on news, with their examinations, respectively, of social control in
the newsroom and the story selections based on an editor’s subjectivity,
described as the news “gatekeeper.”
Their careful observations helped move beyond the anecdotal insider
accounts, provided in prominent journalists’ memoirs, to examine patterns of
gatekeeping decisions.
But others did not follow their lead until much later, a
peculiar omission considering the subversive insights that news is, in White’s
terms, “what the gatekeeper says it is” and Breed’s finding that organizational
policy was used to screen out certain happenings from getting into the
newspaper—particularly if they ran afoul of the publisher’s partisan
leanings.
Jane Ballinger and I (Reese and Ballinger 2001) took a closer look at these
forerunner studies to understand why they did not provoke greater attention.
The reason lay in how the findings were interpreted within the field at that
time: The gatekeepers were deemed to be representatives of the larger culture,
and news policies were assumed to help identify as news those events of
interest to the community.
Both views effectively rendered the production and control issues
unthreatening to the public interest and, as a result, less interesting to
researchers.
Eventually, however, these questions returned to the fore, particularly amid
growing public skepticism about the performance of media and awareness of their
corporate and technological constraints.
Ironically, this attention came
from outside the communication field itself. In the 1970s, a cluster of
newsroom studies emerged using the techniques of fieldwork sociology. Based on firsthand observation and
interviews, these ethnographies of local and national media are still the kinds
of studies most identified with the sociology of news (Fishman 1980; Gans 1979; Gitlin
1980; Tuchman 1978). The
close-hand observation of newswork helped determine what actually happens in the
process of doing journalism, compared to what professionals say happens or what can be inferred
simply from examining the final product.
Professional Practice
and Identity
The focus on production not only
opened up a location for research but also brought a way of thinking about the
process that yields interesting questions.
One of the often-cited early studies of television news by Bantz and his
colleagues (Bantz, McCorkle and Baade 1981) likened the newsroom to a factory,
a label unlikely to yield a positive professional self-image. The comparison is apt, however, to the extent
that the work flow in traditional newsrooms is set up in assembly-line fashion,
with each worker having limited control over the final product (and being
easily replaced from a national talent pool).
Indeed, the notion of professional
identity has been a recurring theme, with surveys of journalists providing
important clues to changes over time. Weaver and his colleagues (Weaver et al. 2007) have described this national group
of 120,000 professionals with significant “editorial responsibility” over news,
with repeated surveys asking how strongly they identify with the roles of
“disseminator,” “adversary” and “interpreter” (and more recently “populist
mobilizer”). The interpretive role is on the rise since 1982, particularly
among online journalists.
Of course, the characteristics of
these professionals matter in explaining the work they produce, but the
sociology of newswork reminds us not to overestimate it.
As a conceptual tool, the hierarchy
of influences helps sort out criticisms of news from citizens and their
associated media watchdog groups.
Liberal critics find fault at the level of ownership, citing the cozy
relationships they perceive journalists to have with powerful elites. Critics on the right are more likely to blame
individual journalists for being too liberal and out of touch with the American
public. Ironically, journalists
themselves give this latter critique a significant amount of attention and
respect, given that it grants them at least their professional autonomy.
In the public arena, where the
journalistic process is skewered by both serious and comic analysts (for
instance, on The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart) and where ideology often dictates one’s critique of news media
performance, academic research in the sociology of news helps show how these
levels play off against each other. Under
which conditions are certain factors most influential? Which of these factors are
gaining over time as the news media environment changes?
Insights
Unlike subfields such as media
economics, with direct practical implications for news operations and products,
the sociology of news offers more general insights for the professional and
more possibilities for reform. A sociological approach reminds us how important
routines are in structuring news, how rooted in local communities they are, and
how invisible those routines often seem to news decision-makers.
For example, news relies on
official voices, with public voices becoming visible mainly through deviant acts
of protest and criminality. But connecting patterns of racial coverage to news
routines shows evidence of “modern racism”: Research indicates that when
compared to similar white criminal defendants, blacks are more likely to be
shown in the grasp of police, unidentified, not moving, and in prison garb—in
short, dehumanized (Entman 1990).
Thinking about news as a product
like any other brings important insights as well. Our cultural and professional ideas of news
make many people resistant to regarding it as a predictable commodity. News, after all, is often unexpected, so how
can it be routinized? The sociology of
news assumes that it must, of course, if the organization is to function.
The news “net” and rhythms of daily
journalism as it engages with other bureaucracies make for a certain
predictability and, less positively, renders some events and voices largely
invisible. Not surprisingly, journalists
develop shortcuts, judgments and assumptions as they apply news values.
Studies in this area, however, help
us understand when those assumptions are legitimately helpful in carrying out a
complex task and when they simply serve as rationalizations for some other
motivation. Tuchman (1972), for example, considers how
newswriters include balancing sources and quotations as a “strategic ritual” to
ward off criticism, rather than as a technique for revealing the truth.
Changes
The objects of study in this area
have undergone profound changes in recent years, particularly as communication
technology has made it harder to identify “the media,” “the profession” and the
site of “production.” The media are
converging, boundaries between professionals and citizen journalists are fading,
and newsroom decisions are often made at a distance.
The sociology of news must now take
into account more informal and ad hoc
organizational news assemblages, such as those by independent citizen groups. And it must track the interrelationships of
the “professional” media with the blogosphere, showing they stand in a
complementary, interlocking—and not competitive—relationship (Reese et al. 2007).
Economic boundaries also have changed. One of Gans’ (1979) early insights was that
economic considerations did not determine the news but set general constraints
within which news managers had to operate, giving little thought to how
profitable a particular story would be.
Now, of course, economic considerations are built into these
decisions. Similarly, he found that
journalists typically wrote not with an audience in mind but for their sources
and other journalists. With
sophisticated metrics of audience traffic, the news user is now never far from
the editor’s mind.
The academic study of news
“production” faces a number of obstacles. There is the difficulty of fieldwork
itself, which requires significant investment of time and energy. Researchers find it difficult to get access to
media companies, which are increasingly sensitive to scrutiny and public
criticism in general. That trend has
been made worse by corporatization and consolidation of ownership, which leads
to greater image discipline.
In the last several years, however,
news professionals and university researchers have been able to approach each
other in a greater spirit of collaborative discovery.
With the collapse of the newspaper
industry, converging of online journalism, and resulting professional anxieties,
a new wave of ethnographic research has come on the scene (Paterson and Domingo 2008). These organizations look quite
different from the ones studied in the 1970s, but research shows they have not
necessarily become more active in journalistic investigation or in taking
advantage of the interactivity available online.
The outcomes of news convergence
are not always easily predicted (Singer 2008).
Online journalists are often regarded as counter-cultural or even
second-class citizens within news companies, although no doubt this will change
as the Internet becomes a dominant form of delivery. The sociology of online
news production shows how the tension between the professional logic of control
and the participatory logic of the new interactive media are being negotiated.
These projects on such vital
questions, often conducted by former journalists, share close-up narratives and
interviews from the frontlines of newsroom changes, making them useful and
accessible to members of the public and the profession.
References
Bantz, C., S. McCorkle, and R. Baade. 1981.
"The news factory." in Mass
communication review yearbook 2, edited by C. Wilhoit and H. DeBock.
Beverly Hills: Sage.
Breed,
Warren. 1955. "Social control in the newsroom: A functional analysis." Social forces 33:326-335.
Entman, Robert.
1990. "Modern racism and the images of blacks in local television
news." Critical studies in mass
communication 7:332-345.
Fishman,
Mark. 1980. Manufacturing the news.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gans,
Herbert. 1979. Deciding what's news: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly
News, Newsweek and Time New York: Vintage.
Gitlin, Todd.
1980. The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making and unmaking of the
new left. Berkeley: University of California.
Paterson,
Chris, and David Domingo. 2008. Making
online news: The ethnography of new
media production. New York: Peter Lang.
Reese,
Stephen D. 2001. "Understanding the Global Journalist: a
hierarchy-of-influences approach." Journalism
Studies 2:173-187.
Reese,
Stephen D., and Jane Ballinger. 2001. "The roots of a sociology of news:
Remembering Mr. Gates and social control in the newsroom." Journalism & Mass Communication
Quarterly 78:641-658.
Reese,
Stephen D., Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyun, and Jaekwan Jeong. 2007. "Mapping
the blogosphere: Citizen-based media in
the global news arena." Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 8:235-262.
Singer, Jane.
2008. "Ethnography of newsroom convergence." Pp. 157-170 in Making online news: The ethnography of new media production,
edited by Chris Paterson and David Domingo. New York: Peter Lang.
Tuchman,
Gaye. 1972. "Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen's notions of
objectivity." American journal of
sociology 77:660-679.
Weaver,
David, Randal Beam, Bonnie Brownlee, Paul Voakes, and C. Wilhoit. 2007. The American journalist in the 21st
Century: U.S. news people at the dawn of
a new millennium. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.
White, David
Manning. 1950. "The gatekeeper: A
case study in the selection of news." Journalism
Quarterly 27:383-390.
Courtesy: Stephen D. Reese
#sociologyofnews #journalism
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