THE NEWS
Main argument is that news reporting is not impartial. Cohen and Young in the '60's used the phrase 'manufacture of news', meaning choosing the decision of what is newsworthy and how it should be presented.
INTRODUCTION
Hoggart wrote that tv news goes thorugh four filters:
- Time and resources
- Visual value
- News value
- Prevailing culture
The first two are practical or technical, the second two are cultural or ideological.
TECHNICAL INFLUENCES
- Deadlines
- Need sufficient time. Some things planned weeks in advance.
- Space and competing events
- Things have a house style, layout, look, duration, sections etc. and things must fit into it.
- Placing of cameras
- Access to events
- Eg. if need military access, may not get.
- New technologies
- Like camera phones, and general globalisation of news. But people, esp. Americans, still read local papers etc.
CULTURAL INFLUENCES
Different levels
The Prevailing Culture
There may be a consensus of what is important, or it may be manufactured. In Marxism, prevailing culture is called dominant ideology. The mass media themselves, help reinforce the 'consensus'.
The Media Professions
- Tunstall focused on culture of journalists and editors on selecting news, as they often agree and are socialised in the same way. Agenda setting explains the selection of news items. They are gatekeepers who control the information.
- Rock, Cohen and Young all say that familiar stories get recycled, eg. moral panics about drugs.
- News gets personalised according to what celebrities or specific polititions are in to.
EXAMPLES
GUMC saw evidence of bias against trade unions and Greenham common women for being unfeminine.