Lecture 2 - Dr Nathan Farrell PDF

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Dr Nathan Farrell...

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Aims: o o o o

News values Gate-keeping Agenda-setting Framing

How news is constructed What is the news? “It is impossible to represent on our television screens the sheer multiplicity of events that occur every day” “News programmes have… “This sense-making activity is a construction, it involves, for example… deciding what is news and what is not… or how to present a news item so that it can be understood by a large amount of people, or to keep it relevant” The media mediates, which means: o They select and edit o Dramatize o Stand between the public, on o The one side, and, on the other, the official managers, institutions, organisations, movements or the societies hegemonic elites o “Media develop their own machinery and rules for generating convincing accounts of social reality” News Values o In 1965, media researchers Galtung & Ruge analysed international news stories to find out what factors they had in common, and what factors placed them at the top of the news agenda worldwide. o “News values are general guidelines or criteria used by media outlets, such as newspapers or broadcast media, to determine how much prominence to give a story. They are fundamental to understanding news production and the choices that editors and other journalists face when deciding that one piece of information is news whilst another is not.” o They came up with the following list of news values (like a scoring system): o Impact o Threshold (a tipping point – eg. Recession) o Frequency (how often it happens) o Negativity o Unexpectedness o Unambiguity (presenting the news as clear as possible) o Audience identification o Personalisation: they like things to be about them, speaking to them individually, targeting them and their values which the audience can agree (eg. Gossip magazines) o Meaningfulness o Reference to elite nations

o Reference to elite persons (celebrities etc) o Pragmatics of media coverage o Consonance: doesn’t fit with what we generally talk about eg. Teen Vogue discussing political issues. Staying in your zone. o Continuity: if you’re already following a story then you will generally continue o Composition Gate-keeping: who decides what gets to become news? A gate keeper decides which commodity (material, goods or information) goes forward and which does not The public receives a lot of their information from the mass media so gatekeepers can control the publics awareness of some stories...