5 The News:

Gates, Agendas
and Values

AIMS

■ To present the case that by its nature and practice the news is the product
of the cultural contexts in which it operates: and rather than mirroring
reality, constructs ritual formulations of it.
■ To explain with reference to landmark theories three core features of news
production – gatekeeping, agenda setting and news values and to examine
their interactivity.
■ To reflect on the role of ideology in the process of news production.

Sooner or later in every study of media communication we must descend from the
high ground which of fers us an over view of the terrain to examine texts and
practices – the specifics which provide evidence to substantiate theories. So far
attention has been trained on generalities such as the nature of audience and
audience response and the purpose, within context, of mass communication. More
than any other message form, the news provides us with documentation that
illustrates and illuminates key connections – between public communication and the
exercise of power, between freedom and control, between reality and representation.
It is, by its content and its shaping, a discourse which purports both to present
reality and to explain it.
This chapter puts the case that the news is inevitably slanted because a culture’s
views of the world at large are coloured by a primary interest in ‘its own kind’. This we
call ethnocentrism, manifesting itself substantially, though not entirely, in nearness,
or proximity. We note also that ‘slant’ is demonstrated by a preference for featuring
Knowns as against Unknowns: the elite are visualised as not only being in the news
but making it.
Strategies of news construction – gatekeeping and agenda setting – are examined
in relation to the underpinning criteria of news selection, which we call news values or

105
106 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

newsworthiness. Acknowledgement is made of the powerfully competing agendas in

contemporary society which strive to attract and manipulate public attention and in
doing so affect the nature of news production.

The cultural orientation of news

An old adage has often been cited as a definer of what makes news. It asserts that
a fly in the eye is worse than an earthquake in China. Though ethically indefen-
sible, the adage nevertheless pinpoints two crucial factors in the selection of events
to be reported – the ethnocentric nature of news coverage (its culture-centredness);
and the significance of proximity, or nearness.
What happens to ‘us’ is considered the prime principle of newsworthiness; and
if a number of us are killed in that earthquake in faraway China reports of it will
guarantee that the tragedy will be more fully reported.
Geographical proximity does not automatically qualify as a value demanding
news attention. Events in the United States are more readily and substantially
reported in Britain than events in Europe, despite the ties that bind the British to
Europe; and the difference is more than one of language. Australia and India share
with the British and Americans the English language but command far less media
attention in Britain. The difference is one of power-value arising from key
economic, political and cultural interactions, in which America has been the
dominant partner. The high profile granted to the USA in the British media is at
best only modestly reciprocated in American media.
The news is as much about the perceived importance of self and other as it is
about ‘reality’. As perceptions of importance – significant events, occasions,
developments – change, so does reality definition. At a primitive level we might
envisage news as the view a sentry has at the mouth of our communal cave: who
or what out there is for us or against us, and what threat might they pose? The
purpose here is one of surveillance.
From the beginning, then, news as a version of reality is skewed by a cultural
bias and conditioned by the specifics of situation: the guard dog barks, the sentinel
geese cackle and we take action to protect ourselves, whether the ‘invader’ is a foe
from across the water or a scare about salmonella in pre-cooked meals.

Cultural ritual
The surveillance function affirms the tribal nature of news; that it is part of the
rituals which dominate our lives. As our ancestors took guard when dusk fell and
watched the night hours for signs of danger, so the Eye of News reports to us daily
in the papers, on the hour on radio and several times daily on TV. It is as ritualistic
as changing the guard; and in the nature and ordering of its content the news
resembles a ceremony. Indeed, we are so familiar with content and style that it
might be said that the news is actually olds: what has by precedent been counted as
news continues to be classified and used as news.
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 107

The conventions of news production are often so formulaic that they hint at a
rightness born of hallowed tradition which in turn, when queried, is righteously
defended. In this sense, the news is not in the business of telling us about reality;
rather it is privileged to inform us about what is important or salient about reality.
And importance is key: people or institutions featuring regularly in the news do so
because they are important to society. They are primary actors in the ritual of cultural
reinforcement and renewal, lords and ladies of the dance. Thus a media bias towards
reporting their doings and sayings is, convention decrees, only natural and proper.
Herbert Gans in Deciding What’s News,1 says that ‘knowns’ are four times more
likely to be in the news than ‘unknowns’. He gauged that fewer than 50 individ-
uals, mostly high-placed federal officials, regularly appear on American TV news.
The ritual of news is characterised both by its ethnocentric nature (its ‘us-
centredness’) and what might be called its ‘power-centredness’. Both aspects of the
ritual demand a considerable degree of selection, of inclusion and exclusion. The
same criteria for selection seem to apply to news sources. According to Allan Bell in
The Language of News Media,2 ‘News is what an authoritative source tells a
journalist… . The more elite the source, the more newsworthy the story’.
In contrast, says Bell, ‘alternative sources tend to be ignored: individuals,
opposition parties, unions, minorities, fringe groups, the disadvantaged’. As far as
our opening adage is concerned – about the fly in the eye – selection depends on
which fly and in which eye.

News as construct
We are seeing, then, that the news is culturally positioned, and we view reality
through a cultural prism. That the rendition of reality is so convincing is explained
partly because the news, framed for us by the media, is usually all that we have to
go on as a portrait of realities beyond our known environment; and partly because
the news is constructed with such professional skill.
Television news suggests that what we see is what there is, that we are being
presented with mirror images of reality. One of the best books on ‘life seen
through a media prism’ is edited by Stanley Cohen and Jock Young. It captures
the point being made here in its title: The Manufacture of News.3 Contributors to
this volume examine the reporting of events and issues in terms of a process of
assembly, of construction according to dominant cultural-political criteria. Among
subscribers to The Manufacture of News are Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge, and
Professor Stuart Hall whose work is referred to later in this chapter.
As audience our attention is not, however, drawn to the ‘constructed’ nature of
news. Rather we have grown so accustomed to the modes of news presentation
that we are, unless especially cautioned, likely to judge that it is at least a close
encounter with reality. Yet journalists provide us with a clue to their trade as
‘assembly-workers’ when they refer to news reports as ‘stories’, thus implying a
process of invention. As Allan Bell puts it, ‘Journalists do not write articles. They
write stories’ (a theme taken up in the next chapter).
We begin to recognise the artifice of news only when we come face to face with
108 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

the real thing through lived experience: disasters, riots, protest marches, strikes,
demonstrations – news media have filled our heads with visions of how these
things ‘look’. Just occasionally we encounter such events personally and the shock
of the real to our mediated experience can be devastating.

Selecting the news: gatekeeping

In studying the news we need to explore three linked features of production –
gatekeeping, agenda setting and news values. The operation of the first two
depends upon the demands of the third, which in turn regulates the conventions
of news presentation. Gatekeeping is about opening or closing the channels of
communication. It is about accessing or refusing access. In an article ‘The
“Gatekeepers”: a case study in the selection of news’, published in Journalism
Quarterly, 27, 1950, David M. White presents a simple model of the gatekeeping
process (Figure 5.1).
White had spent a period of research observing the activities of a ‘Mr. Gate’, a
telegraph wire editor on an American non-metropolitan newspaper. The notion of
‘gate areas’ had been posed three years earlier by Kurt Lewin in ‘Channels of group
life’ in Human Relations 1, 1947. Lewin’s particular attention was focused upon
decisions about household food purchases but he drew a comparison with the
flow of mass media news.
While the term gatekeeping originates at this time, the practice of it is as old as
history and it is an identifiable practice in many areas of communication. Students
who have done any research will have already experienced gatekeeping: you want
some information or you would like to talk to someone, perhaps to interview
them for a project you are preparing. Some gates open, some are ajar and need
pushing and some are firmly closed against you: why?

Gates
N1
N2 N2 1
N N3 M
N3 1
N4
N1 N4

N = Source of news item

N 1,2,3,4 = News items
N2 1,3 1 = Selected items
M = Audience
N 1, N 4 = Discarded items

Figure 5.1 White’s simple gatekeeping model (1950). From D.M. White, ‘The
“Gatekeepers”: a case study in the selection of news’ published in Journalism
Quarterly, 27 (1950) and latterly reproduced in Communication Models for the Study
of Mass Communications (UK: Longman, 2nd edn, 1993) by Denis McQuail and
Sven Windahl.
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 109

Students doing projects or dissertations know why. Those whose say-so rules
the opening and closing of gates may be too busy. They are more likely to open the
gate – like the news – to Knowns rather than Unknowns. As one of my own
students put it in a project log, ‘The people I wanted information from didn’t
think I was important enough to bother with, being a mere student. And I had
nothing to exchange with them for their advice and their time’.
At a personal level, gates can sometimes be prised open through sheer determi-
nation and persistence, but ultimately the gate swings on hinges of reward; of
purpose – of worthwhileness. White’s model features a number of competing
news items (N). At the gate, the sub-editor – ‘Mr. Gate’ – selects those items
considered of sufficient interest and importance to be passed through to the next
stage of news production. Thus N2 and N3 have been selected and have undergone
the first stage of transformation, hence White’s use of the ‘to-the-power 1’ at this
point (indicating that the ‘assembly’ process – of shaping and selection – has
already begun).
N21 and N31 are no longer raw information: they are mediated information.
White’s model does not give the criteria for selection and rejection of news items,
nor does it acknowledge the fact that in the general process of mediation there are
many gates and that gatekeeping in one form or another is taking place at all levels
and at each stage of the news manufacturing process.
In 1959 J.T. McNelly produced a model of news flow which reflects the many-
gated reality of news processing. It also indicates that modifications take place to
the story as it passes through each gate (Figure 5.2). At every stage in the mediation
process, decisions are taken, not only about what events to cover, but how these
might be covered and by whom; and gatekeeping is far from being the monopoly
of media operators: audience too exercises the powers of selecting and rejecting.
We are all gatekeepers: we self-censor. We decide to say something to another
person – the comment passes through the gate. But we may decide not to say
anything; or we might need to summarise, modify, spruce up, distort that which
passes through our communicative gate. Yet again, we see the importance in the
process of communication of intent.
Reporters with leftish political leanings, working on a rightish newspaper will,
if they wish to stay on the payroll, gatekeep pre-emptively; that is, they will be
selective about the stories they submit for publication, knowing that certain
stories (sympathetic to the left, for example) would simply not be published – so
why waste time and effort in submitting them?
Self-regulation of this kind is essential if the gates of access to sources of
information are to be kept open. In most countries the chief supplier of informa-
tion is government, and most governments regularise (even ritualise) the
provision of information to the media, in particular to what are termed ‘lobby
correspondents’. Here, a degree of reciprocal gatekeeping is often a condition of
access. Government will provide a certain amount of information in return for the
journalist using that information ‘properly’. ‘Improper’ use of that information
may lead to the exclusion of a newspaper’s lobby correspondent from the
privileges of daily access to government news sources.
110 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

1 C3 S2
S
C2 C4

S
3
C1 C5

S
4
E R
SR

SR
E R1 R3
E SR
E R2

McNelly’s model of intermediary communicators in news flow, showing news passing

different ‘gatekeepers’ (after McNelly 1959)
Key to symbols in diagram:
E = Newsworthy event
C1 = Foreign agency correspondent
C2 = Regional bureau editor
C3 = Agency central bureau or deskman
C4 = National or regional home bureau editor
C 5 = Telegraph editor or radio or TV news editor
S, S1, S2, etc = The report in a succession of altered (shortened) forms
R = Receiver
R1, R2, etc. = Family members, friends, associates, etc.
SR = Story as modified by word of mouth transmission
Dotted line = feedback

Figure 5.2 McNelly’s model of news flow (1959). Taken from McQuail and
Windahl (see Figure 5.1). An important feature of the McNelly model is the SR
feature which recognises the part audience itself plays in the mediation of news.
The model originates in J.T. McNelly’s article, ‘Intermediary communicators in the
international news’, published in Journalism Quarterly, 36 (1959).

News gathering, news editing

As we have seen, selection operates at every stage of the news production process.
It varies, however, in its nature and concentration. A.Z. Bass, writing in
Journalism Quarterly, 46 (1969) poses a ‘double action’ model of internal news
flow (Figure 5.3). This identifies two stages of production: Stage 1, news
gathering and Stage 2, news processing. In Stage 1, reporters and photographers
encounter raw news directly, or at least more directly than editors and sub-editors
back at the newspaper, radio station or TV company. They are usually employed
on one news story at a time. By the very fact that they are ‘at the scene’, they have
a degree of choice on what features of an event they will select, and how they will
report on them.
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 111

Stage 1 Stage 2

News News Completed

Raw news News copy
gatherers processors product
e.g.: Writers e.g.: Editors
Reporters Copyreaders
Local editors Translators

Figure 5.3 Bass’s ‘double action’ model of internal news flow (1969). The
model appears in ‘Refining the gatekeeper concept’ published in Journalism
Quarterly, 46 (1969).

Once their report reaches the news organisation pressures of selection mount.
The editorial team has many stories to deal with. They have to balance the
demands of one story against another and, as Bass points out, they have to work
in accordance with the organisation’s norms and values. Far more than are
reporters in the field, the editorial team is influenced in its decision-making by the
cultural climate of the institution which in turn operates more centrally in the eye
of government and the public.

Gates in times of crisis

The sound of gates slamming to, in times of crisis such as war, can be as loud as
the enemy’s artillery. During the Falklands War of 1982, between Britain and
Argentina, it became difficult if not impossible to breach the walls of Fortress
Information. Press and television were obliged to queue up at a drawbridge
manned by the Ministry of Defence. During the Gulf War of 1991 the situation
was different, though arguably no better for the free flow of news. The Allied
forces kept the gates of information wide open, but they controlled the nature of
that information, permitting the positive, closing off the negative. In War and the
Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War,4 Philip M. Taylor writes:
Television is often regarded as a window on the world and in some respects it is.
But in wartime, its potential to become a window onto the actual battle front is
limited, not just by the nature of the medium itself but also by the curtain of
darkness which military censorship attempts to draw over it.

Many commentators have pinpointed the inadequacies of Gulf War coverage as

a result of its being gatekept by the military authorities. What TV could show of
the war was what the military authorities granted them to show. For example,
library footage (provided by the military) appeared to demonstrate the ‘cleanness’
of the war rendered possible by the technological wizardry of modern armaments.
The resultant ‘reality’ had more in common with a video wargame than any
resemblance to what was actually happening in Iraq as Operation Desert Storm
settled the ‘mother of all battles’.
112 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

Gates operate for and against media personnel. It is significant that Don
McCullin, one of the world’s best photographers of war, was gatekept throughout
the Falklands War. While other reporters and photographers were permitted at
least into the outer courtyard of Fortress Information, McCullin was not even
allowed to cross the moat.
The Ministry of Defence was, according to its own lights, making the correct
decision: McCullin’s pictures would not have differentiated between Britons and
Argentinians in portraying them as victims of war. His imaging of war as hell would
not have sustained the war effort, nurtured consensus about its necessity; rather his
pictures might have been instrumental in turning the public against the war.

Setting the agendas of news

An agenda is a list of items, usually in descending order of importance. Meetings
have agendas which have to be worked to. If an item is not on the agenda prior to
the meeting there is only one place that it can be raised during the meeting –
under Any Other Business. The agenda for a meeting is normally drawn up by the
secretary to the meeting in consultation with the meeting’s chairperson. This gives
them some power – to decide what will or will not be discussed at the meeting.
At the meeting itself, the chairperson has certain powers over the agenda. He
or she may extend or curtail discussion on topics. The skilful chairperson will
usually rule by consent, without the need to resort to voting. In Japan it is a
tradition that decisions must already have been tacitly settled prior to the meeting.
This is to avoid loss of face resulting from disagreement in public. Meetings
conducted in Western countries may seem to be different, open rather than closed
texts, as it were. Yet appearances can beguile. For every overt or public agenda
there is a covert or hidden one.
As far as the media are concerned one might say that the overt agenda is synony-
mous with the public agenda; that is, what is of most importance to the public
appears top of the media agenda. Yet it has to be acknowledged that wherever there
are competing interests, rival ideologies or conflicting priorities, agendas are arenas
of struggle. Those whose discourse dominates also choose the agenda and order its
items. In the media industry reporters may wish to pursue certain agendas, but
their activity will be reined in by agendas of ownership and control.
The link between media agendas and public perception of what constitutes
news is a vital one to explore. If the public look to the media for news, what the
media decides is news is what the public recognise as news. What is emphasised by
the media is given emphasis in public perception; what is amplified by media is
enlarged in public perception.
This is illustrated by Donald McCombs and Malcolm Shaw’s agenda-setting
model of media effects (Figure 5.4). The authors of the model state in ‘Structuring
the “unseen environment” ’ in the Journal of Communication, Spring 1976:
Audiences not only learn about public issues and other matters through the media,
they also learn how much importance to attach to an issue or topic from the
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 113

emphasis the mass media place upon it. For example, in reflecting what people say
during a campaign, the mass media apparently determine the important issues. In
other words, the mass media set the ‘agenda’ of the campaign.

Amplification of issues
McCombs and Shaw argue that the agenda-setting capacity of the media makes
them highly influential in shaping public perceptions of the world: ‘This ability to
affect cognitive change among individuals is one of the most important aspects of
the power of mass communication’. The model is an oversimplification, of course.
It assumes one agenda – that purveyed by the media – which then becomes the
agenda of the public. It can be argued that members of the public have their own
agendas, shaped by their own personal circumstances.
There are plenty of intervening variables which influence our perceptions and
our judgments other than media coverage, though it has to be said that none may
be quite as powerful as the full force of media definitions – especially if the media
are promoting the same definitions in similar ways. A single newspaper claiming
that Party Z at an election will put up taxes may not sway public opinion, but ten
newspapers saying the same thing, and TV channels reporting what ten newspa-
pers are claiming, may well – through a process of amplification and reinforce-
ment – drive the tax issue to the top of the public agenda.

Issues Differential media Consequent public

attention perception of issues

X1
X 1

X2
X 2

X3 X3
X4
X 4

X5 X5

X6 X 6

Figure 5.4 McCombs and Shaw’s agenda-setting model of media effects

(1976). From McQuail and Windahl (see Figure 5.1). Once again X represents an
issue whose impor tance is amplified by coverage in the media. Even issues of
considerable impor tance may remain of modest or negligible impor tance in public
perception if they suffer media neglect.
114 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

The McCombs and Shaw model does not tell us whether effects are direct, or,
from the point of view of media, intentional. Also, as Denis McQuail and Sven
Windahl point out in Communication Models for the Study of Mass Communication,5
the model leaves us uncertain ‘whether agenda setting is initiated by the media or
by members of the public and their needs, or, we might add, by institutional elites
who act as sources for the media’.
A later model of agenda setting is posed by E.M. Rogers and J.W. Dearing
(Figure 5.5). This identifies three interactive agendas. The policy agenda is that
propagated by government and politicians. It is one often riven by counter-
agendas – the right of the party, the left of the party. Appropriate emphasis is
placed in this model on contextual factors: influences pressing in from national
and world events.
The Rogers and Dearing model is a useful update of McCombs and Shaw, but
one might ask why the three agendas are presented as being of equal size and
presumably equal power. Because the model is still a linear one, it does not
sufficiently indicate the dynamic relationship between the agendas or the potential
for conflict. The policy and media agendas seem to be operating as balancers with
the public agenda as being central (which of course is what it should be but rarely
is). The model conveys balance, thus it is normative.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND INTERPERSONAL

COMMUNICATION AMONG ELITES AND OTHER INDIVIDUALS
GATEKEEPERS, INFLUENTIAL MEDIA,
AND SPECTACULAR NEWS STORIES

MEDIA PUBLIC POLICY

AGENDA AGENDA AGENDA

REAL-WORLD INDICATORS OF THE

IMPORTANCE OF AN AGENDA ISSUE OR EVENT

Figure 5.5 Rogers and Dearing’s model of the agenda-setting process (1988).
From McQuail and Windahl (see Figure 5.1). This model, first published in an article
‘Agenda-setting: where it has been, where is it going?’ in Communication Yearbook
11 (US: Sage, 1987) serves very usefully as a basis for examining the whole
contextual scene of news making.
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 115

POLICY MEDIA
Agenda Agenda

PUBLIC
Agenda

CORPORATE
Agenda

Figure 5.6 Tripolar model of agendas: policy, corporate and media. The public
agenda is the only one which does not arise from consciously formed and
articulated aims and objectives. Government, corporations and media largely know
what they want from the public and how to go about getting it. The first two are also
aware that in order to create and influence public opinion they have to do it through
cultural apparatuses of which the media is arguably the most important. On the
other hand, pressure groups in society are instrumental in influencing public opinion
with a view to using the force of that opinion to influence government or the
corporations.

To focus on the actual distribution of influence one would have to add an extra
agenda – that of the corporations which dominate contemporary life (Figure 5.6).
Corporate agendas often work in alliance with, and occasionally in competition
with, the policy agendas of government, aiming to influence if not order public
agendas. The reader may be justifiably tempted to add further arrows to this
model to emphasise the interactive nature of the agendas.

Agenda, discourse and climate of opinion

We have seen that just as there are many gates there are several agendas; so any
analysis of agenda setting must start with the question – Whose agenda, and
articulated through which discourse? What is obvious is that there is much more
to the agenda-setting process than merely listing what is important and what is
less important.
Having been placed in a hierarchy of importance, stories are shaped into a
discourse – a way of defining and presenting information and ideas; of creating
preferred meanings out of which will hopefully arise preferred readings. Let us
116 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

remind ourselves of the nature and importance of discourse by recalling a defini-

tion offered by Gunther Kress in Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice:6
Discourses are systematically-organised sets of statements which give expression
to the meanings and values of an institution. Beyond that they define, describe
and delimit what is possible to say (and by extension – what is possible to do or
not to do) with respect to the area of concern of that institution, whether margin-
ally or centrally.

Kress continues:
A discourse provides a set of possible statements about a given area, and organises
and gives structure to the manner in which a particular topic, object, process is to
be talked about. In that it provides descriptions, rules, permissions and prohibi-
tions of social and individual action.

News is a discourse, and news production is a discourse anchored by the

ideology of the news producers or those who employ them, particularly if we are
talking about the press. No news production, however, is independent of the
values which shape and drive the players at all levels. The degree to which the
media agenda is also that of the public, its discourse an influential part of public
discourse, depends in large part upon the standing of the media in public percep-
tion – its credibility as a source of information.
In an article ‘The future of political communication research: a Japanese
perspective’ in the Journal of Communication,7 Ito Youichi discusses the relation-
ship between media, government and public in Japan. He speaks of extracted
information – that which the public draws from sources other than the mass
media, from personal experience and observation, for example, and talking to
others. Youichi introduces the Western reader to a concept shared by the Chinese
and Koreans as well as the Japanese – kuuki. This can be translated as a climate of
opinion requiring compliance. It may be nurtured by the media or by those in
government or be the product of extracted information on the part of the public.
In other words, it becomes the force of public opinion.
The tripolar model of agendas illustrated in Figure 5.6 helps us keep in mind
the potential for alliances of influence in the public arena. Media revelations about
government corruption, for example, might create an alliance between media and
public. Government, now the odd one out in the threesome, will have to move
into line – respond to the climate of opinion requiring compliance – by taking
action over that corruption. Similarly, gross intrusions into privacy on the part of
the media might lead to an alliance between government and public and pressure
upon media to put its house in order. Youichi writes:
Mass media have effects only when they stand on the majority side or the
mainstream in a triadic relationship that creates and supports the kuuki that
functions as a social pressure on the minority side.

He is of the opinion that ‘Scholars should pay more attention to the conditions
under which mass media credibility is or is not maintained’.
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 117

News values
The complexities of gatekeeping and agenda setting may at this point seem to be
sending us every which way. We sense, however, that somewhere in the
scrummage there is at least a vague set of rules of combat as far as media perfor-
mance is concerned. Such rules we refer to as news values.
The names of two Norwegian scholars, Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge, have
become as associated with news value analysis as Hoover with the vacuum cleaner.
Their model of selective gatekeeping of 1965, while not carrying quite the
romance of the apple that fell on Newton’s head, is nevertheless a landmark in the
scholarship of media (Figure 5.7).
They were not the first to assemble a list of criteria for news selection. As early as
1695 a German writer, Kaspar Steiler, wrote about news values in his book Zeitungs
Lust und Nutz, roughly translatable as Uses and Gratifications of Newspapers. Steiler
discusses importance as a news value and the proximity – nearness to home – of
events. Also, he identifies events which are dramatic and negative. The American
Walter Lippman produced his own analysis of news values in 1922, in Public
Opinion.8
Galtung and Ruge first proposed their now-famous taxonomy or classification
of news values or factors in an article in the Journal of International Peace Research.9
This was reprinted in The Manufacture of News3 and elsewhere. Of equal note
when news values are being discussed is another contribution printed in The
Manufacture of News – Stuart Hall’s seminal article, ‘The determinations of news
photographs’, a must-read for any student of media.
In the Galtung and Ruge model potential items of news resemble guests arriving
at a hotel. Standing sentinel is the doorman, Media Perception, who lets some
visitors pass through the revolving door of news values while others end up back

News factors
determine
selection

IX I
VIII II
World events Media Media
Perception VII III Image

VI IV
V

Figure 5.7 Galtung and Ruge’s model of selective gatekeeping (1965). From
McQuail and Windahl (see Figure 5.1). The model suggests that until a world event
is perceived as being newsworthy by the media, it will not qualify for consideration
for transformation into a media image of that event.
118 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

in the street. As the privileged guests emerge from the revolving doors they do
so with the shape and gloss of media images. They have been processed as well
as selected.
A number of values the authors define as being culture-free, others culture-
linked, though it has to be said that attempting to describe any activity as being
unaffected by the culture that surrounds it is a knotty problem and one which may
not really warrant the effort. Indeed, the authors acknowledge that ‘what we
choose to consider an “event” is culturally determined’.
Events, argue Galtung and Ruge, will be more likely to be reported if they fulfil
any one or more of a number of conditions, particularly if they fulfil these
conditions in combination. Below, I have listed and enlarged upon the 12 news
factors which Galtung and Ruge identify.

■ Frequency
■ Amplitude
■ Unambiguity
■ Familiarity
■ Predictability
■ Surprise
■ Correspondence
■ Composition
■ Eliteness – of people
■ Eliteness – of nations
■ Personification
■ Negativity

■ Frequency
If the event takes a time to occur approximate to the frequency of the medium’s
output of news – hourly, four times daily, daily or weekly – it at least initially
qualifies for inclusion in news rather than if it has an ‘awkward’ timescale (usually,
long). A murder, for example, is more newsworthy than the slow progress to
prosperity of a Third World country. The completion over months or years of a
dam that will aid irrigation and thus improve crops is less likely to be reported
than if the same dam is blown up by terrorists.

■ Amplitude
The bigger, the better, the more dramatic, the more likely the event is to achieve
what the authors call ‘threshold value’, meaning poised to pass through the gate;
and ‘the more violent the murder the bigger the headlines it will make’. Amplitude
alone may not necessarily constitute a news value. In order to qualify it will be
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 119

subject to regulation by geographical or cultural proximity. Three hundred people

can die in a plane crash in Nepal and this may warrant an inside story in the
Western press. However the presence of ‘our own’ people on board, however
small in number, is likely to drive the story up the agenda.

■ Unambiguity
Galtung and Ruge speak of clarity. The more uncomplicated the events, the more
they will be noticed and reported. A number of qualifications attach to this value.
Some events are of sufficient amplitude to warrant coverage even though they may
be complicated. Industrial disputes often fall into this category. What may happen
is that the dispute is reported but freed from the complexities which surround it.
We are seeing here the link between value and the process of news construction.
Finding an event complicated or ambiguous, the media will generally work
towards simplification; and one approach is to single out those items within a
complex story which actually are unambiguous, such as actions, which may be
direct and clear-cut, whereas the causes of those actions are more complicated.
Recent commentators, Marc Raboy and Bernard Dagenais, speak of a
‘tendency to flatten a complex and multi-textured phenomenon into simple
formulations’and such a tendency they see as value-loaded. In their introduction to
Media, Crisis and Democracy,10 the authors cite the case of the Gulf War (1991) in
which Iraq, having occupied neighbouring Kuwait, was invaded by a military
coalition of 28 countries, spearheaded by America, and including Britain and
France. Raboy and Dagenais are of the opinion that the Western media:
blackened Saddam Hussein (the Iraqi president) and his regime, obscuring all
possible consideration of the real meaning of the war, of US designs and motives,
of the manipulation of public opinion and disinformation.

Oversimplification on the part of the media has less to do with the pressures of time
(deadline meeting) than with value-judgments, manifested by the collusion which
occurs between authority and media in times of crisis. Indeed Raboy and Dagenais
see crisis as a news value in its own right because it provides dramatic stories.

■ Familiarity
Emphasis has already been placed upon ethnocentrism as a news value: that which
is familiar to us, about which we know something, whether it involves
neighbours, neighbouring communities or neighbouring nations, is considered
important because events affecting them could also be events affecting us. We are
more ‘at home’ with what is familiar to us, generally more interested in people and
places we know than those strange to us.
Galtung and Ruge state that while ‘the culturally distant will be passed by more
easily and not be noticed’ an exception to normal practice will come about
through relevance: a ‘remote country may may be brought in [to the news] via a
pattern of conflict with one’s own group’.
120 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

■ Predictability
Drawing upon a work by B. Berelson and G.A. Steiner, Human Behaviour: An
Inventory of Scientific Findings,11 Galtung and Ruge refer to a ‘hypothesis of
consonance’ where news is what is expected to happen, a fulfulment of predic-
tions. News operators ‘know’ what news is: when events conform to this expecta-
tion, they are reported, largely in set, or routine ways, reflecting routine thinking.
Galtung and Ruge contend:
A person predicts that something will happen and this creates a mental matrix for
easy reception and registration of the event if it does finally take place. Or he wants
it to happen and the matrix is even more prepared, so much so that he may distort
perceptions he receives and provide himself with images consonant with what he
has wanted. In the sense mentioned here ‘news’ are actually ‘olds’, because they
correspond to what one expects to happen… .

In short, this is a version of wish-fulfilment. It is a practice seen by a number of

commentators to result in stereotyping of people and situations. Reporting of race
often stands accused of allowing expectations to become predictions, and predic-
tions in turn to become self-fulfilling prophecies. If black youths are assocated in
the minds of the media operators with violence, then, the hypothesis of
consonance would suggest, those operators will actively look for violence to occur.
This theme is analysed by Christopher P. Campbell in Race, Myth and the News.12
The author writes of ‘a kind of tunnel vision’ which contributes to contemporary
racist attitudes in the media.

■ Surprise
News values compete with one another and the value of surprise runs counter to
that of predictability. That which is unexpected may well prove a vital news value.
Thus dog biting man (especially if he is a postman) is scarcely news; but man
biting dog, that is newsworthy. As Galtung and Ruge say, ‘Events have to be
unexpected or rare, or preferably both, to become good news’.
Skinhead youths crashing heads is news because the action might be deemed to
be predictable. Equally, skinheads might qualify as news if their behaviour contra-
dicts the stereotype: if they surprise media expectations by, for example,
campaigning on behalf of multiracial neighbourhoods.

■ Correspondence
Once a story is up and running it will often continue to be covered even past its
sell-by date in terms of its headline potential. Galtung and Ruge say:
The channel has been opened and stays partly open to justify it being opened in the
first place, partly because of inertia in the system and partly because what was
unexpected has now become familiar.

It is in the interest of the media to keep stories simmering because there is

 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 121

always the potential to give an old tale a new twist. For example, it is common
practice to link stories on similar themes, for such links strengthen news value.
Old stories are regularly dusted down and given new life where they are perceived
to clarify or reinforce – and amplify – the significance of new stories.

■ Composition
This value arises from what Galtung and Ruge term a ‘desire to present a
“balanced” whole’. A diet of really bad news cries out for some balancing good
news: the grim needs to be matched with the cheerful, the horrific with the heart-
warming. Television news often rounds off with a human interest story – light,
humourous, oddball.
The cynic might see even in this practice a degree of manipulation: let people
go to bed thinking the world is an entirely horrible place and in future they may
switch off the news altogether. The danger is of distraction or deflection, where
what we remember of a news bulletin may not be the headline story about govern-
ment corruption but the end-of-bulletin ‘filler’ about a yodelling parrot or a
baseball team which has won its first game in 25 years.

■ Eliteness
The term ‘eliteness’ is actually used by Allan Bell in The Language of News Media2
in offering his own variation on Galtung and Ruge; but the authors count as a
primary value the importance of elite people, elite institutions and elite nations in
the news. The elite are Knowns. They have titles, positions – they are easily
referenced; enabling stories to be personified, to be shifted from the theoretical
and the general to the specific, the focused and the colourful. And of course
having qualified for coverage the elite increase their public profile by being
featured in the media.
Galtung and Ruge believe that ‘Elite people are available to serve as objects of
general identification, not only because of their intrinsic importance’. Being the
influentials in society, its leaders and leader-makers, the power elite have symbolic
value. Hence their words as well as their actions are reported. Their opinions are
more sought after and recorded. The most banal utterances of presidents and
prime ministers will be reported even though they do not qualify under any
criterion other than that they issue from ‘top’ people.

■ Personification
The potential for personalising a story, by emphasising its human interest, is a
critically important factor of news, one invariably operated by the popular press.
For every issue or event there has to be a person to associate with it, to encapsulate
it, to symbolise it. Personality becomes a metonym for the story and its theme,
and the characteristics of both become interchangeable.
There seems to be the need for somebody to blame, to shoulder responsibility,
122 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

to be answerable: after all, you can’t take a picture of an issue. Matters of

political, economic, industrial or environmental importance; issues concerning
gender, race, crime and punishment may involve thousands or millions, but they
are swiftly re-presented in person-form: a general becomes the epitome of the
war effort; the complexities of an industrial dispute are boiled down to the
features of the leading protagonists.

■ Negativity
The only good news, it has often been said as far as news gatherers are concerned,
is bad news. If immigrant workers in Germany are being terrorised by fascist
gangs; if their houses are being fired with petrol bombs; if they are beaten to death
on the streets of Breman or Stuttgart, then Germany will feature on the agenda of
British or American news media more readily than that nation’s generous
hospitality to refugees from Bosnia.
What Anthony Smith has termed ‘aberrant news values’13 are especially assertive
in a Free Press system. This point hardly needs stressing, but the effects of bad news
reporting are of critical and ongoing importance in our analysis of media perfor-
mance. Bad news creates bad impressions. We carry images of people, groups,
communities and nations in our heads which have been placed there by the media.
What is treated negatively risks being thought about negatively. Because the
media are preoccupied with outcomes, we, as audience, rarely acquire information
beyond the bad news. We are told WHAT but rarely HOW or WHY. Explanation
and analysis, the tracing of effects back to causes do of course feature in media
coverage; but the media operator might argue that sensation rather than analysis
sells newspapers and boosts TV ratings.

Operational factors
Having produced their list of news factors which set the agenda that controls the
media gates; having provided advice which might enable us to at least know how
lived events become mediated events in the news, Galtung and Ruge suggest three
hypotheses under the headings selection, distortion and replication.
The more an event satisfies news values, the more it is likely to be selected.
Once an item has been selected what makes it newsworthy will be accentuated.
This the authors call the distortion stage; and the process will recur at each phase
of production as the item passes to audience. Replication is what happens when a
‘version’ reaches a new step in the process.
It is the version, not the reality, which is being worked upon: the ‘longer the
chain [of processing activities], the more selection and distortion will take place…
every link in the chain reacts to what it receives… according to the same princi-
ples’. In other words, once the features of a story have been assembled, once the
construction is under way, the subsequent phases of the operation build on the
construction, not on ‘reality’.
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 123

TELEVISION’S NEWS VALUES

Galtung and Ruge base their taxonomy of news factors on criteria operated
14
by the press. In Journalists at Work , Jeremy Tunstall applies Galtung and
Ruge to news values which govern TV news selection, suggesting four points
of difference:
1. In TV the visual is given pre-eminence
2. News items which include film of ‘our own reporters’ interviewing or
commentating on a story are preferred
3. TV makes use of a smaller fraction of the number of stories the
newspapers carry, and even major items are short compared with
newspaper coverage
4. There is preference for actuality stories which film of actual events
makes possible for TV.

The status of source

In The Language of News Media2 Allan Bell, making some useful additions to
Galtung and Ruge, writes of attribution as a value. The reliability or status of the
source of information is crucial, and this is closely linked with elite choice: organisa-
tions are more ‘reliable’ sources than individuals, unless of course those individuals
are elite persons. ‘The more elite the source,’ says Bell, ‘the more newsworthy the
story.’ He puts it bluntly: ‘News is what an authoritative source tells a journalist.’
He refers to those who ‘wear a general mantle of authority and are part of the
institutional network where journalists expect to get information’. This value
applies not only to what people do, but to who is saying what: ‘Talk is news only
if the right person is talking’. In this sense, the elite not only are the news, they
make it. Bell is voicing similar sentiments to those of the American analyst David
Barsamian who refers to journalists as ‘stenographers to power’.15

The exception that proves the rule

If what Allan Bell says is true, that some sources of information – like trade
unions – suffer from media neglect; and if proximity – cultural, geographical or
commercial – is a prime value for news selection, why is it that in the 1980s
Poland hit the headlines in the British press and was regularly reported on TV?
After all, Poland is classifiable as a faraway country of which we know little.
And yet in the early 1980s the activities of the Polish trade union Solidarity sprang
into British headlines. British trade unionists must have looked on in amazement
as a Conservative government and a Conservative press turned the Polish workers
into heroes and not demons.
124 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

What was going on? Had news values suffered a rush of blood to the head?
Was the world of values being suddenly inverted? These questions had extra
pertinence in the light of what was happening to trade unions in Britain.
Worker rights were being drastically restricted by new legislation. There is a
plausible answer:

Ideology

This is not exactly the missing piece from the news values jigsaw because the
assumption is obvious enough that the power elite come with their values, their
ideology, attached. Nevertheless, any taxonomy that does not include reference to
ideology is failing to offer a basis for explaining the ‘Poland conundrum’.
The explanation for Solidarity suddenly becoming the headline flavour-of-the
month in Britain lies not in the fact that here was a trade union fighting for the
good of its workers; rather it was because its struggle was seen to be part of a
grander conflict between Western nations and the Iron Curtain countries,
between capitalism and communism.
Any force – even a trade union – standing out against the ideology of
communism, for that is what Solidarity was perceived to be doing, would
stimulate Western interest, Western support and media coverage. In this case, the
news values of importance and proximity were secondary to ideology.

Ideology and the news

Stuart Hall in ‘The determinations of news photographs’ (in The Manufacture of
News3) perceives two levels of news value. The first he describes as formal, the
other ideological. Formal news values belong to ‘the world and discourse of the
newspaper, to newsmen as a professional group, to the institutional apparatus of
news-making’. Ideological news values ‘belong to the realm of moral-political
discourse’ in society.
This ‘double articulation’ as Hall terms it ‘binds the inner discourse of the
newspaper to the ideological universe of the society’. In practice ‘there is probably
little or no distinction between these two aspects of news production,’ believes
Hall. Ideology is essentially hidden, representing a ‘ “deep structure” whose
function as a selective device is un-transparent even to those who professionally
most know how to operate it’. Hall believes ‘Events enter the domain of ideology
as soon as they become visible to the news-making process’.
It would seem appropriate, then, that the model of news values suggested
by Jörgen Westerståhl and Folke Johansson in the European Journal of Commu-
nication, 1994 16 places ideology in the centre of the news-making process
(Figure 5.8).
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 125

Proximity

Drama Ideology Import-

ance

Access

Figure 5.8 Westerståhl and Johansson’s model of news factors in foreign news
(1994). Ideology, put where it belongs, in the centre of the news-making process.

Though the model relates specifically to foreign news, it has a general application.
Drama enters the picture and, as with news stories as well as fictional ones, the
drama is bad news for someone. Stuart Hall is more specific. For him, in the
domain of political news, the most salient news value is violence.
In the Westersthål and Johansson model recognition is given to access, as much
a circumstance as a value. If journalists have easy access to events – as they had
during the Vietnam War (1959–75) – they are are obviously more able to use the
evidence of their own eyes, their own direct experience, than if they are herded
together far from the war zone and fed information by officials – as they were
during the Gulf War.
Sometimes all routes to information are blocked to reporters. They are denied
physical access to events and they are refused even official information. This was
the case with the Chechen civil war in the Soviet Union between 1995 and 1996,
a largely unreported conflict resulting from hazards of access to the Chechen
capital, Grozny, and other parts of the country. The McCombs and Shaw model
(Figure 5.4) is apposite here, for minimal media coverage of the Chechen war
meant that public interest in or knowledge of the fate of the Chechen people was
modest where it existed at all.17
Very often, at home as well as abroad, the only information available is from
official sources. Westerståhl and Johansson speak in their article of ‘reporting
coloured by national interest’. As far as Western nations are concerned, that
interest is coloured by a ‘common Western ideology’; in short, capitalism; in
particular, in the decades of the 1980s and 90s, of the ‘free market’ variety, charac-
terised by policies of privatisation, deregulation and commoditisation.
Where ideology appears to have no particular purchase, nations and the media
that report them tend to take no sides. An example given by Westerståhl and
Johansson is the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s which ‘represented a case where the
readiness in the Western world to identify with either side was at its lowest level’.
126 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

For this reason, few news values were activated: ‘in terms of news coverage, the
death of, let us say, one Israeli soldier counted as much as the death of hundreds of
Iranian or Iraqi soldiers’.
The Gulf Crisis of 1990–91 featured hundreds of Iraqi soldiers; but also among
the players of that exhaustively covered drama was a ‘presence’ few of the media
seemed to mention much, but which made the ideological difference – oil; an
‘untransparent’ feature of Gulf War coverage.

Ideology and the pressures of time

A further criterion of newsworthiness which begs a mention here is one posed by
Philip Schlesinger in the 1970s and which seems to be even more relevant now:
immediacy. The emphasis on the importance of time in industrial societies,
discussed in Chapter 1, has embedded itself in Western news values: the world is
in a rush; time is ideological.
In an article entitled ‘Newsmen and their time machine’ in the British Journal of
Sociology,18 Schlesinger defines immediacy as the time which has elapsed between
the occurrence of an event and its public reporting as news. It refers to the speed
with which coverage can be mounted; and the model example would be a ‘live’
broadcast: ‘News is “hot” when it is most immediate. It is “cold”, and old, when it
can no longer be used in the newsday in question.’
Immediacy is embodied in every newsperson’s mental script. It shapes and
structures his or her practices. It structures the news presentation, the running
order and the time slots for each piece of news. Related to this is pacing: ‘Each
news bulletin is structured according to a concept of the right pace’; and this
pace is dictated by the need to ‘move things along’ in order to keep the
audience’s attention.
The news value of immediacy can be linked to an addition Allan Bell makes
to the Galtung and Ruge taxonomy – that of competition. What dictates choice
and treatment is the competition from other newspapers, from other
broadcasting channels. If, as Herbert Gans says in Deciding What’s News,1 the
chief criteria for news presentation are clarity, brevity and colour then news
producers will compete to be clear (unambigous), brief (so as not to lose audience
interest) and colourful (in order to capture and hold attention).
In short, the news has to be entertaining, and immediacy is perceived to be an
essential ingredient of entertainment. Yet Schlesinger argues that immediacy
creates situations in which news is all foreground and too little background; where
the emphasis on now obscures the historical sequence of events. He speaks of ‘bias
in the news against the long-term, and it is plausible to argue that the more we
take note of news, the less we can be aware of what lies behind it’.
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 127

Figure 5.9 Cartoon published in Index on Censorship, 3, 1994.

SUMMARY

Stress has been placed here on the cultural orientation of news, its ethnocentric
nature and its resemblance to ritual. However effectively, through professional skill,
the news convinces us that it replicates reality we have to keep in mind that it is only
a version of reality; and that it is highly constructed.
The process by which an event is transformed into news has been examined
here. News values govern decisions about the selection of events and these
manifest themselves in agenda setting – giving priority to some events or issues
rather than others. Every potential news item passes through a number of media
‘gates’ and at each gate further selection – and mediation – takes place.
128 MEDIA COMMUNICATION

News values classified by Galtung and Ruge have been explained and linked to
Stuart Hall’s two levels of news value, formal and ideological. Selection, distortion
and replication are seen to confirm the notion of news as a construct and a number of
other values, such as crisis, immediacy and access are discussed.
Ideology is viewed as a key feature of news production. It operates within cultural
and institutional contexts, influencing the ways in which news represents reality. News
as a composite of ‘stories’ is touched upon, a theme taken up in the next chapter
when the forms and features of narrative are explored.

KEY TERMS

ethnocentric ■ proximity ■ knowns, unknowns ■ discourse

mediation ■ gatekeeping ■ agenda setting ■ news values

extracted information ■ kuuki ■ hypothesis of consonance

formal and ideological news values ■ attribution ■ immediacy

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES

1. Discussion:
(a) What strategies might non-elite persons or groups devise to improve their
chances of having their voice heard on local and national news agendas?
(b) Consider the view that the news is an agency of social control.
(c) Compare their effectiveness as news media of newspapers, television and
radio.
2. Study a TV news bulletin (or bulletins) and gauge the number of stories involving
elite and non-elite persons. Document the time devoted to such stories and
indicate the particular news value/news values which have ‘opened the gate’ to
such stories. How much attention has been paid to what the actors in the story
say compared to what they do?
3. Examine tabloid newspapers in search of examples of Wedom/Theydom –
references to minorities, foreign nationals, other countries. How are they
described, categorised? What difference is there in coverage of stories of
‘other’ between the tabloids and the so-called quality press?
4. Video record a TV news broadcast and play it to a group of viewers, half of
whom you blindfold (or have sitting with their backs to the screen). When the
bulletin is over, conduct a test on how much non-visual information the
 THE NEWS : GATES , AGENDAS AND VALUES 129

participants can remember. Who scores best, those who could see the on-
screen images or those who couldn’t?
5. Do a gender count of a day’s news, in the papers and in broadcast news. Do
women feature as prominently as men; and with what kind of stories are
women/men most familiarly identifiable?

NOW READ ON

It is risky to fall into the trap of believing that the latest books render earlier ones out
of date. Roger Fowler’s Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press
(UK: Routledge, 1991) still provides an invaluable read concerning the way news is
assembled into discourses through language.
Also warmly recommended are the following: Understanding News by John Hartley
(UK: Methuen, 1982); The Known World of Broadcasting News: International News
and the Electronic Media by Roger Wallis and Stanley Baron (UK: Routledge, 1990);
Journalism and Popular Culture edited by Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (UK: Sage,
1992) and Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues edited by Ammu Joseph
and Kalpana Sharma (UK: Sage, 1994).
For readers fascinated with what it is like to work as a top journalist, see an
enter taining States-side volume, Breaking the News by James Fallowes (US:
Pantheon, 1996). Lastly for an analysis of news as global practice see Mark D.
Alleyne’s News Revolution: Political and Economic Decisions about Global Information
(UK: Macmillan, 1997).