Gatekeeping in Transition

Timothy Vos, François Heinderyckx, Tim Vos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317910510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Much of what journalism scholars thought they knew about gatekeeping—about how it is that news turns out the way it does—has been called into question by the recent seismic economic and technological shifts in journalism. These shifts come with new kinds of gatekeepers, new routines of news production, new types of news organizations, new means for shaping the news, and new channels of news distribution. Given these changing realities, some might ask: does gatekeeping still matter? In this internationally-minded anthology of new gatekeeping research, contributors attempt to answer that question. Gatekeeping in Transition examines the role of gatekeeping in the twenty-first century from organizational, institutional, and social perspectives across digital and traditional media, and argues for its place in contemporary scholarship about news and journalism.

Part I
Thinking and Rethinking Gatekeeping

1
Revisiting Gatekeeping Theory During a Time of Transition

Tim P. Vos

Gatekeeping did not come with a birth certificate, but the case can be made that the basic theory of gatekeeping is at least 65 years old. Although journalists used the concept of gatekeeping—if not the precise terminology—more than a century ago, the seminal piece by David Manning White (1950) generally gets the credit for launching the scholarly gatekeeping tradition. In many places in the world, 65 is considered the age of retirement. So, is it time to send a reliable but tired old theory “out to pasture”? There is no shame in retirement. Gatekeeping can be remembered for its importance in those early attempts to give early journalism and mass communication scholarship a more systematic and scientific basis. It can be remembered for how it challenged received notions of journalistic objectivity. It can be remembered for inspiring many young scholars to engage in empirical scholarship.

On the other hand, 65 is remarkably young compared to many concepts used by those in the academy. John Stuart Mill’s (1977 [1859]) treatment of liberty, while dealing with a far more universal concept than gatekeeping, is far older than gatekeeping and likewise initiated a flurry of theorizing by scholars. Socrates’ notion of virtue has endured for more than two millennia and has inspired scholarly reflection over many centuries since its articulation (Brickhouse & Smith, 2010). While certain ideas about liberty and virtue have fallen out of favor, the basic notions continue to be useful theoretical constructs. So it is, this book argues, with the concept of gatekeeping.

Some of the earliest conceptions of gatekeeping have indeed fallen out of favor and did so a long time ago. White’s (1950) consideration of the gatekeeper emphasized the individualized, rationalized selections by a single journalist (Reese & Ballinger, 2001). Almost immediately, critics (e.g., Donohew, 1967; Gieber, 1956; Pool & Shulman, 1959) began to show the ways in which institutionalized factors structured the decision making of journalists. The classic newsroom studies of Gaye Tuchman (1978) and Herbert Gans (1979) demonstrated the role of socialization and journalistic routines in constructing the news. Tuchman, Gans, and others also quickly dispelled the notion that gatekeeping was simply a matter of selection (Shoemaker, 1991). White (1950) selected news stories from the wire service, but most gatekeeping does not start with a raw product called “news.” The process often starts with tips, hunches, and bits of information. Gatekeeping is how these different elements get turned into news and how that news is framed, emphasized, placed, and promoted (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). The conceptualizations of gatekeeping as individual judgment and news selection are incomplete at best and misguided at worst. Scholarship that looks to pick a fight with David Manning White (1950) is beating either a straw man or a dead horse.

Gatekeeping as a theoretical construct, however, remains an important and vital lens through which to explore the question How does news turn out the way it does? That question can be posed of a particular news story from a particular publication, or it can be posed of a whole class of stories across a whole news ecosystem. The question How did the Wall Street Journal come to frame the U.S. President’s state of the union address the way that it did? can be asked. And the question How is it that the U.S. news media failed to produce critical coverage of a presidential administration’s case for war? can also be asked. This second question is obviously much more complex, since it points to a whole array of gates—implicating an entire ecosystem of news organizations and distribution networks—and to what ultimately makes it to the public. But this highlights another important feature of gatekeeping theory—namely, the channels through which information and news flow. Although gatekeeping scholarship has long theorized how information flows to and through news organizations, there has been a recent effort to theorize how information flows through and from news organizations to the eventual readers and viewers of news (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Audiences get news by subscribing to a publication or tuning into a broadcast, but audiences increasingly see news that has been emailed, “liked,” and “tweeted” that comes through some aggregators and search engines. How to theorize and empirically examine the structured or patterned characteristics of news delivery channels is still evolving. Chapter 2 offers an approach to move gatekeeping theory in this direction.

Gatekeeping scholarship has a longer record for answering the question How does news turn out the way it does? Pam Shoemaker and her colleagues (Shoemaker, 1991; Shoemaker, Eichholz, Kim, & Wrigley, 2001; Shoemaker & Reese, 2013; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009) take an array of factors into account and theorize how various forms of pressure shape news into the form it ultimately takes. They have divided these into five levels of influence: the individual, media routines, organizational, social institutional, and social system levels. Each of these levels represents a conceptual set of factors that can exert positive and negative forces as information moves back and forth through the news construction process.

At the individual level, gatekeeping scholarship has included examinations of the demographic profiles, role conceptions, and cognitive characteristics of gatekeepers. At the routine level, research has examined factors such as time constraints, reporting and verification procedures, conceptualizations of audience feedback, and relationship to sources. At the organizational level, scholarship has explored the ownership structure, organizational culture, and organizational decision-making processes of news-related organizations. At the social institutional level, research has sought to understand the social and institutional pressures on news making that come from governments, sources, advertisers, markets, audiences, public relations practitioners, interest groups, and other media. At the social system level, scholarship has delved into the role of social structure and the role of cultural values, attitudes, and ideas in shaping news. All of this is done with an eye for explaining how news turns out the way it does. These five levels of influence are retained in the structure of this volume to think about the ways in which gatekeeping can be fruitfully reexamined.

By addressing these five levels of influence, the gatekeeping tradition has steadfastly rejected the short-circuit fallacy that reduces explanations of news to one or two macrolevel factors. Scholarship on the political economy of news production, for example, has held heuristic value, pointing to the role of profit considerations in news construction. However, gatekeeping theory, in keeping with the field theory of Kurt Lewin (1951), has posited that a field of interrelated factors must be empirically examined to arrive at adequate explanations for how news turns out the way it does. Thus, profit considerations must be examined—for example, within the context of news-making routines, where journalistic autonomy is often practiced in news construction. The value and practice of autonomous news judgment is a powerful force for keeping profit-maximizing logic in check (Demers, 1995). The gatekeeping tradition has typically been dissatisfied with explanations that leave the nitty-gritty of news production in a black box. Gatekeeping researchers have often arrived at their conclusions based on sustained observation and intimate knowledge of complex, real-world conditions.

It is this tradition of theorizing news construction through close contact with the real, empirical world that provides the impetus for this book. It is because the real world of news production and distribution is changing so quickly that scholars are confronted with the changing dynamics of gatekeeping. If news making is in a period of transition, then gatekeeping is in transition. Our theorizing must transition as well.

Rethinking Gatekeeping

It is important to acknowledge that what we thought we knew about gatekeeping might need reevaluation. Take, for example, the recent fate of gatekeepers of all sorts. Legacy institutions or industries that have relied on gatekeepers to mediate between sources of information and the ultimate recipients of that information have mostly found themselves on hard times. The idea that big record labels exerted no small measure of control over what music we heard now seems quaint—or perhaps disturbing—but nonetheless outdated. Given the obvious and rapid changes in society, it’s unsurprising that some observers have announced the death of the gatekeeper.

Even before journalists and other observers concluded that legacy media were in significant trouble, some scholars took stock of the emergence of online media and warned about the fate of gatekeeping practices and roles. Williams and Deli Carpini (2000) pointed to the role of online media in breaking open the story of U.S. President Clinton’s affair with a White House intern and concluded that gatekeeping was collapsing:

The new media environment, by providing virtually unlimited sources of political information (although these sources do not provide anything like an unlimited number of perspectives), undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: if there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers.

(Williams & Deli Carpini, 2000, pp. 61–62)

The “multiplicity of gates” (p. 66), in other words, means that information will make it into the public sphere, regardless of actions taken by the legacy media. Editors and news directors might still be minding gates for their organizations, but so many gates now exist that one or two—or even a hundred—closed gates will not prevent information from being published. There will always be an open gate somewhere.

A related argument is that the vast capacity of the internet means that news organizations are not limited by traditional news holes. More information can be published, so gatekeepers need to hold less information back (Pavlik, 2001). Both arguments—that gates are so numerous as to be meaningless and that space is so bountiful that selectivity is less of an issue—point to a key premise of the old gatekeeping model: scarcity. Shoemaker and Vos (2009) had defined gatekeeping as crafting news by choosing from a near-limitless amount of information. But the abundance of information has now been met by an abundance of space and an abundance of outlets.

Others have conceptualized the breakdown of the gatekeeper role as the leveling of the hierarchy between news organizations and audiences. Audience-generated content, crowd sourcing, and other means of audience involvement “herald the slow death of top-down models of journalistic news coverage and information dissemination, and even the gatekeeping model itself” (Bruns, 2011, p. 118). Bruns (2005) saw the rise of collaborative media organizations and news aggregators as subverting the old “regime of control” (p. 11). He clearly saw the coming tide of audiences as co-producers of media content and aptly noted the implications for old gatekeeping models. Because of the open information environment created by the internet, audiences often have access to the same information as journalists, allowing audiences to better see how legacy media have tried to control information (Bruns, 2005). That exposure puts the legitimacy of legacy media on shaky ground.

These two basic critiques of the gatekeeping model—that space and outlets are no longer scarce and that news production is no longer unidirectional—point to new dynamics for journalistic gatekeeping. This becomes even more obvious in the age of social media. Social media empower the audience to distribute and frame the news and add to the ubiquity of information (Coddington & Holton, 2014). But before we proceed with the project to reimagine gatekeeping as a concept in the digital era, we would do well to consider why gatekeeping might still be a useful concept for thinking about the construction of news and public affairs discourse.

Diverse Media, Diverse News?

Gatekeeping is typically explained in terms of human decision making. So, given the range and variety of journalists and news organizations engaged in decision making, how is it that these journalists and news organizations, when confronted by a complex phenomenon, are capable of producing such a narrow range of news messages? This has been an important question within the gatekeeping literature (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Gatekeeping scholarship has provided a theoretical approach and an empirical research tradition for answering that question. It has pointed to a range of factors—from routines of information gathering and assessment, to organizational characteristics of news media, to pressures from various extra-media institutions, to dominant social and cultural values, attitudes, and ideas—that limit the range of information available to the public. The range of ideas and the corpus of factual information that media contribute to the public sphere play no small role in the vibrancy of democratic self-governance (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009), so this is a consequential question to contemplate.

If the flow of information has changed such that there are more outlets for information and the hierarchy of information is flattened, then the presumption of the question—that the information environment is capable of exhibiting a narrow range of news messages—should be less valid. But take the example of the financial and banking crisis that emerged around 2008. Scholars (e.g., Manning, 2013; Starkman, 2014; Usher, 2013) have observed that journalists and others failed to warn citizens of the impending crisis and initially failed to give the issue the prominence it deserved. This would have been easier to explain if it had happened a decade or two earlier, when the legacy media dominated the news landscape. The legacy media represented a relatively narrow social institution, peopled by older, upper-middle-class white men (Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007; Weaver & Wilhoit, 1996) who were driven by a shared set of profit motives (Bagdikian, 2004; McManus, 1994). But the financial crisis happened during a time of diverse digital media and at a time in which sources and experts had their own digital platforms outside the mainstream press (Starkman, 2014) and comments sections and discussion boards within the mainstream press (Baden & Springer, 2014). Facebook and Twitter were relatively new but were clearly finding widespread use, especially Facebook, when the crisis emerged. In other words, the mainstream press was not the regime of control it had once been, and the flow of information would not ostensibly be strictly in one direction.

Nevertheless, the messages available to the public were surprisingly uniform (Starkman, 2014). The elite press and business press missed the story until it was too late (Manning, 2013; Usher, 2013). User-generated content on mainstream news sites was apparently not a source for heterogeneous views either. A study of reader comments in German newspapers, for example, showed that comments deviated little from the viewpoints already expressed in the press (Baden & Springer, 2014). Dissident voices were complaining to authorities about fraud and poorly designed financial instruments and trying to warn of the coming economic catastrophe, but by most accounts those voices and warnings did not break through to an audience of any consequence (Manning, 2013; Starkman, 2014). The truth did not go viral. The truth remained locked behind the gates.

One can obviously read too much into a single case, but this particular case is one of significant global importance. Other, arguably less consequential cases, such as the Drudge Report’s breaking open of the Clinton sex scandal, have been occasions to revisit what we thought we knew about gatekeeping. Perhaps this case should give us pause as well. For example, it can help us think more clearly about the kinds of gates that make up the gatekeeping process. While the gatekeeping model has long recognized that gates exist at many points in the construction and communication of news (Shoemaker, 1991), it is good to be reminded that input and output gates can face different kinds or degrees of force (Bro & Wallberg, 2015). We might hypothesize that information that enters gatekeeping channels easily can exit easily. When this is the case, the same information will be widely distributed, and the same information can also be easily frame...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I Thinking and Rethinking Gatekeeping
• Part II Individual Level The New Gatekeepers
• Part III News Routines New and Old
• Part IV News Organization—or Lack Thereof
• Part V Social Institutions Gatekeeping the Gatekeepers
• Part VI Social Systems Near and Far
• Part VII Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index