News Selection and Presentation

3 Key excerpts on "News Selection and Presentation"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Construction of News in a Polarised State

  Maltese Advocacy Journalism

  • Adrian Hillman(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Determining what is news

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003270829-2

  2.1 Introduction

  Early news sociology work was prefaced by research conducted by White (1950) and Breed (1955), promoting a discussion on the construction of news, emphasising how gatekeeping elements transformed what was defined as news and how the socialisation of journalists influences its construction. From there, accounts of news work flourished in the 1970s and 1980s (Green Gonzalez, 2017), being mainly studies of an ethnographic nature, involving participant observation and in-depth first-hand knowledge of news work. Significantly, a number of these scholars used their journalistic experience as a backdrop to their studies. However, while these scholars brought an immersive and crucial first-hand understanding of the way the news organisations worked and functioned, it was developed from an editorial vantage point and unsighted to the different perspectives which can be brought to bear from the executive and ownership level.

  2.2 News, and the construction of reality

  These news studies presented different dimensions from the overall picture of news construction. Molotch and Lester (1974) were in the vanguard in the belief that all events are socially constructed; their point was that each event reveals different types of information about how society is organised. Tuchman (1978) developed the idea that news is a social construct. She contends that news is rooted in organisational routines and journalists’ performative claims of objectivity, as opposed to an underlying democratic value or principle. Gans’ (2004) work is a sociological analysis of how national news organisations, journalists, sources, audiences, and all other participants in the national news-making process decide what is news and how it is reported. As a major explanation of why the news comes out the way it does, he points to source power, audience power, and efficiency.

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  Language in the News

  Discourse and Ideology in the Press

  • Roger Fowler(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  If at first the set of news values was thought of as a check-list of features of events which is referred to (consciously or not) in order to decide whether or not to report an event, my discussion of stereotypes now makes it clear that this is not the whole story. News values are rather to be seen as qualities of (potential) reports. That is to say, they are not simply features of selection but, more importantly, features of representation; and so the distinction between ‘selection’ and ‘transformation’ ceases to be absolute: an item can only be selected if it can be seen in a certain light of representation, and so selection involves an ideological act of interpretation.

  SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS IN NEWS SELECTION

  So far, my explication of the notion of ‘socially constructed’ news has been by way of a cognitive commentary on Galtung and Ruge’s selection factors. This commentary proposes that news stories are constructed on the basis of mental categories which are present in readers and built on by the media. This cognitive account suits the purpose of the present book, because it fits with the linguistic concern of the later chapters: to present the formation of ideas as governed by choices of language. However, it says little about the social, economic and historical determinants of the stereotypes in terms of which the news is to be understood. Other dimensions need to be added. Since they are not my main business, and anyway have been dealt with often by other writers, I will just briefly list some of them, but that is not to undervalue their overwhelming importance in an overall account of the media.11

  If we turn back to the quotation from Philo’s article (p. 13), we find that he stresses the manufactured nature of news; cf. the title of Cohen and Young’s book, The Manufacture of News. There is the question, of course, of what exactly is the product: arguably the product, in a commercial sense, is not news or newspapers (though both are clearly made), but rather readers – the profit, if any, coming from advertising revenue – or even votes

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  The Discourse of Broadcast News

  A Linguistic Approach

  • Martin Montgomery(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 News presentation

  [I]n the diverse areas in which television seems, fairly evenly and openhandedly, to reproduce the ‘real world’ to which it refers, the practice of television inevitably intervenes, mobilizing distinctive forms of narration, specific modes of address and types of camera positioning so as to selectively structure the viewer’s orientation to the ‘real world’ it re-presents.

  (Bennett et al., 1981, p. 86)

  4.0 News presentation: its role and performance

  From the perspective of the previous chapter, news presentation refers to the studio-based elements of the news, at the core of which are headlines and the kernels of news items but which also include opening and closing the programme, shifting the plane of the discourse from kernel to subsidiary elements and back again, as well as interviewing correspondents and other figures whose discourse contributes to the overall news broadcast. News presentation encompasses these elements but it is also at the same time a specialised, distinctive and variable kind of speech performance performed by a particular individual. This chapter will first consider some aspects of news presentation as performance (in sections 4.0–4.2) before identifying in further detail in its remaining sections some of the discourse characteristics of main discourse elements of presentation – headlines and kernels.

  As noted in Chapter 2 , various terms are used to designate the presenter’s role: newsreader, newscaster and anchor – as well as presenter itself. A newsreader is a presenter whose role is to read the news; and this term is sometimes distinguished from newscaster, defined as a presenter with some kind of journalistic background who participates in compiling the script as well as reading it. A common term in North America is ‘anchor’, used to designate someone who presents material prepared for a news programme and who at times will improvise commentary for live presentation. The term adopted here, as the most easily understood superordinate, is ‘presenter’; and it is used to encompass all these roles, basically because in bulletin news they are usually combined in one person. Thus, in bulletin news it is common for one person to open and close the programme, read the news, introduce reports and interviews and close them and so in this way handle all the news presentation throughout the programme. Nonetheless, it must be recognised that sometimes roles become bifurcated, with the task of reading scripted news summaries or kernels delegated at points in a programme to a specialist newsreader. This is particularly so in the case of extended news magazine programmes such as UK Channel 4 News or BBC Radio 4’s Today

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