1. Media & Society (COMM 100) Updated FA16
News lecture
Media & Society (COMM 100)
Updated FA16

2. News is NOT…
The really significant events that happened in a given span of time
The problem is that news is also another media text and works with conventions; it adheres to specific conventions and these influence how we understand the news.

3. News is…
A set of stories based on events deemed important to report over a given span of time.
People in the news business decide what news is. What drives decisions? The selection process is very important.
A representation of what is important for you to know
Local news teams and the News you need to know – crime coverage, sports, weather, local celebrity events. The conventions themselves shape decisions about what it is that you need to know.
A manufactured product
Like a fictional text – there are editors, writers, actors, etc. But the content is certainly not fiction.
MAIN POINT: Rather than news gathering, it is more accurate to speak of news-making.

4. Sources from which news is made
"The Wire" (AP & Reuters)
News conferences and press releases
The competition (other news media)
The beat
Independent & investigative research

5. Characteristics of News
Print news (and most internet news)
Menu-like – you select what you want to read
Time-flexible – you can read it when you want
Customized address – different section for different people
Easily archived – and easily searched – indices of stories. Internet publications are different in this respect given the relatively recent emergence of Internet news publications, as well as the limited archives that many websites maintain
Provides stable and easily referenced record. Papers of record (i.e. New York Times) create the ‘official story’
Broadcast news
Sequential – news, weather, sports
Time-fixed – happens at particular time of day
Universal address – same news for everyone
Fleeting – if you don’t record it, it’s gone
Provides sense of immediacy
The medium through which you get news matters 

6. Where TV News Comes From
Earliest news broadcasts were offered as a “public service” in part to justify the ability for stations to secure licenses through the FCC.
Early news advertised the “liveness” of television, especially through remote cameras. TV comes into home as part of a broader (1950s) cultural fascination with new technologies, and the news emphasizes this weather gadgets and helicopters.
Audiences were already familiar with the format of news from radio, but the image component added a 2nd dimension to news experience, i.e. radio with pictures. The Kennedy-Nixon debates in the 60s were the first held on TV and as such they really demonstrated how the medium could be used (and how public images could be framed in the process).
Over the course of TV history, news became a major source of advertiser revenue because of broad audience demographics. News serves up audience to advertisers.
News expands from 15 to 30 minutes during the Vietnam war.

7. A Common Myth of TV News
MYTH: Broadcast TV news is primarily a source of information for its audience.
Most Americans get news from TV but don’t necessarily know more about important issues & events. Why? Because of …
Socially-based scheduling. Dinnertime and bedtime are not good times to retain info, and thus low information retention rate among audience members.
Predictable coverage. Local news starts with death, then weather, sports, etc.
Infotainment. News is provided by networks whose goal is to entertain not impart information

8. Why you need a critique of news
News and information have long been thought to be the backbone of American Democracy.
News is often presented as fact and, therefore, self-evident (and widely trusted).
Many of the common criticisms of news that we are used to hearing are erroneous (e.g. the news is too liberal, the news is too conservative).
An understanding of the process of news-making will help clarify why stories turn out the way they do (which helps us see that news is not a mirror of reality but a manufactured product).
Because if news media fuel political education and participation the we need to make sure they are doing their job (and, often times, they are not).

9. Conventions of News Narrative Objectivity Genre Conventions
Reporting follows a story format, it not just randomly assembled.
Narrative instructs us about how to feel, and it fulfills expectations.
Objectivity
A style of writing or set of procedures to be followed. It is the standard of professionalism for journalists.
As a convention, objectivity is to truth what realism is to reality: it bears no direct and necessary relationship (an objective story does not necessarily have to be true).
Genre Conventions
With respect to TV broadcast news, footage is often cut with reference to existing genres of entertainment media.

10. Narrative in News News stories are stories
Narrative Frame – the mood and style of narrative (suspense, comedic, tragic, excitement and fear)
Plot – what actually happens (always highly selective b/c you can’t report on everything that happens)
Characters – each character has a role (good, bad, concerned citizen, etc.)

11. Objectivity as a set of formal procedures
Objectivity allows journalists to maintain a professional distance from the story by following a set of procedures in his or her writing:
Presentation of conflicting possibilities
Stories are often written with 2 sides, despite the fact that there might be more than two sides.
Each side is not necessarily treated in the same way or given equal attention. For ex. most stories about political protests and arrests tend to feature the voices of police and/or city officials more prominently than those of the people (legitimately or illegitimately) arrested.
Judicious use of quotation marks
Reporters find experts to validate information and includes within their stories. This is also called sourcing.
One of the problems with sourcing is that experts are not always objective or bipartisan, so it sometimes makes it difficult to know who or what to believe.
Structuring information in an appropriate sequence
Stories are written using the INVERTED PYRAMID: all the important information – who, what, where, when, how – is included in the lead (sometimes written as lede) sentence and the lead paragraph. The rest of the story unpacks and supports the lead paragraph.
Appropriate sequencing makes editor’s job easier and saves time.

12. How objectivity protects journalists
Political distance
By being objective, the reporter is seen as nonpartisan, hence trustworthy.
Expertise
Reporters have special training and skills that are specific to the trade.
Factuality
It is not the reporter’s job to say whether the perspectives offered by experts are true or false – the job of the reporter is to quote sources accurately and, whenever necessary, to try and counterbalance misleading quotes (from one source) with factual information from another source.
Rules replace ethics
By writing stories that follow the ‘recipe’ of objectivity, reporters can do their jobs without having to make ethical decisions based on the ways that they feel about the subject of the news story.

13. The problem with objectivity
Objectivity is impossible because all statements of fact imply a value statement. One cannot remove oneself from the process. It is impossible to write without a point-of-view.
We wrongly assume that without objective reporting democracy will collapse. However, non-objective, fact-checked reporting can lead to very good journalism (for example, Matt Taibbi’s work on Wall St or the work of citizen journalists).
Having faith in the objectivity of journalism makes it difficult for people to learn how to critique the ways in which certain news stories are historically or habitually covered by the press (for ex. the build up to war in Iraq).
False equivocation = Giving equal time to perspectives that lack equal merit (for ex. the climate change ‘debate’ in the U.S.)

14. News vs. Opinion/Punditry
Opinions are found in newspapers in editorial pages and columns, letters to the editor, book, movie and music reviews and political/editorial cartoons. In these forms of communication, writers often mix fact and opinion. So it is not always easy to tell whether something is based on verifiable information or someone's particular viewpoint. For example, a well written editorial uses several facts to back up the expressed opinion.

15. Journalists and Politics
There is a fallacious notion that news media is inherently liberal. Reporters are generally liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues; the same is true with print and editorial policies. BUT…journalism is stridently CENTRIST in its orientation. For example, journalists try to remain aloof when something bad comes out about a political candidate, and they rarely (if ever) criticize politicians for “lying,” etc.
The critique of journalism as liberal masks the fact that news media are primarily owned by millionaires (and, increasingly, billionaires) with conservative political agendas. More broadly, news has very specific ideological assumptions that shape the ways in which stories are told…or whether they are told at all (see our chapter & notes on ideology). For example: war, the economy, environmentalism, and the so-called ‘war on terror’ are all covered in ways that severally limit the range of debate.

16. The Liberal vs. Conservative Critique
TWO COMMON SCHOOLS OF NEWS CRITICISM
The Conservative Critique – news media are too liberal
The Liberal Critique – news media are too conservative
Both sides want to answer the question: What’s wrong with the news? While these are seen as ‘opposing’ critiques, both perspectives share a number of common assumptions about the function and purpose of news (both in terms of content and the way the news industry works).
MAIN POINT: Focusing on the issue of whether newspapers are ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ does not allow us to focus attention on some of the larger problems associated with how news is made and interpreted.
For example…

17. Free Speech & News Filters
When Americans think about free speech, they tend to support a view that presumes that one’s freedom is contingent on the ability to speak one’s mind with assurance that one has protection from government intervention, i.e. arresting one for the substance of one’s speech such as one’s political ideology. This is a completely legitimate perspective for citizens of this or any other nation to hold, but when it comes to the way in which we think about the relationships between free speech and a free press, such a perspective often makes people blind to how private restraints on free speech can and do operate. In other words, people tend to just worry about the government instead of questioning whether a for-profit, market-based (private) media system actually provides an appropriate venue for free speech. With such issues in mind, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman famously argued that such restraints on speech are, in fact, present in American journalism. They refer to these restraints as filters that inhibit the functioning of a truly free press. The main point: Such ‘filters’ prevent certain issues and ideas from getting into the news; it’s a sifting process. They are large-scale structural factors, not the doing of individual journalists.

18. Chomsky & Herman’s Five Filters
Size and Ownership of the Mass Media
News media are BIG corporations with a strong profit imperative, as well as formal & informal social networks connecting them to other big corporations. Consequently, issues related to economics, international trade, and labor tend to reinforce the merits of the free market, corporations, and corporate policies. For example: one is unlikely to hear serious debate in the press over media policies that do not favor existing ownership structures.
Advertising
When news outlets have to rely on advertising to pay their bills, there is an inherent conflict of interests at stake when it comes to reporters tackling specific issues, or taking on certain interests. For example, if half the revenue for a news program comes from ads placed by oil and gas companies, do you think reporters and editors feel free to do hard-hitting stories on those same companies?
A reliance on advertising can also dictate the kind of content featured on TV news, in particular, because companies don’t want to buy ads on programs with adversarial content or stories that threaten peoples’ worldview. They want people in a ‘buying mood’.
Sources
People with in positions of power (govt. officials, corporate officers, etc.) are more likely to be quoted in news stories than critics and dissenters, regardless of their expertise. As a result of doing this for decades, the credibility of such elites becomes instantaneous in the mind of news readers/viewers, whereas more critical voices are viewed with skepticism, and often presented as antagonistic.
Reporters are overworked, underpaid, and have deadlines that need to be met. They must find ways to make their jobs easier, and PR (in the form of press and video releases) helps to fill the gap. The problem is that all PR has an angle, whereas professional journalism is supposed to be objective and dispassionate. Some PR gets into news with little or no editing (particularly with broadcast news).
Finally, if a journalists alienates a source (through tough questions, for example), then the source won’t talk to them.  

19. Five Filters on Free Press (continued)
Flak
Flak is organized, institutional criticism of news. It is NOT when folks simply writing letters (or making phone calls) to complain about content published in a newspaper or broadcast on TV.
It is typically done on behalf of, and/or funded by, businesses or political operatives who systematically complain to news organizations when their interests are threatened. For example, a hard-hitting investigate news report, or even just an opinion piece, about animal abuse on factory farms will unleash a huge amount of organized criticism of both the journalists responsible for the story as well as the news organization in which it appears – regardless of whether the story is completely factual.
The point is to put the pressure on news organizations who threaten the power and/or legitimacy of specific interests. that focuses on businesses who complain about reporters and stories 
Ideological Premises of the system
Chomsky & Herman actually refer to the 5th filter as Anti-Communism since this was the dominant ‘lens’ through which U.S. news stories about foreign affairs, international trade, and military conflict were crafted for several decades. Since ‘communism’ does not pose the same threat to the U.S. that it once did, it is more accurate to think of this filter in terms of ideology, since there are new political ideas that shape how similar kinds of stories are told in the present day.
For example, it is very difficult for Americans to get news about most countries or political events in the Middle East without those stories being ‘filtered’ by the issue of terrorism or, perhaps, radical Islam. This happens in terms of the way news outlets select which stories they will cover, and the way which such stories are framed. While government officials have a vested interest in spinning information in this way, a truly free press would avoid such a practice based on their stated commitments to objectivity. As an experiment, try finding a news story about virtually anything in Iran or Syria that does not make reference to the country’s government or political leadership.
Dominant ideologies also render many political positions as invalid, fringe, or downright crazy. For example, you will almost never see a self-identified socialist quoted in a U.S. news story about politics or economics in a way that takes such a position seriously, regardless of whether such a position has merits or is seen favorably by many Americans.
MAIN POINT: These help filter out certain things/ideas from getting into the news.
They are large-scale structural factors – not attributable to individual journalists. It’s a sifting process.

20. The Construction of Frames in News Journalism

21. Defining framing
“News is a window of the world. Through its frame, American learn of themselves and others, of their institutions, leaders, and life styles, and those of other nations and their peoples…The view through a window depends upon whether the window is large or small, has many panes or few, whether the glass is opaque or clear, whether the window faces a street or a backyard. - Gaye Tuchman, Making News, 1980 “What makes the world beyond direct experience look natural is a media frame.” “Frames are principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens and what matters…Thus for organizational reasons alone, frames are unavoidable, and journalism is organized to regulate their production” - Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (1980)

22. Defining framing (cont)
Frames are not the same as topics
Frames as regular patterns

23. Journalistic tools in framing the news
Choosing the news angle
Selecting the sources (and avoiding others)
Formulating the headline, the lead of a news story and selecting the visual image
Culture bound narratives: formulating a new episode in a longer and well known story.

24. Framing early student protest against the war against Vietnam (1965)
Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (1980): analyzes the earliest framing devices in main stream media outlets.
“15000 White House pickets denounce Vietnam War”

25. Framing devices in coverage of Vietnam protests
Trivialization (of age, dress, language, style, goals)
Polarization (emphasizing counterdemonstrations)
Emphasis on internal dissention
Marginalization (deviant or unrepresentative)
Disparagement by numbers (under-counting)
Reliance on statements by government officials

26. Framing the WTO
“A few Starbucks windows smashed by a hundred ‘anarchists’ where all the shallower news reports needed to see to decide “what’s the story”, even if tens or hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were marching by playfully, in peace” (Todd Gitlin about Seattle 1999)

27. New Example: Ferguson The police violence frame:
Emphasizes the centrality of Michael Brown’s murder as the key issue and focal point
Emphasizes the impunity of the Ferguson Police Department
Puts this specific incident in a larger context of police repression in Ferguson
Puts this specific incident in a larger context of both police violence and police militarization on a national scale

30. New Example: Ferguson The peaceful protesters frame:
Emphasizes the righteousness and necessity of peoples’ response to murder
The rioters/looters frame:
Emphasizes the criminality of protest, despite the circumstances or the specifics of the incident
Links this specific incident to other acts of civil unrest and competing philosophies of ‘direct action’

33. New Example: Ferguson The black criminal ‘thug’ frame:
Relies on racist ‘dog whistles’ utilized by public figures and politicians since the 1950s, as well as gross news characterizations of black criminality that extend back into the late 1800s
Implies that police actions are/were justified, if not provoked
Implies that all black men, especially youth, are potential criminals (the same treatment applied to Treyvon Martin coverage).
Re-frames the issue as one of ‘law breaking’ as opposed to racism, regardless of context or circumstance
Subsequently, it relies on false notion of ‘reverse racism’

35. Conclusion:
Framing matters!