Inventing the News

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Inventing the News
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What is News?
News is not found or gathered. It is
selected and created. It is a creation of a
complex political, cultural and business process.
The process includes the selection, exclusion and
framing of events into a form intelligible to
specific communities.
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Our News Who Decides?

• Narrative and Editorial Decisions By News
  Organizations (Journalistic Framing)
• Narrative and Editorial Activity By News Makers
  (Public Relations/Propaganda)
• News Reporting Process/Reader Interest,
  Expectation and Preferences
• Economics of News Business

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Narrative Frame
Where is this? Who is this man? What is he
doing? Where is he going? Why is the house
burning? Lightning? Riots? War? Terrorist
Attack? Accident?
Narrative Frame
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Framing Events The Power to Define Reality
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Hong Kong Violent Crime Statistics 2003 to 2007
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Los Angeles County Crime Statistics 2006
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Whats News? versusWhats Important?Galtung
and Ruge

• Frequency
• Threshold
• Absolute intensity
• Intensity Increase
• Unambiguity
• Meaningfulness
• Cultural proximity
• Relevance
• Consonance
• Predictability
• Demand

• Unexpectedness
• Unpredictability
• Scarcity
• Continuity
• Elite Nations
• Elite People
• Reference to Persons
• Reference to Something Negative

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Frequency

• Frequency the time-span of an event and the
  extent to which it 'fits' the frequency of the
  newspaper's or news broadcast's schedule.

• Background to the news, economic, social or
  political trends - is less likely to make it into
  the news as such trends take a long time to
  unfold.

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Threshold

• Threshold How big is an event? Is it big enough
  to make it into the news?
• Whose news?

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Unambiguity

• Unambiguity How clear is the meaning of an
  event? The mass media generally tend to go for
  closure, Events like murder, car crashes and
  robberies are easily grasped so are likely to
  make it into the news.
• Survey of 300 leading US media professionals
  across the US, conducted by The Columbia
  Journalism Review, revealed that the most regular
  reason why stories don't appear is that they are
  'too complicated'.

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Unambiguity

• Taking complex issues and reducing them to an
  unambiguous story.

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Meaningfulness
HKU Student Attacked by Crazed Lecturer in Lan
Kwai Fong 7.4 Earthquake Strikes Mauritania
60,000 Feared Dead

• Events happening in cultures very different from
  our own will not be seen as being inherently
  meaningful to audiences here. On the other hand,
  events in continental Europe and the USA will
  make it into the news. The same is likely to
  apply within our own society, ethnic groups, the
  underprivileged etc. receiving less coverage.

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Consonance

• Consonance Does the event match the media's
  expectations? Journalists have a pretty good idea
  of the 'angle' they want to report an event from,
  even before they get there. If the media expect
  something to happen, then it will.
• Covering Rallies, Violence
• Government Involvement/Approval

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Unexpectedness

• Dog bites man is not news. 'Man bites dog' is
  news.
• If an event is highly unpredictable, then it is
  likely to make it into the news. The
  unpredictability does, however, need to be within
  the confines of meaningfulness and unambiguity.

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Continuity

• Once a story has been covered, it is likely to
  receive further coverage.
• Once a story has been covered, similar stories
  are likely to be covered.

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Elite Nations

• Reference to elite nations This relates again to
  'cultural proximity'. Those nations which are
  culturally closest to the US and UK will receive
  most of English language coverage -.

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Elite Persons

• The media pay attention to important people.
  Anyone the media pay attention to must be
  important even when what they say or do isnt.

Bush opens long weekend with a round of golf
KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine (AP) President Bush
opened a long weekend of golf and fishing Friday
by hooking his first drive into a riverbank. He
found his stroke on his second try, cheered by
his father, who proclaimed it a "good ball!"
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Personalization

• Personalisation This connects with
  unambiguity and meaningfulness. Events are seen
  as the actions of individuals. Incompatibility
  between the Government's policies and the
  Opposition's is presented as a personal showdown
  between the two party leaders.
• Social and political issues are only reported if
  they can be embodied in an individual, and thus
  social conflict of interest is personalised into
  conflict between individuals. The effect of this
  is that the social origins of events are lost,
  and individual motivation is assumed to be the
  origin of all action.

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Negativity The PK Principle
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Framing Positive or NegativeImpact of Positive
and NegativeFraming on Risk AversionKahneman
Tservesky, 1984 Study
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Prospect Theory

• The prospect of a loss has a greater impact on
  decision making than does the prospect of an
  equivalent gain.
• People are more likely to choose risk-free
  alternatives in cases of gain
• People are more likely to choose risky
  alternatives to avoid loss.

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DANGER!!!!
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