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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Inventing RealityDeciding What Matters
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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!

• 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.

7.4 Earthquake Strikes Mauritania 60,000 Feared
Dead
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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.

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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

• Negativity Bad news is good news. Bad news has
  many of the other characteristics as well - it
  may be unexpected, unambiguous, consonant with
  our general expectations about the world, it may
  be 'big', e.g. a major catastrophe etc.

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Framing Positive or NegativeH5N1 Death Toll
Projections 2006 6000 deaths

• Hong Kong is preparing for the outbreak of a
  mutated form of bird flu which will kill 6,000
  people. Two alternative programs to combat the
  disease have been proposed.

• Program A
• 2000 people will be saved.
• Program B
• 2 in 3 chance that zero people will be saved
• BUT
• 1 in 3 chance 6000 people will be saved

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Framing Positive or Negative H5N1 Death Toll
Projections 2006 6000 deaths

• Hong Kong is preparing for the outbreak of a
  mutated bird flu which will kill 6000 people. Two
  alternative programs to combat the disease have
  been proposed.

• Program C
• 4000 people will die.
• Program D
• 1 in 3 chance that nobody will die
• BUT,
• 2 in 3 chance that 6000 people will die.

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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.