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NEWS CUlTURE

Second Edition

Stuart A I I a n

Open University Press

McGraw-Hill Education

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First published 1999

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Second edition 2004

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• MAKING N[WS: TRUT�. ID[OLOGY AND N[WSWORK

The fundamental obligation of the reporter is to the truth. (Fergal Keane, BBC journalist)

News may be true, but it is not truth, and reporters and officials seldom see it the same way.

(James Reston, US journalist)

Truth, according to an old journalistic saying, is the news reporter's stock-in-trade. This principle was reaffirmed by Fergal Keane, a widely respected BBC foreign cor respondent, in a televised Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture (broadcast 20 October 1997 on BBC 1). In his words:

The art of the reporter should more than anything else be a celebration of the truth . . . The reason millions of people watch and listen is because we place the interests of truth above everything else. Trust is our byword. That is the unalter able principle. It is our heritage and our mission, and I would rather sweep the streets of London than compromise on that . . . The fundamental obligation of the reporter is to the truth. Start messing with that for any reason and you become the moral accomplices of the secret policemen.

These are powerful words, eloquently spoken. At one level, it seems to me, the implica tions of Keane's argument are clear: a journalism resolutely committed to 'the truth' must never hesitate to uncover and expose lies, deceit and misrepresentation regardless of the consequences.

At another, more subtly complex level, however, the implications of Keane's declar ation quickly prove to be much more challenging to discern. This reference to 'the truth' begs a rather awkward question: namely, whose definition of what is true is being upheld as 'the truth' ? The answer to that question goes to the heart of ongoing debates over whether or not the news media 'reflect' social reality truthfully, or the

MAKING NtWS: TRUTH, !OtOlOGY AND NtWSWORK I •

extent to which journalists can produce a truthful news account. These debates typic ally restrict the discussion to one regarding how best to separate 'facts' from 'values'. The assumption that 'the truth' resides entirely in the former leaves to one side the problem of whether or not such a separation is actually possible in the first place. In light of these types of issues, then, this chapter will examine how the news media work to define the ideological limits of 'truth' by exploring how journalists produce news accounts which claim to be 'objective' reflections of reality.

In the first instance, our attention turns to consider two competing perspectives on the role the news media play in structuring public awareness and debate about social problems. Specifically, the 'liberal pluralist position' will be counterpoised against the 'political economy position' so as to identify several factors pertinent to the larger social context within which journalists operate. Next, we examine a range of insights generated by researchers attempting to explore the ideological dynamics of newswork practices, that is, the day-to-day routines of news production which inform the cultural construction of news as an 'impartial' form of social knowledge. Here the focus is on the extent to which the codified conventions of newswork contribute to the naturaliza tion of the various social divisions and inequalities indicative of modern society, prin cipally by helping to reaffirm these inequalities as being appropriate, legitimate or inevitable in ideological terms.

Structuring public debate

The conviction that the citizen's right to freedom of speech is best protected by a mar ket-based mass media system is at the core of the liberal pluralist conception of the journalist's role in modern society. Many of its advocates, who arguably include most journalists themselves, maintain that the news media represents a fourth estate (as distinguished, in historical terms, from the church, the judiciary and the commons). Journalism, as a result, is charged with the crucial mission of ensuring that members of the public are able to draw upon a diverse 'market place of ideas' to both sustain and challenge their sense of the world around them. This responsibility for giving expres sion to a richly pluralistic spectrum of information sources places the journalist at the centre of public life. Thus it is the news media, to the extent that they facilitate the formation of public opinion, which are said to make democratic control over governing relations possible.

The performance of this democratic function is contingent upon the realization of 'press freedom' as a principle safeguarded from any possible impediment associated with power and privilege. The news media, according to the liberal pluralists, must carry out the crucial work of contributing to the 'system of checks and balances' popularly held to be representative of democratic structures and processes. More spe cifically, by fostering a public engagement with the issues of the day, they are regarded as helping to underwrite a consensual (albeit informal) process of surveillance whereby

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the activities of the state and corporate sectors are made more responsive to the dic tates of public opinion. As arenas of arbitration, the news media are said to allow for clashes over decision making to be expressed, adjudicated and ultimately reconciled in such a way as to ensure that neither cumulative nor continuous influence is accorded to a single set of interests (see also McQuail 1992; O'Neill 1992; Carper 1997; Wheeler 1997). Liberal pluralist researchers insist that the capacity of a particular news organ ization to present the necessary 'plurality of viewpoints' is preserved 'by virtue of the clash and discordancy of interests which exist between owners, managers, editors and journalists' (Bennett 1982: 41; see also Golding and Murdock 1996).

Opposition to the liberal pluralist position, despite its continued salience in public debates about the news media, has been advanced from a number of different angles by researchers adopting a much more critical stance. For these alternative approaches, many of which rely on a political economy framework for their analyses, the basic tenets of liberal pluralism are in need of serious revision. T he writings of Karl Marx have provided an important starting point for several of these lines of critique, includ ing a celebrated passage which he co-wrote with Frederick Engels in The German Ideology around 1845:

T he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. T he class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subjec� to it . . . In so far, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they . . . among other things . . . regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

(Marx and Engels 1970 [1845]: 64-5)

T his passage clearly challenges several of the assumptions underlying liberal pluralist arguments. T he 'ruling ideas of the epoch', to be loosely understood as the representa tions of a 'dominant ideology', are not forced on the subordinate classes, nor are they to be reduced (conspiratorially) to 'useful fictions'. Rather, the Marxist position main tains that the capitalist ruling class must work to advance its particular class-specific interests by depicting its ideas, norms and values in universal terms. T hat is to say, these 'ruling ideas' need to be mobilized as being consistent with the beliefs of ordinary people, as being the only correct, rational opinions available to them (Marx and Engels 1970 [1845]: 65-6). Mass media institutions, whether publicly or privately owned, are controlled by members of this ruling class (see Figure 3.1). Each one of these institu tions reproduces these 'ruling ideas', to varying degrees, so as to lend justification to the class inequalities engendered by capitalist society as being reasonable or common sensical. In this way, the media help to ensure that the danger of radical protests emerging to disrupt the status quo is sharply reduced.

Figure 3.1 News Corporation

NEWSPAPERS

United States New York Post

United Kingdom The Times

The Sunday Times

The Sun

News of the World

TSL Education

Australia More than 100 national, metropolitan, suburban, regional and Sunday titles, including the following:

The Australian

The Weekend Australian

The Daily Telegraph

The Sunday Telegraph

Herald Sun

Sunday Herald Sun

The Courier-Mail (42 per cent) Sunday Mail (Brisbane) (42 per cent) The Advertiser

Sunday Mail (Adelaide)

The Mercury

Sunday Tasmanian

The Sunday Times

Northern Territory News

Sunday Territorian

Fiji The Fiji Times

Sunday Times

Nai Lalakai

Shanti Dut

Papua New Guinea Post-Courier (63 per cent)

MAKING N[WS: TRUT�. ID[OlOGY AND N[WSWORK I •

FILMED ENT ERTAINMENT

United States Fox Filmed Entertainment'�

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Fox 2000 Pictures Fox Searchlight Pictures Fox Music Twentieth Century Fox Home

Entertainment Twentieth Century Fox Licensing and

Merchandising Twentieth Century Fox Television Fox Television Studios Twentieth Television Regency Televisiont (50 per cent) Blue Sky Studios

Australia Fox Studios Australia

Latin America Fox Studios Baja'� Canal Fox'�

T ELEVISION

United States Fox Broadcasting Company'� Fox Television Stations'�

WNY W New York, NY WWOR New York, NY KT T V Los Angeles, CA KCOP Los Angeles, CA WFLD Chicago, IL W PW R Chicago, IL WTXF Philadelphia, PA KDFW Dallas, TX KDFI Dallas, TX WFXT Boston, MA WT TG Washington, DC

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Figure 3.1 continued

WDCA Washington, DC WAGA Atlanta, GA WJBK Detroit, MI KRIV Houston, TX KTXH Houston, TX KMSP Minneapolis, MN WFTC Minneapolis, MN W TVT Tampa, FL KSAZ Phoenix, AZ KUTP Phoenix, AZ WJW Cleveland, OH KDVR Denver, CO W RBW Orlando, FL WOFL Orlando, FL KTVI St. Louis, MO WITI Milwaukee, WI WDAF Kansas City, MO KSTU Salt Lake City, UT WBRC Birmingham, AL WHBQ Memphis, TN WGHP Greensboro, NC KTBC Austin, TX WUTB Baltimore, MD WOGX Gainesville, FL

Europe Balkan News Corporation

Asia STAR STAR Plus

STAR News STAR Movies STAR Mandarin Movies STAR World STAR Gold STAR Chinese Channel ESPN STAR Sports (50 per cent) Channel [V] Xing Kong Wei Shi Vijay Television (51 per cent)

Latin America Cine Canal Telecine

Australia and New Zealand Premium Movie Partnershipt

(20 per cent)

CABLE NETWORK PROGR AMMING

United States Fox News Channel':- Fox Cable Networks Group':

FX Fox Movie Channel Fox Regional Sports Networks

(13 owned and operated):f Regional Programming Partnerst

(40 per cent) Fox Sports World SPEED Channel Fox Pan American Sportst

(38 per cent) Rogers Sports Nett (20 per cent) National Sports Partnerst (50 per cent) National Advertising Partnerst

(50 per cent) National Geographic Channel -

Domestict (67 per cent) National Geographic Channel

Internationalt (50 per cent) Los Angeles Dodgers STAPLES Centert (40 per cent)

Australia Fox Sports Australia (50 per cent)

DIRECT BROADCAST SATELLITE TELEVISION

Europe Sky Italia (80 per cent)

Sky Sport

Figure 3.1 continued

Calcio Sky Sky Cinema Sky TG 24

British Sky Broadcasting (35 per cent) Sky News Sky Sports Sky Travel Sky One Sky Movies

Latin America Sky Latin America DTH Platforms

Mexico - Innova (30 per cent) Brazil - NetSat (49 per cent) Sky Multi-Country Partners

(30 per cent)

Australia F OXTEL (25 per cent)

Asia Phoenix Satellite Television

(45 per cent) Hathway Cable and Datacom

(26 per cent) China Network Systems

(18 Affiliated Cable Systems) (20 per cent)

Sky Perfect TV! (8 per cent)

MAGAZINEs· AND INSERTS

United States and Canada News America Marketing

In-Store FSI (SmartSource Magazine)

Notes

MAKING N[WS: TRUTU, ID[OlOGY AND N[WSWORK I •

SmartSource iGroup News Marketing Canada

The Weekly Standard Gemstar-TV Guide International

(43 per cent)

Australia InsideOut donna hay

BOOK PUBLISHING

United States, Canada, Europe and Australasia HarperCollins Publishers

OTHER

Europe NDS (78 per cent) Broadsystem Ventures The Wireless Group (19 per cent) Convoys Group Sky Radio (93 per cent) News Outdoor Group (75 per cent)

Australia and Asia National Rugby League (50 per cent) News Interactive Festival Records Newspoll (50 per cent) UTV Software Communications

(20 per cent)

::- Held by News Corporation's 81 per cent owned Fox Entertainment Group (FEG).

t Reflects percentage held by News Corporation's 8 1 per cent owned FEG.

:j: Fox Regional Sports Networks are all 100 per cent owned except Fox Sports Net South, which is

88 per cent owned, and Sunshine Network which is 94 per cent owned.

Source: News Corporation Annual Report 2003. Figures as of 30 June, 2003

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Marx's personal knowledge of journalism was shaped by the ten years he spent, while living in London, as a European correspondent for the New York Tribune. An impassioned advocate of a free press, who regarded it as a means to counter forces of oppression for the greater welfare of society, he nevertheless did not write at length about the news media. For political economists engaged with these issues today, then, Marx's preliminary insights need to be recast in relation to journalistic institutions the likes of which he could not have even anticipated in the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, modern political economists have retained Marx's focus on class power as a determinant factor of social control in order to document the impact of changing patterns of news media power and influence within local, national and (increasingly) global contexts. Of particular concern are the growing levels of concen tration, conglomeration and integration of ownership in this sector, for these dynam ics are directly linked to a range of issues associated with control over journalistic content.

For example, many political economists argue that news media power is being restricted to an ever smaller number of (usually white and male) hands; that the corporate priority of profit maximization is leading to increasingly superficial news formats where content becomes evermore uniform and the spaces available to report on controversial issues sharply reduced; and, that corporate fears over 'the bottom line' are reshaping judgements about newsworthiness in ways which frequently all but silence alternative or oppositional voices. Such voices - including those in the labour movement, trade unions, feminists, anti-racists, environmentalists, anti-poverty activ ists and other groups committed to progressive social change- are routinely character ized as representing a threat to the interests of 'market sensitive' news organizations. Thus the implications of reducing news to just a commodity form like any other are profound, particularly when these types of critical voices are struggling just to be heard within the confines of ideological parameters conditioned by the drive for 'efficiency gains' (and with them greater advertising profits). It is with these kinds of concerns in mind that political economists continue to channel their research into campaigns aiming to bring about a fundamental reorganization of the current dynamics of media ownership and control, a process to be achieved primarily through the radical restructuring of state regulatory policies.

In seeking to provide a conceptual framework to account for the interrelation of these types of dynamics at the level of news content, Herman and Chomsky (1988) have developed a 'propaganda model'. Writing from a US perspective, they argue that there exists within that country's commercial news media an institutional bias which guarantees the mobilization of certain 'propaganda campaigns' on behalf of an elite consensus (propaganda is deemed to be broadly equivalent with dominant ideology in this analysis). Notwithstanding this 'guarantee', however, the economic power of owners of capital over the media does not culminate in the creation of a political vacuum. Rather, in their view, the news media 'permit - indeed, encourage - spirited debate, criticism and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system

MA�ING N[WS: TRUT�. ID[OlOGY AND N[WSWOR� I •

of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus' (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 302). Liberal pluralist treatments of the news media as autonomous institutions are thereby to be countered by examining the systematic subordination of the media vis-a-vis the functional requirements of dominant classes. To the degree that the powerful are able to coordinate the fluctuating boundaries of public opinion through the exercise of control over what will be found in media content, class power will be successfully reproduced.

Liberal pluralist notions of a 'free', 'independent' and 'objective' news media are thus countered by Herman and Chomsky's (1988: 298) contention that if the news media perform a societal purpose at all, it is to 'inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state'. Propaganda campaigns may be instituted either by the state itself or by one or more of the top media firms (or even in unison), but in all instances the collaboration of the mass media is a prerequisite (1988: 33). In order to specify the 'secret' at work behind the 'unidirectionality of propaganda campaigns', Herman and Chomsky (1988: 33) define its effectivity in terms of a 'multiple filter system'. By drawing attention to these respective 'filters', they are seeking to demonstrate the extent to which journalists reiterate uncritically official positions of the state while, simultaneously, adhering to its political agenda. The resultant news product, they maintain, ultimately makes for 'a propaganda system that is far more credible and effective in putting over a patriotic agenda than one with official censorship' (1988: xiv).

Briefly, five component 'filters' of this model, each of which interact with and reinforce one another, are identified by Herman and Chomsky (1988: 3-31) as follows:

1 The first filter to be accounted for concerns the commercial basis of the dominant news organizations: specifically, the size and the scale of the investment required to run major news outlets, the concentration and conglomeration of ownership and cross-ownership patterns, and the power and wealth of the proprietors and their managers. Close ties between the media elite and their political and corpor ate counterparts ensure that an 'establishment orientation' is ordinarily main tained at the level of news coverage (here issues of placement, tone, context and fullness of treatment are particularly important). It is this top tier of major news companies which, together with the government and wire services, 'defines the news agenda and supplies much of the national and international news to the lower tiers of the media' (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 4-5). At the same time, the resultant 'profit orientation' of these organizations, many of which are under intense pressure from stockholders, directors and bankers to focus on 'the bottom line', is a further key aspect of this filter shaping news coverage.

2 The second filter pertains to the influence of advertising, the principal income source for commercial news organizations, on media content. 'With advertising,' Herman and Chomsky (1988: 14) write, 'the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The adver tisers' choices influence

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media prosperity and survival.' Historically, media relying on revenue from sales alone have found it very difficult to compete with the resources available to their advertising-subsidized rivals. This dynamic typically leads to such outlets being pushed to the margins, where eventually many are forced to close down. Herman and Chomsky also point out that advertisers are primarily interested in affluent audiences due to their 'purchasing power', and thus are less inclined to support forms of news and public affairs content which attract people of more modest means. Moreover, there is a strong preference for content which does not call into question their own politically conservative principles or interferes with the 'buying mood' of the audience.

3 The news media's over-reliance on government and corporate 'expert' sources is cited as the third filter. Herman and Chomsky (1988: 18) describe the symbiotic relationship that journalists have with their information sources, arguing that it is driven both by economic necessity and a reciprocity of interests. These powerful establishment sources provide journalists with a steady, reliable flow of 'the raw material of news', thereby allowing news organization to expend their resources more 'efficiently'. The relative authority and prestige of these sources also helps to enhance the credibility of the journalist's account. The routine inclusion of such 'experts' not only shapes the news agenda, but simultaneously makes it much more difficult for independent, non-official sources to gain access. 'By giving these purveyors of the preferred view a great deal of exposure,' Herman and Chomsky (1988: 24) maintain, 'the media confer status and make them the obvious candi dates for opinion and analysis.'

4 Filter number four addresses the role of 'flak' or negative responses to media content as a means of disciplining news organizations. Complaints, including threats of punitive action, 'may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress' (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 26). 'Flak' can be produced either by individuals, state officials in their ceaseless efforts to 'correct' news coverage, or by various advocacy groups, includ ing politically motivated 'media monitoring' campaigns or 'think tank' oper ations. Such forms of 'flak' can prove costly for news organizations, not only at the level of legal disputes but also in terms of the potential withdrawal of pat ronage by advertisers due to organized consumer boycotts. Still, Herman and Chomsky (1988: 28) suggest that these makers of 'flak' receive respectful attention by the media, only rarely having their impact on news management activities explicitly acknowledged.

5 The final filter is the role of the 'ideology of anti-communism' as a 'political control mechanism'. 'This ideology', in Herman and Chomsky's (1988: 29) words, 'helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states [such as China or Cuba in the 1990s] and radicalism.' This 'national religion' of 'anti-communism', they argue,

MAKING N[WS: TRUT�. ID[OlOGY AND N[WSWORK I 0

has served to fragment the political left and the labour movements, as well as ensured that liberals and social democrats are kept on the defensive. Its corres ponding influence on the news media has also had far-reaching implications: 'In normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for "our side" considered an entirely legitimate news practice' (1988: 30-1).

Overall, then, only the 'cleansed residue', having passed through these successive filters, is pronounced 'fit' to call news. This is not to suggest, however, that the news media are monolithic in their treatment of controversial issues. Rather, Herman and Chomsky (1988: xii) state: 'Where the powerful are in disagreement, there will be a certain diversity of tactical judgments on how to attain generally shared aims, reflected in media debate.' Nevertheless, views which contest the underlying political premises of the dominant state discourse, especially with regard to the exercise of state power, will almost always fall outside of the parameters demarcated by the limits of elite disagreement. The 'filters' identified above are deemed to be working to reinforce these parameters in ways which make alternative news choices difficult to imagine. This process, they contend, 'occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operat ing with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values' (1988: 2).

News values and frames

The 'propaganda model' briefly mapped out above usefully highlights a range of important issues. Here, though, it is important to bear in mind that it not be interpreted so narrowly as to suggest that the news media are to be viewed strictly as purveyors of propaganda coincidental with the interests of ruling class domination. Some interpretations of Herman and Chomsky's approach risk reducing the news media to tired ideological machines confined to performing endlessly, and unfailingly, the overarching function of reproducing the prerogatives of an economic and political elite through processes of mystification. Journalists would then become little more than well-intentioned puppets whose strings are being pulled by forces they cannot fully understand. Meanwhile the news audience - admittedly an unexplored given in this model - would then appear to be composed of passive dupes consistently fooled into believing such propaganda is true.

Any conflation of news with propaganda is, in my view, unsustainable. The propa gandist, unlike the journalist (at least under ordinary circumstances), sets out with the deliberate intention of deceiving the public, of concealing 'the truth' so as to direct

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public opinion in a particular way through manipulative tactics, devices and strategies. To make the point bluntly, then, journalists are not propagandists. 'A journalist who intentionally fabricates or misleads', writes Newkirk (1998), 'is as ill equipped for journalism as a doctor who intentionally mistreats patients is for medicine'. This is not to deny, however, that the factors Herman and Chomsky attribute to 'propaganda' with their notion of 'filtering' are crucial determinants shaping the operation of the news media. Their study is also rich with startling evidence of how the US news media have been implicated in official propaganda campaigns at the level of 'foreign' news (examples of reporting examined range from Central America to Indo-China). I wish to suggest, however, that its more compelling insights regarding the determinants of news coverage need to be further developed, in the first instance by taking account of the everyday practices journalists engage in when constructing news accounts as truthful 'reflections' of reality.

For many of the critical researchers focusing squarely on the dynamics of news production, it is the culture of routine, day-to-day interactions within specific news institutions which has warranted particular attention. From a variety of different conceptual perspectives, notably those associated with cultural and media studies, sociology, criminology and ethnomethodology among others, they have sought to investigate the ideological imperatives embedded in the work of constructing news as a truthful representation of reality. An effort is made by these researchers to problematize or 'make strange' the everyday activities of journalists, or newsworkers as they are often called in these studies, as they go about performing their job. Drawing upon a range of research strategies, including questionnaires, in-depth interviews, participant observation and ethnography, these investigations have endeavoured to document the fluidly contingent means by which the ideological character of news is encoded through the professionalized norms and values of reporting.

Even a glance at the front pages of different national newspapers on a given day, or the national news broadcasts on rival networks, typically reveals a broad similarity in the 'stories' being covered, and the hierarchical order in which they have been organ ized. Journalists, as well their editors and all of the other individuals involved in the work of processing news in a particular news organization (hereafter the term 'news workers' will be used to encompass all of these different roles), bring to the task of making sense of the social world a series of 'news values'. These news values are operationalized by each newsworker, as Hall (1981) suggests, in relation to her or his 'stock of knowledge' about what constitutes 'news'. If all 'true journalists', he argues, are supposed to know instinctively what news values are, few are capable of defining them:

Journalists speak of 'the news' as if events select themselves. Further, they speak as if which is the 'most significant' news story, and which 'news angles' are most salient, are divinely inspired. Yet of the millions of events which occur every day in

MAKING NfWS: TRUT�. IDfOlOGY AND NfWSWORK I •

the world, only a tiny proportion ever become visible as 'potential news stories': and of this proportion, only a small fraction are actually produced as the day's news in the news media.

(Hall 1981: 234)

Hence the need to problematize, in conceptual terms, the operational practices in and through which news values help the newsworker to justify the selection of certain types of events as 'newsworthy' at the expense of alternative ones. To ascertain how this process is achieved, researchers have attempted to explicate the means by which certain 'news values' are embedded in the very procedures used by reporters to impose some kind of order or coherence on to the social world. After all, the world has to be rendered 'reportable' in the first place, a point succinctly made by Barthes (1973) who once observed: 'What is noted is by definition notable'.

There is an extensive research literature concerned with 'news values', much of which elaborates upon an innovative study conducted in the mid-1960s by Galtung and Ruge (1981) on the structure of foreign news in the Scandinavian press (see, for example, Epstein 1973; Roshco 1975; Tuchman 1978; Gans 1979; Fishman 1980; Hartley 1982; Ericson et al. 1987; A. Bell 1991; Dayan and Katz 1992; Zelizer 1992). In selectively drawing upon these attempts to specify the informal (largely unspoken) rules or codes of newsworthiness, the following factors may be regarded as being significant:

•

Conflict: 'balanced' journalism dictates that 'each story has two sides'; when these 'sides' are in dispute, a sense of immediacy is likely to result at the same time that potential interest is enhanced through dramatization. Relevance: the event should be seen to impinge, however indirectly, on the news audience's lives and experiences. The proximity of the event is a related factor. Timeliness: recent events are favoured, especially those that have occurred in the previous 24 hours and which can be easily monitored as they unfold in relation to institutional constraints and pressures. Simplification: the significance of an event should be relatively unambiguous; the diversity of potential interpretations may then be kept to a minimum. Personalization: an emphasis on human actors 'coping with life on the ground' is preferred over abstract descriptions of 'faceless' structures, forces or institutions. Unexpectedness: an event which is 'out of the ordinary' is likely to be 'novel' or 'new', thereby enhancing its chances of being caught in the news net. As an old cliche goes: 'Dog bites man isn't news; man bites dog is'. Continuity: an event should allow for the projection of a sense of where it 'fits in' so as to allow for prescheduling, a significant consideration for a news organiza tion allocating its resources. A related factor is its consonance or conformity to the newsworker's (and audience member's) preconceptions about what type of 'news story' it is likely to resemble. Composition: a mixture of different types of events must be processed on any given day, thus events are chosen in relation to fluctuations in the 'news hole' to be

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filled. Divisions between, for example, international, national and local news are usually clearly marked in regional newspapers and newscasts.

• Reference to elite nations: a hierarchy is often discernible here which gives priority to events in those countries which are regarded as 'directly affecting the audience's well-being', such as the USA and other members of the 'first world'. This is at the expense of those events taking place in other places, particularly developing or 'third world' countries which only infrequently receive newsworthy status (and then only under certain terms: see Chapter 7).

• Reference to elite persons: activities performed by politicians, members of the monarchy, entertainment and sporting celebrities, corporate leaders, and so forth, are far more salient in news terms than those of 'ordinary people'.

• Cultural specificity: events which conform to the 'maps of meaning' shared by newsworker and news audience have a greater likelihood of being selected, a form of ethnocentrism which gives priority to news about 'people like us' at the expense of those who 'don't share our way of life'.

• Negativity: 'bad news' is ordinarily favoured over 'good news', namely because the former usually conforms to a higher number of the above factors. As the celebrated media theorist Marshal McLuhan once remarked, advertisements constitute the only 'good news' in the newspaper.

The news culture indicative of one news organization will be at variance with that of others, of course, but researchers have been able to identify a variety of shared assump tions which recurrently underpin these daily negotiations. Thus while news values are always changing over time and are inflected differently from one news organization to the next, it is still possible to point to these and related news values as being relatively consistent criteria informing these assignments of significance.

News accounts, then, may be deconstructed in ideological terms so as to elucidate how these news values help to rule in certain types of events as 'newsworthy' while, at the same time, ruling out alternative types. At the heart of these processes of inclusion and exclusion are certain 'principles of organization' or 'frames' (Goffman 1974) which work to impose order on the multiple happenings of the social world so as to render them into a series of meaningful events. Precisely how a particular news event is 'framed' by the journalist claiming to be providing an 'objective' or 'balanced' account thus takes on a distinct ideological significance. Gitlin (1980) extends this ethno methodological notion of 'frame' to argue for a consideration of how the daily rou tines of journalism strive to naturalize the social world in accordance with certain discursive conventions. News frames, he argues, make the world beyond direct experi ence look natural; they are 'principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation com posed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters' (Gitlin 1980: 6; see also Allan 2002).

The subject of often intense negotiation between journalists and their editors, as well as their sources, frames help to render 'an infinity of noticeable details' into practicable

MHING N[WS: TRUTH, ID[OlOGY AND N[WSWOR� I •

repertoires. Frames thereby facilitate the ordering of the world in conjunction with hierarchical rules of inclusion and exclusion. As Gitlin (1980) contends:

largely unspoken and unacknowledged, [frames] organise the world both for journalists who report it and, in some important degree, for us who rely on their reports. Frames enable journalists to process large amounts of informa tion quickly and routinely: to recognise it as information, to assign it to cognitive categories, and to package it for efficient relay to their audiences. Thus, for organ isational reasons alone, frames are unavoidable, and journalism is organised to regulate their production.

(Gitlin 1980: 7)

Once a particular frame has been adopted for a news story, its principles of selection and rejection ensure that only 'information' material which is seen to be legitimate, as appropriate within the conventions of newsworthiness so defined, is to appear in the account. 'Some of this framing', Gitlin (1980: 28) argues, 'can be attributed to trad itional assumptions in news treatment: news concerns the event, not the underlying condition; the person, not the group; conflict, not consensus; the fact that "advances the story", not the one that explains it.'

The invocation of a news frame is not to be viewed, however, as a means to preclude the encoding of 'information' which might explicitly politicize the seemingly impartial definitions of social reality on offer. Rather, the very authoritativeness of the frame is contingent upon its implicit appeal to 'objectivity', which means that it needs to regu larly incorporate 'awkward facts' or even, under more exceptional circumstances, voices of dissent. The news frame's tacit claim to comprehensiveness dictates that it must be seen as 'balanced' and 'fair' in its treatment of counter-positions: indeed, after Gitlin (1980: 256), 'only by absorbing and domesticating conflicting values, definitions of reality, and demands on it, in fact, does it remain hegemonic.' Accordingly, it is through repetition, through the very everydayness of news discourse, that the prevail ing frames (once again, neither arbitrary nor fixed) acquire an ostensibly natural or taken-for-granted status.

Routinizing the unexpected

In discussing the day-to-day activities of reporting, journalists and their critics alike often draw upon the metaphor of a 'mirror' to describe how the social world is 'reflected' in news accounts. The pioneering US broadcast reporter Edward R. Murrow once famously stated, for example, that journalism 'must hold a mirror behind the nation and the world' and that, moreover, 'The mirror must have no curves and must be held with a steady hand' (cited in MacDonald 1979: 310). This language of reflection is similarly employed in critiques of news coverage to pinpoint evidence of 'bias', that is, to question whether journalists have mirrored reality in an 'objective' manner or,

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failing that, the extent to which they have allowed certain 'distortions' to creep into the reporting process.

Not surprisingly in light of the issues raised in the discussion above, many critical researchers have dismissed the 'mirror' metaphor for being too simplistic. Even its advocates, they point out, have to acknowledge the vast number of 'blind-spots' which render certain types of events virtually invisible. The mirror metaphor is also difficult to sustain due to its inability to account for the ideological dynamics embedded in the newsworker's mediation of the social world. This process of mediation involves not only a series of procedures for knowing the world but, equally importantly, for not knowing that world as well. As Hallin (1994) writes of the 'mirroring' qualities of so-called 'objective reporting' of governmental affairs in the USA:

A form of journalism which aims to provide the public with a neutral record of events and which, at the same time, relies primarily on government officials to describe and explain those events obviously has the potential to wind up as a mirror not of reality, but of the version of reality government officials would like to present to the public.

(Hallin 1994: 52)

In light of these types of criticisms, Tuchman's (1978) concept of a 'news net' has been widely regarded as a much more suitable metaphor than that of a reflective 'mirror'. Introduced following her research into newswork practices, the idea of a news net is a more useful way of conceptualizing this imposition of order on the social world. News, in her analysis, is a social resource which, through its very construction, implies a series of particular constraints or limits on the forms of knowledge which can be generated and called 'reality'.

Tuchman's study, which draws on data gathered by participant obser vation and interviews with newsworkers over a ten year period in the USA, documents how news organizations disperse a news net that intertwines time and space in such a way as to allow for the identification of 'newsworthy' events. If the news net is intended for 'big fish', as she argues, then at stake in conceptual terms is the task of unravelling this 'arrangement of intersecting fine mesh (the stringers), tensile strength (the reporters), and steel links (the wire services) supposedly provid [ing] a news blanket, ensuring that all potential news will be found' (Tuchman 1978: 22). That is to say, the bureaucratic threads of the news net are knitted together so as to frame certain preferred types of occurrences as 'news events' while, concurrently, ensuring that others slip through unremarked.

A news net stretched to encompass certain centralized institutional sites, ones where news is 'likely to be made today', reinforces a myriad of normative assumptions about what should constitute the public agenda. The problem of defining what counts as an 'appropriate news story' is directly tied to journalistic assumptions about what the news audience is interested in knowing. Tuchman's (1978: 25) study discerned three general premises incorporated into the news net: first, readers are interested in occur-

MAKING NtWS: TRUTH, !OtOlOGY AND NtWSWORK I •

rences at certain localities and not others; second, readers are concerned with the activities of only specific organizations; and third, readers find only particular topics to be worthy of attention.

In light of this set of working assumptions, Tuchman (1978: 25-31) maintains that three interrelated methods of dispersing reporters can be described using the following criteria: geographic territoriality, organizational specialization and topical specialization.

First, 'geographic territoriality' is the most important of the three methods basic to the news net. Each news organization divides the social world into distinct areas of territorial responsibility so as to realize its respective 'news mission'. Assessments can then be made as to where news is most likely to happen - in effect, as McQuail (1992) notes, a self-fulfilling tendency - thereby allowing for a considerable degree of pre-planning. The news mission is a double-sided dynamic: on the one hand, it con forms to certain presumptions regarding what the audience 'wants to know' while, on the other hand, it sets these presumptions against pre-given financial and technological constraints (on the importance in this regard of the international news agencies, such as Reuters, Associated Press, United Press International and Agence France Presse, see Wallis and Baran 1990; G. Reeves 1993; Herman and McChesney 1997; Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 1998; van Ginneken 1998).

Second, 'organizational specialization' is another method for dispersing reporters. Beats and bureaux need to be set up in connection with the numerous organizations that are regularly 'making news' in that specific territory. Examples range from the 'crime beat', including such places as the police station, courts or prisons, to other sites routinely generating news like the city council, the fire and rescue services, the health authority, and so forth. Due to their formal status as sources of centralized informa tion, these sites are legitimized as the preferred places for newsworkers to collect the 'facts' they require. The coding of a given news item as 'belonging' to a- particular site is not always a straightforward decision, however, and can lead to conflict within the news organization (see Roshco 1975; Gans 1979; Fishman 1980; Zelizer 1992; J.L. Reeves and Campbell 1994; Glover 1999).

Third, 'topical specialization' is the final method; at issue here is the extent to which topical specialities, such as consumer affairs, finance, education, environment, health, arts, science, the 'women's page' (see Chapter 6), travel, gardening, motoring or sports, bypass the territorial desks. Usually each topic is associated with its own department which will possess a budget to be spent on the preparation of material. A decision on the quantity of material can be made only after the territorial editors announce how much space has been left over for each of them to use (see also Epstein 1973; Norris 1997a, b; Gavin and Goddard 1998; van Zoonen 1998; Allan et al. 2000; Allan 2002).

Evidently, the amount of movement in and across the three methods involves considerable negotiation, and thus flexibility, as each pulls the news net in different directions. Attention may then shift to consider, among other concerns, the following:

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• The economic pressure to maintain a cost-efficient, profitable news organization, in part by avoiding expenses which may not result in a final news story, means that investigative reporting is often disallowed on these terms (see G. Williams 1996; Bagdikian 1997; Franklin and Murphy 1998; Hackett and Zhao 1998; Pilger 1998, de Burg 2000, Marjoribanks 2000).

• There is a need to conform to the news organization's daily production schedule, especially where deadlines are concerned. Schlesinger (1987) uses the phrase 'stop watch culture' to pinpoint how these relations are interwoven throughout the production process (see also Gans 1979; Curran 1990; A. Bell 1991, 1998; Willis 1991; Steiner 1998).

• Being able to routinize the uncertainty of future happenings is considered to be of critical importance as the newsworker's obligation to produce sufficient copy to fulfil 'story quotas' must be met. In contrast with 'hard' news, so-called 'soft' news or 'human interest' stories are usually less dependent on notions of 'timeliness' (see Tiffen 1989; Jacobs 1996; Kitzinger 1998; Skidmore 1998).

• This practical need to anticipate or pre-plan news-as-events, Tuchman (1978) argues, leads to the further sub-classification of three types of 'hard' news: namely, 'spot' news, 'developing' news and 'continuing' news. 'Continuing' news usually revolves around events which are prescheduled well in advance, thereby making them highly sought after by reporters and editors alike (see Fishman 1980; Dayan and Katz 1992; Miller 1993, 1994; K. Becker 1995).

• The implementation of new technologies (each have their own varying 'time space rhythms') to enhance speed, flexibility and, thereby, professionalism (see Cottle 1995; Schudson 1995; Tunstall 1996; McNair 1998; Shingler and Wieringa 1998).

Professional ideals, such as those of 'impartiality' and 'objectivity', are thus likely to be operationalized in ways which privilege the (largely internalized) 'journalistic stand ards' appropriate to the news organization's ethos and its priorities.

A hierarchy of credibility

The very basis upon which the journalist is able to detect 'news events', according to Fishman (1980: 51), rests on a commonsensical understanding that society is bureau cratically structured. It is this perspective which provides specific procedures for locating knowledge of occurrences. Specifically, it furnishes the reporter with a 'map of relevant knowers' for newsworthy topics. A journalist covering a story concerning, say, the possible effects of a nuclear power plant on the health of children in a local community, knows that information officers at the plant, as well as politicians, scien tists, nuclear energy lobbyists, health officials, social workers and environmental groups, among others, will be positioned to offer their viewpoints (see also Anderson

MAKING N[WS: TRUT�. ID[QlOGY AND N[WSWORK I •

1997; Campbell 1999; Allan 2002). 'Whatever the happening,' writes Fishman (1980: 51), 'there are officials and authorities in a structural position to know.' This 'bur eaucratic consciousness', to employ his phrase, indicates to newsworkers precisely where they will have to position themselves to be able to follow the time-line or 'career path' of events as they pass through a series of interwoven, yet discernible phases.

To clarify, H.S. Becker (1967) employs the notion of a 'hierarchy of credibility' to specify how, in a system of ranked groups, participants will take it as given that the members of the highest group are best placed to define 'the way things really are' due to their 'knowledge of truth'. Implicit in this assumption is the view that 'those at the top' will have access to a more complete picture of the bureaucratic organiza tion's workings than members of lower groups whose definition of reality, because of this subordinate status, can be only partial and distorted. As H.S. Becker (1967: 241) writes, 'any tale told by those at the top intrinsically deserves to be regarded as the most credible account obtainable . . . Thus, credibility and the right to be heard are differentially distributed through the ranks of the system.' By this rationale, then, the higher up in this hierarchy the news source is situated, the more authorita tive his or her words will be for the newsworker processing the bureaucratic account. Newsworkers are thus predisposed to treat these accounts as factual, according to Fishman (1980: 96), 'because journalists participate in upholding a normative order of authorized knowers in society [and] it is also a position of convenience.' After all, the 'competence' of the source should, by this logic, translate into a 'credible' news story.

Of interest in this context is Hallin's (1986, 1994) analyses of how the dictates of 'objective' reporting serve to ratify a normative order of 'credible' sources, especially when challenges to the status quo are being mobilized. The journalist's world, he argues, can be usefully characterized as being divided into three regions, each governed by different standards of reporting (1986: 116-18). These regions may be represented as concentric circles (see Figure 3.2).

1 Sphere of consensus: this sphere, Hallin (1986) proposes, can be defined as repre senting 'motherhood and apple pie'. That is to say, it encircles those social issues which are typically regarded by journalists (and, they are likely to assume, most members of the public) as being beyond partisan dispute and, as such, non controversial. Consequently, ' [ w ]ithin this region journalists do not feel compelled either to present opposing views or to remain disinterested observers. On the contrary, the journalist's role is to serve as an advocate or celebrant of consensus values' (Hallin 1986: 116-17).

2 Sphere of legitimate controversy: in this sphere, there are a range of social issues which are framed by journalists as being the appropriate subject of partisan dis pute. The typical types of controversies which unfold during electoral contests or legislative debates, for example, are situated here, the ideological parameters of

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Sphere of consensus

Sphere of ---t-- legitimate controversy

---- Sphere of deviance

Figure 3.2 Spheres of consensus, controversy, and deviance Source: Hallin 1986: 117

which are represented by the positions articulated between and within the main political parties (as well as the bureaucracies of the state or civil service). 'Within this region,' Hallin (1986: 116) writes, 'objectivity and balance reign as the supreme journalistic values.'

3 Sphere of deviance: the realm located beyond the above sphere is occupied, according to Hallin (1986: 117), by 'those political actors and views which journal ists and the political mainstream of the society reject as unworthy of being heard.' Virtually any pretence of journalistic 'neutrality' falls away, he argues, as news organizations perform the work of boundary maintenance. In this sphere, journal ism 'plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda those who violate or challenge the political consensus. It marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conflict' (Hallin 1986: 117).

These respective spheres, Hallin is quick to acknowledge, each contain internal grad ations, and the boundaries distinguishing them are relatively fluid and changeable. Nevertheless, this model suggests that 'gut instincts' about source credibility are politi cized, as the further away a potential source is from the political consensus the less likely it will be that the source's voice will gain media access.

One of the most noteworthy attempts to document the importance of these types of dynamics in Britain was a project co-authored by Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts (1978), entitled Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Their investigation examines how journalistic conceptions of 'competence' and 'credibility' help to ensure that news statements are almost always dependent upon

MAKING N[WS: TRUT�. ID[OlOGY AND N[WSWORK I •

'objective' and 'authoritative' statements from 'legitimate' institutional sources. For newsworkers, Hall et al. (1978) write:

This means constantly turning to accredited representatives of major social institutions - M.P.s for political topics, employers and trade-union leaders for industrial matters, and so on. Such institutional representatives are 'accredited' because of their institutional power and position, but also because of their 'repre sentative' status: either they represent 'the people' (M.P.s, Ministers, etc.) or organised interest groups.

(Hall et al. 1978: 58)

It follows that the 'professional rules' indicative of the routine structures of news production are typically serving to represent the 'opinions of the powerful' as being consistent with a larger 'public consensus'. Here Hall et al. (1978: 58) proceed to note the irony that 'the very rules which aim to preserve the impartiality of the media, and which grew out of desires for greater professional neutrality, also serve powerfully to orientate the media in the "definitions of social reality" which their "accredited sources"- the institutional spokes[persons] - provide.'

The journalist's daily struggle to negotiate the professional demands of newswork, with all of the attendant pressures, produces in Hall et al. 's (1978: 58) view 'a system atically structured over-accessing to the media of those in powerful and privileged institutional positions.' It is precisely this issue of how the definitions of certain sources are routinely 'over-accessed' to the detriment of alternative viewpoints which is crucial. Sources who enjoy high status positions in society can assume, in turn, that they are much more likely to become what Hall et al. (1978) call 'the primary definers' of controversial topics.

Accordingly, the structured relationship between the news media and this hierarchy of institutional definers permits the most powerful of the latter to set down the initial definition or primary interpretation of the news topic to be processed. It is recurrently the case that this interpretation will then be mobilized to 'command the field' with the likely result that it will, in turn, establish the terms of reference within which all further coverage (as well as any subsequent 'debate') takes place. 'Arguments against a primary interpretation', Hall et al. (1978: 58) stress, 'are forced to insert themselves into its definition of "what is at issue" - they must begin from this framework of interpretation as their starting-point.' Moreover, this 'initial interpretative framework is extremely difficult to alter fundamentally, once established' (Hall et al. 1978: 58-9). In this way, then, the news media are regarded as playing a vital ideological role in reaffirming the iniquitous power relations underlying society's institutional order.

Challenges to the concept of 'primary definition' have emerged from a variety of different perspectives. For many liberal pluralists, for example, Hall et al. (1978) are guilty of overemphasizing the capacity of the news media to structure public debate in ways consistent with the interests of the powerful. In their view, journalists almost always enjoy a sufficient degree of autonomy from these types of influences, thereby

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ensuring that their reportage I S 'balanced' and 'objective'. More usefully, other researchers have sought to extend the approach introduced by Hall et al. through a more rigorous assessment of the institutional imperatives of source competition.

One such intervention has been advanced by Schlesinger and Tumber (1994) in their book Reporting Crime: The Media Politics of Criminal Justice. Although they endorse the general argument that newswork practices typically promote the views of authori tative sources, they proceed to provide six specific points of criticism (Schlesinger and Tumber 1994: 17-21). These points, together with illustrative references to other studies, may be briefly outlined as follows.

First, the notion of 'primary definition' fails to recognize possible disputes between official sources struggling to influence the production of a news account. In the course of such a conflict it may not always be clear who is actually the primary definer (or by which criteria such primacy is to be defined) in a given instance.

A telling illustration of this point is documented in Hallin's (1986, 1994: 55) investi gations into US news coverage of the Vietnam War: 'the case of Vietnam suggests that whether the media tend to be supporting or critical of government policies depends on the degree of consensus those policies enjoy, particularly within the political estab lishment.' It then follows, he suggests, that although news content 'may not mirror the facts', media institutions 'do reflect the prevailing pattern of political debate: when consensus is strong, they tend to stay within the limits of the political discussion it defines; when it begins to break down, coverage becomes increasingly critical and diverse in the viewpoints it represents, and increasingly difficult for officials to control'.

Second, the extent to which official sources engage in tactics to pass privileged but unattributable information to journalists under a cloak of confidentiality, such as through the use of 'off-the-record' briefings, is not sufficiently recognized.

Typical examples of statements from non-attributable sources, frequently presented to reporters as 'for background only' comments, include: 'according to a well-placed government source', 'sources close to the Prime Minister say', 'a trusted source has revealed', 'as leaked by an inside source', and so forth. In Britain, a decision made by the Labour government shortly after taking office in May 1997 to formally place lobby briefings by government spokespeople 'on the record' (along similar lines to the US custom) has by no means eliminated the practice. It is often described as a key element of 'spin doctoring' (see also Glover 1999; Palmer 2000).

Third, important questions are being obscured with regard to the means by which the boundaries of primary definition are being drawn, and redrawn, as official sources compete amongst themselves (using different media strategies) over access to the discursive field of debate.

As Deacon and Golding (1994: 201-2) argue in their study of British media coverage of the 'poll tax' disputes, 'the ideological advantages of primary definition can be eroded by political vulnerability, so that an "accredited" source becomes largely "discredited" - consistently on the defensive and increasingly unable to control the

MAKING N[WS: TRUTU, ID[OlOGY AND N[WSWORK I •

direction of public and media debate.' They then proceed to make a further crucial point: 'not only does primary definition have to be won, it must also be sustained interpretatively and evaluatively through a series of battles, in which its political vulnerability may progressively increase' (Deacon and Golding 1994: 202).

Fourth, the apparent atemporality of Hall et al.'s (1978) formulation needs to be highlighted, that is, its inattention to how the structure of access changes over time as new forces, and their representatives, emerge.

This point is underscored by Hansen's (1993b: 151) investigation of the strategies employed by environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, to secure access to media debates (see also Allan et al. 2000). In his words: 'It is one thing for environmental groups to achieve massive media coverage for a short period of time and in relation to specific issues. It is quite a different task to achieve and maintain a position as an "established", authoritative and legitimate actor in the continuous process of claims-making and policy-making on environmental matters.'

Fifth, it is the need to account for the ways in which journalists challenge official sources, even to the extent of pursuing campaigns, which is at issue. Schlesinger and Tumber (1994: 19) criticize Hall et al.'s (1978) approach for tending to 'overstate the passivity of the media as recipients of information from news sources: the flow of definitions is seen as moving uniformly from the centres of power to the media'. They point out that there are significant variations between different news media which need to be addressed, both in terms of the respective medium (such as between television and the press) and at the level of rival news outlets (such as different newspapers).

An illustration of this point is found in Miller's (1993, 1994) research into media portrayals of the conflict in Northern Ireland during 'the Troubles', where he argues that current affairs and documentary programmes were frequently regarded by government officials as the most difficult to manage:

It is precisely for this reason that official agencies attempt to elucidate the exact nature of queries and even of proposed programmes before permitting access. The access that is granted is heavily bounded by the interests of the sources, but in the end they are betting on slightly longer odds than with hard news stories, which have less space and time and are less likely to do investigative reports.

(Miller 1994: 109-10)

A final criticism renders explicit Schlesinger and Tumber's (1994) commitment to introducing an alternative logic to Hall et al.'s (1978) mode of inquiry. Specifically, they contend that most researchers have been media-centric in their approach to ana lysing source-media relations, a problem which can be overcome only by granting equal priority to the perspectives of the sources themselves as they work to generate 'counter-definitions'. These complex processes of negotiation or brokerage between power-holders and their opponents need to be brought to the fore.

Overall, then, it is Schlesinger and Tumber's (1994: 20) contention that the approach

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advocated by Hall et al. (1978) is insufficiently curious about 'the processes whereby sources may engage in ideological conflict prior to, or contemporaneous with, the appearance of "definitions" in the media.' Hence the importance of centring the contested dynamics within and between source organizations as they struggle to 'get their message out' through news media which are far from monolithic in their reporting.

Analyses have much to gain, it follows, by examining the precise methods employed by news sources in their efforts to shape media agendas. News promoters anxious to have their voice articulated across the field of the news media are often only too willing to openly cater to the practical needs of newswork. Drawing upon findings derived through an extensive series of interviews with news sources situated across the British criminal justice system, Schlesinger and Tumber (1994) proceed to dis tinguish a number of conditions typically involved in a source's attempts to realize its goals:

1 that the source has a well-defined message to communicate, framed in optimal terms capable of satisfying news values

2 that the optimal locations for placing that particular message have been identified, as have the target audiences of the media outlets concerned

3 that the preconditions for communicative 'success' have been assured so far as possible by, for instance, cultivating a sympathetic contact or fine-tuning the timing of a leak

4 that the anticipated strategies of others (which may include support as much as opposition) are incorporated into ongoing media strategies. Support may be har nessed by coalition-building. Opposition may, for instance, be countered by astute timing or discrediting its credibility

5 that means exist for monitoring and evaluating the impact of a given strategy or tactic and for adjusting future action in the light of what is reflexively learned

6 that some messages may be as much intended for private as public communica tion, thus operating on at least two levels.

(Schlesinger and Tumber 1994: 39)

The relative success enjoyed by a potential news source in 'getting its message out' is thus likely to be directly tied to its capacity to routinize its own activities, especially with respect to preparing 'copy ready' information materials with an eye to the needs of the time-pressured journalist.

Bell's (1991) examination of the principal sources drawn upon by newspaper jour nalists in New Zealand similarly highlights the significant role played by 'pre-existing text' in newsworkers' judgements. 'A story which is marginal in news terms but written and available', he argues, 'may be selected ahead of a much more newsworthy story which has to be researched and written from the ground up' (1991: 59). His observation that most news copy consists of reported speech (even though it is often not attributed

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as such) underscores the extent to which newsworkers regularly rely on reprocessing or repackaging source material as news. Specifically, Bell (1991: 57) identifies the follow ing 'input sources' (types of contact journalists have with sources) as being the most salient:

• interviews, either face to face or by telephone • public addresses • press conferences • written text of spoken addresses • organizationally produced documents of many kinds: reports, surveys, letters,

findings, agendas, minutes, proceedings, research papers, etc. • press releases • prior stories on a topic, either from own or other media (newsworkers, as Bell

writes, 'feed voraciously off each other's stories') • news agency copy • the journalist's notes from all the above inputs, especially the spoken ones.

Forms of text-based contact such as these ones encourage journalists to see the world through the eyes of their sources, if only because it makes their work that much easier to manage.

Similar types of source-media research provide further examples of some of the preferred tactics employed by news sources or event promoters (see Tiffen 1989; Eldridge 1993; Keeble 1994; Negrine 1996; Niblock 1996; J. Wilson 1996; Franklin 1997; McNair 1998; Manning 200 1; Varley and Tapsall 200 1; Cottle 2003). These tactics include:

•

handing out to newsworkers advance copies of talks or speeches the scheduling of press conferences at convenient hours (safely before deadlines) news releases in 'ready-to-go' format, including an 'inverted pyramid style' narra- tive structure prompt access to bureaucratic personnel with pertinent information the opportunity to attend 'informal chats' or 'pseudo-events' .

Needless to say, source strategies such as these ones do not guarantee that newsworkers will 'stay on message', but they do , enhance the likelihood that the source in question will be accorded with a privileged place in the hierarchy of access. This is no small achievement: 'The right to be considered the primary source of authoritative information about world events', as Hallin (1994: 49-50) suggests, 'should probably be considered a central component of the legitimacy of modern political institutions.' This power, he continues, is 'comparable in a secular age to the right of the church in medieval Europe to interpret the scriptures' (Hallin 1994: 50).

Figure 3.3 Source: Gabriel Thomson in The Independent 1 September 1997.

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Issues of access

When asked to reflect on how they go about their daily work of identifying those 'newsworthy' sources deserving to be included in a news account, journalists will often claim that they simply follow their 'gut feelings', 'hunches' or 'instincts'. Many insist that they have a 'nose for news', that they can intuitively tell which sources are going to prove significant and which ones are bound to be irrelevant to the news frame. Drawing upon an extensive range of interviews with Canadian newsworkers, Ericson, Baranek and Chan (1987, 1989, 1991) suggest that what guides the journalist in the course of these encounters is a 'vocabulary of precedents'. That is to say, the journalist's previ ous experience of the rules and organizational constraints characteristic of newswork interactions with sources directs them to visualize the social world in terms of specific types of knowledge.

The ongoing articulation of precedent in the working culture of journalists pro vides them with recognition knowledge (that this is a story of a particular type), procedural knowledge (how to get on with contacting and using human and documentary sources), and accounting knowledge (how to frame and formulate the story; how to justify the chosen approach to others).

(Ericson et al. 1987: 348)

This 'vocabulary of precedents' therefore profoundly shapes who journalists speak to, what they talk about, and how that discussion is represented. As noted above, journal ists typically rely on sources to furnish them with a verbal or written account of their institution's stance or position, thereby saving them the effort of having to undertake an investigation themselves. 'Moreover, even on the rare occasions when journalists do get close to the original source,' write Ericson et al. (1987: 352), 'they are usually required to obtain a constructed account from an authorized source rather than be able to provide their own direct interpretation.'

If newsworkers are generally predisposed to accept the words of authorized sources as being factual, then it follows that statements which differ from one another must be handled in certain prescribed ways. Newsworkers anxious to avoid potential criticism for anchoring their account on 'biased' sources must take care to frame any conflict outside of the realm of competence by foregrounding the interested perspectives of the sources. 'Precisely by conceiving of interested perspectives in social structural terms,' Fishman (1980: 124) writes, 'the reporter is able both to identify a set of competent and relevant interests and to trust that their differing accounts reveal differing factual aspects of the event.' Supplementary evidence may thus be mobilized in the form of conflicting truth-claims. For a news source to be included as part of the constellation of interests being constructed around an event, it must either explicitly or implicitly reaffirm the terms being employed by the newsworker in the initial framing of the event itself. To speak 'off topic', or to stray from the perceived area of competence (and thus

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be demonstrating 'personal bias'), is to risk being positioned outside the ideological limits of newsworthiness.

Accessed voices, as Cottle (1993) found in his study of regional news, must be seen to be 'appropriate', 'articulate' and 'represent a clear point of view' to be deemed relevant. This sense of relevancy, he points out, tends to be 'construed in terms which reflect the programme's bid for popular appeal, typically involving the professional pursuit of immediacy, drama and general human interest' (1993: 89). At the same time, as the study by Deacon and Golding (1994: 202-3) confirms, a key distinction needs to be recognized between sources approached as 'advocates' (associated with a particular position) and those made to serve as 'arbiters' (regarded as non-aligned providers of information):

Although all news sources can be thought of as 'advocates' - who each have a preferred image or message they would like to convey in the media - some are selected by journalists to act as 'arbiters' on particular issues. The views and opinions of these arbiters - provided they are comprehensible to journalists and, crucially, can be broadly assimilated within their inferential framework - are treated with greater deference than those of even the most senior 'advocates' and play a very important part in shaping media evaluations of the issues upon which they are invited to comment.

(Deacon and Golding 1994: 202-3)

The 'arbiters' of a specific field of discourse, to the extent that their views guide the journalist's engagement with sources explicitly adopting a position of advocacy, are thereby performing a 'legislator' function (Deacon and Golding 1994: 16). In other words, they are helping to establish the (ostensibly non-partisan) criteria by which certain 'advocates' will be granted access to be heard on matters of controversy and, moreover, what aspect of the topic they will be encouraged to address.

Elsewhere I have described these source dynamics in relation to what I have termed the 'will to facticity' (Allan 1995, 1998b). Once it is recognized that the truly 'objective' news account is an impossibility, critical attention may turn to the strategies and devices used by journalists to lend to their accounts a factual status. Given that this factual status can never be entirely realized, the notion of a 'will to facticity' pinpoints the necessarily provisional and contingent nature of any such journalistic appeal to truth. Newsworkers must know, for example, what questions to ask the source in order to get at the right 'facts'. Here the news frame comes back into play, for as Tuchman (1978: 81) contends, 'knowing what to ask influences whom one asks: The choice of sources and the search for "facts" mutually determine each other.' As a general rule, Fishman (1980) maintains, journalists will usually take care when first setting up interviews with a source to inform him or her about what they are to talk about:

Journalists orient their sources toward a certain way of looking at an event: as a legal-bureaucratic entity, as a moral issue, as a part of a historical trend, and so

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forth. Thus, they define for their sources the terms of an acceptable account, the terms in which all the various accounts will be framed, and the terms in which the event eventually will be described in the news story.

(Fishman 1980: 131)

During the actual interview, then, this shared narrative framework becomes, in effect, an organizing principle of inclusion and exclusion. The newsworker, according to Fishman, sets down the rules which must be obeyed if facticity and newsworthiness are going to intermesh.

A number of research studies show that in order to achieve the recognized 'cred ibility' required to be a legitimate or trustworthy candidate for the purpose of appropriation within the news net, individuals or groups attempting to mobilize alternative definitions of the situation are often forced to accommodate or adapt to the narrow confines of legitimized topic parameters. Attention has also been directed to how the tempo or rhythm of newswork serves, in turn, to place an enhanced emphasis on 'events', not 'issues'. Where the former have a beginning, a middle and an end, and are therefore easily processed as derivative of the factual, the latter implies that the line of demarcation separating the realm of facts from the realm of interpretation and explanation has been crossed. This when objective reporting dictates that this line always be respected. Hence the structural dependence on reliable institutional sources who produce consequential events. These sources, as argued above, allow for certainty to be built into the reporting process, principally through the imposition of predictability (even a certain rationality) vis-a-vis the confusion of the social world.

Consequently, those individuals or groups who lack regular access to the news frame (their definitions rarely getting entangled in the news net) have the option of resorting to 'disruptive access'. At stake is the need to force the temporary suspension of the routinized, habitual access enjoyed by others so as to create opportunities for their voices to be processed as newsworthy. As Molotch and Lester (1974: 108) write, these voices 'must "make news" by somehow crashing through the ongoing arrangements of newsmaking, generating surprise, shock, or some more violent form of "trouble"'(see also Gitlin 1980; McLeod and Hertog 1992; Liebes and Curran 1998). Specific investi gations of the interventions mobilized by various individuals, groups and movements to secure access through 'disruptive' means include the following studies concerning news coverage of:

• the women's movement (Tuchman 1978; van Zoonen 1994; Barker-Plummer 1995; Meyers 1997; Norris 1997a; Bradley 1998; see also Carter et al. 1998, Gallagher 2001)

• campaigns against racism (Hollingsworth 1986; Gordon and Rosenberg 1989; van Dijk 1991; C.C. Wilson and Gutierrez 1995; Dennis and Pease 1997; Gabriel 1998)

• the anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons and peace movements (Halloran et al. 1970; Gitlin 1980; Hackett 1991; A. Young 1991; Jeffords and Rabinovitz 1994; Eldridge 1995)

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MAKING N[WS: TRUTH, ID[O lOGY AND N[WSWORK I •

the environmental and ecological movements (see Hansen 1993a; Neuzil and Kovarik 1996; A. Anderson 1997; Chapman et al. 1997; Adam 1998, Campbell 1999; Allan et al. 2000)

• campaigns over issues of sexuality, including how they pertain to lesbian and gay rights (see Dickey 1987; Gross 1989; Moritz 1992; Stratford 1992; Fejes and Petrich 1993) as well as the media politics around HIV and AIDS (Watney 1987; Lupton 1994; Miller et al. 1998; Allan 2002; Critcher 2003)

• anti-poverty, anti-crime and community rights campaigns (see Curran et al. 1986; Cottle 1993, 1994; Deacon and Golding 1994; Meinhof and R ichardson 1994; J.L. Reeves and Campbell 1994; Devereux 1998; Knight 2001).

News interest is certainly not an end in itself, however, as the ensuing coverage may actually be the antithesis of that which had been initially desired by those individuals or groups struggling to articulate a counter-interpretation of the situation. All too frequently efforts to dislodge primary definitions are ignored, dismissed as 'soft news' novelties, or trivialized in other ways. As several of the above studies suggest, it is recurrently the case that the news frame is organized around the question of how quickly order can be restored to the social world, thereby ensuring that little, if any, attention is directed to the ethical implications of the issues raised through 'disruptive access' (see Belsey and Chadwick 1992; Chaney 1994; Tester 1994; Brants et al. 1998; Kieran 1998; K. Thompson 1998; Berry 2000). This chapter thus comes to a close by posing several points of inquiry to be addressed in subsequent chapters:

• What are the prerequisites to be met before a voice 'deserves' inclusion in media debate as an 'authoritative', 'newsworthy' source?

• In what ways have various alternative or oppositional voices been made to cater their interventionist strategies so as to conform to the routinized imperatives of newswork ?

• In what ways do these journalistic inflections of 'respectability', 'competence' and 'prestige' mark the limits of 'acceptable' dissent?

• To what extent does this constant threat of marginalization, of being defined as 'deviant' vis-a-vis 'the consensus', condition what can and cannot be said by these critical voices ?

Informing the dynamics which underlie each of these points are relations of power and resistance, relations which are constitutive of a cultural politics of hegemony whereby the parameters of truth are invoked, reaffirmed and, on occasion, contested. It is to this question of 'hegemony' as it is embedded in the textuality of news discourse that our attention turns in the next chapter.

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