FOUR APPROACHES TO NEWS RESEARCH
When providing an overview of the field of international news research, it is
useful to specify the level of analysis (i.e., micro or macro), and the kind of
perspective applied to the news process (i.e., how the social phenomenon of
news is conceptualized). Two perspectives on the news process have dominated
research on international news: those of selection and construction. Research
using a selection perspective traditionally focuses on the news ‘event.’ Events in
the world are the independent variables determining the structure of foreign news.
Here, social institutions (the press, the journalistic profession, the news market,
etc.) are said to play a secondary, intermediate role as a ‘selector’ or gatekeeper;
they perform such functions as selection, rejection, re-editing, etc.
The construction perspective takes the opposite view: news is seen as a
social artefact. Social conventions and practices, specific values, and the
allocation of material resources work together to produce a particular outcome:
the news. Here, social institutions constitute the primary variable; the form,
content, and volume of foreign news are all products of the social practices of
news institutions. These two perspectives are paired with the micro–macro
distinction, thus producing a matrix of four approaches to the analysis of
international news.
1. In the first approach – micro-level and selection perspective – we find the
oldest tradition: gatekeeper analysis. This began with the seminal study
by White (1950), and was further developed by McNelly (1959) to include
the whole chain of gatekeepers, from the initial reporting of the event in a
foreign location, to the editor of a local newspaper in another part of the
world. Even though, during the past two decades, severe criticism of the
gatekeeper approach has been raised, it has not completely lost its place
in the field (Shoemaker 1991). The concept of gatekeeping intuitively
corresponds to certain basic empirical observations at the micro level:
foreign news is brought into the newsroom, some of it is selected,
rewritten, and so on.
2. In the second approach – macro-level and selection perspective – we find
the news flow analyses. These studies have so far dominated research on
international news; examples are, among many others, UNESCO (1953),
Nnaemeka and Richstad (1980), Stevenson and Shaw (1984), UNESCO
(1985), and Varis and Jokelin (1976). Although news flow analysis entails
detailed counting of individual news items, it has been conducted at the
macro level. The general idea has been that the more data one collects
and summarizes, the more general propositions one can make as to the
structure of international news.
3. In the third approach – micro-level and construction perspective – we find
empirical studies of news content, often comparative case studies
focusing, for instance, on the different U.S. TV networks’ coverage of
events in the Third World (see, e.g., Adams 1982). We also find a few
detailed studies of news agency organizations (see, e.g., Boyd-Barrett
1980; Boyd-Barrett and Thussu, 1992; Fenby 1986; Höhne 1984), and
studies of foreign correspondents (see, e.g., Batscha 1975). In both
cases, the underlying assumption is that social institutions heavily
influence the form, content, and volume of foreign news. However, the
analysis is, in practice, concerned with micro-level phenomena: the
content of individual news stories or the particulars of an individual news
agency.
4. In the fourth approach – macro-level and construction perspective – we
generally find more theoretical contributions, which are concerned with
international news in the context of broader questions of media or
cultural imperialism, or of the political economy of the media (see, e.g.,
Galtung 1971; Mosco 1996; Mowlana 1997; Schiller 1976; Tunstall 1977;
Tunstall and Machin 1999).
