THREE TRADITIONS OF NEWS PRODUCTION RESEARCH IN
REVIEW
To three main traditions in news production research, delineated by
Schudson (1991), might initially seem to lead in different directions. The political
economy position would, in one sense or another, return research to Marx’s
dictum in The German Ideology (1845–46) that the ideas of the dominant class
are the ideas of an age. Hence, it would encourage examination of how the
technological media participate in a wider ideological ‘mediation’ – the
transformation of ideas into forms of social domination. The classic issues have
been re-emphasized at the momentous and still contested transition to a global
‘network society’ (Castells 1996), whose seminal ideas and slogans, again, may
serve powerful minority interests. Next, a focus on the social organization and
production of news might raise questions, for instance, of how news workers’ use
of the Internet affects the sorts of information they obtain and report as news (e.g.,
Borden and Harvey 1998; Garrison 2000). In addition, within textual media
studies, historical and comparative research on how myths of individualism and
of the ‘team’ coexist in the wider culture, suggests itself as a means of accounting
for the forms of representation and the modes of address noted above in current
television news, but also for the novel forms of community arising within
computer mediated communication (e.g., Jones 1998).
To indicate the extent to which the three traditions address some of the same
research questions, I start from within the tradition that I know best, the social
construction of news, or what Schudson (1991) called the social organization of
news and consider three U.S. studies (Fishman 1980; Gitlin 1980; Tuchman
1978). To begin, all three books take up both the social organization of news work
and what Murdock and Golding (1977) had identified as the problem of ‘mediation’
– how the ideas of a dominant class become the ideas of an epoch. Of the three
books, Gitlin’s work on media coverage of the U.S. student movement relied the
least on formal participant observation or a theoretical framework of
phenomenology. His empirical data were derived partly from his own records of
participation in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), partly from interviews
with news workers and friends who had been involved in the news stories being
analyzed. Nonetheless, one basis for his larger argument that journalists and
editors ‘put reality together’ was concepts from symbolic interactionism, such as
Goffman’s (1974) notion of a frame which brings some aspects of reality into view,
while excluding others. One of the most interesting portions of Gitlin’s (1980) data
concerns those cases where personnel at news headquarters in New York City
told their team how not to cover a story, and where, in addition, these instructions
had a chilling effect on other network teams covering other stories which they
perceived as similar. In a next step, then, organizational and policy deliberations
could be read off at the level of textual structures as well, even if this was not the
empirical focus of Gitlin’s study.
Compared to such a clear-cut intervention of powerful interests into
concrete news decisions, the books by Tuchman (1978) and Fishman (1980) also
included examples of the routine imposition of what might be called ‘an
ideological imperative’ on the selection and structure of news. Tuchman’s study
of a local television station described, among other things, how the business
office of the station intervened to obtain newspaper coverage of stories that
involved its advertisers; how the order of stories in the late evening newscast was
rearranged to please advertisers (an airline sponsoring the news had an
agreement that an air crash would not be the first story when it was the lead
sponsor); and how women reporters complained that they were ordered
specifically to cover certain stories because they involved women. (The wall
between news and advertising departments has since been breaking down
(Croteau and Hoynes 2001: 163– 181; Underwood 1993).) Fishman showed, for
example, how reporters tended to accept and reproduce the presumed distinction
between policy-making and policy implementation within municipal government,
and hence how news stories would hide conflicts, compromises, and processes
of undue influence in local politics. What both Fishman and Tuchman shared with
Gitlin, nevertheless, is the assumption that a detailed empirical accounting of the
daily routines and practices of news production is required in order to explain how
social infrastructures, institutions, and their interests are translated into concrete
news texts.
