mass-communication-theory

As with any theoretical proposition that challenges the prevailing view of the
time—specifically, the limited-effects perspective—spiral of silence and agendasetting
both encountered intense criticism, and their adherents had to overcome a
fear of isolation and rejection from others in the discipline, just as Noelle-
Neumann might have predicted. Nonetheless, these assertions of sometimes powerful
mass media helped move mass communication theory toward its more contemporary
stance.
NEWS PRODUCTION RESEARCH
news production
research
The study of how
the institutional
routines of news
production inevitably
produce
distorted or biased
content
Chapter 10 Media and Society: The Role of Media in the Social World 303
During the past four decades, several studies have been conducted on the production
and consumption of news content (Crouse, 1973; Epstein, 1973; Fishman,
1980; Gans, 1979; Gitlin, 1980; Tuchman, 1978; Whiten, 2004). Most of the
research we discuss in this section was undertaken by British and American sociologists
during the 1970s and 1980s. Their purpose was to critically analyze how
journalists routinely cover news. Most of this research supports theories about the
intrusion of media into politics as well as cultural commodification theories (see
Chapter 11).
W. Lance Bennett (1988, 2005a) surveyed news production research literature
and summarized four ways in which current news production practices distort or
bias news content:
1. Personalized news: Most people relate better to individuals than to groups or
institutions, so most news stories center around people. According to Bennett
(1988), “The focus on individual actors[s] who are easy to identify with positively
or negatively invites members of the news audience to project their own
private feelings and fantasies directly onto public life” (p. 27). Thus personalization
helps people relate to and find relevance in remote events. It does this,
however, at a cost. “When television news reports about poverty focus on an
individual’s situation rather than on poverty more generally,” wrote New
York Times Magazine editor Alexander Star, “viewers look for someone (the
poor person or someone else) who caused the hardship. But this … is to
avoid the whole complicated process that brought someone grief. Stories call
our attention away from chance, the influence of institutions or social structures,
or the incremental contributions that different factors typically make to
any outcome. And they follow conventions that verge on melodrama: events
are caused by individuals who act deliberately, and what those individuals do
reflects their underlying character. This, to put it mildly, is not how most
things happen (2008, p. 10). Reality becomes little more than a series of
small, individual soap operas.
2. Dramatized news: Like all media commodities, news must be attractively packaged,
and a primary means of doing this involves dramatization. Edward Jay
Epstein (1973) provided the following quotation from a policy memorandum
written by a network television news producer: “Every news story should, without
any sacrifice of probity or responsibility, display the attributes of fiction, of
drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising
action and falling action, a beginning, a middle, and an end. These are not only
the essentials of drama; they are the essentials of narrative” (pp. 4–5).
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