The Handbook of Journalism Studies

12. NEWS VALUES AND SELECTIVITY 169
informed by audience taste—and news ideologies, which they perceive as born out of a desire to
inform or infl uence the audience and which are shifting over time. “In our view ideologies are
the main source of deviations in news reporting from a standard based on more or less objectifi ed
news values” (1994, p. 77).
Other academics argue that news values themselves can be seen as an ideologically loaded
way of perceiving—and presenting—the world. For Hall (1973, p. 235), although the news values
of mainstream journalism may appear to be “a set of neutral, routine practices,” they actually
form part of an “ideological structure” that privileges the perspectives of the most powerful
groups within society. Robert McChesney (2000, pp. 49–50, 110) highlights the way in which
a journalistic emphasis on individual “events” and “news hooks” results in less visible or more
long-term issues being downplayed, with individualism being portrayed as “natural” and more
civic or collective values being treated as “marginal.”
In their “propaganda model,” Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky ([1988] 1994, p. 298)
go further, suggesting that “selection of topics” is one of the key ways in which the media fulfi l
their “societal purpose” of inculcating “the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged
groups that dominate the domestic society and the state.” According to their model, fi ve fi lters—
identifi ed as the concentration of media ownership; the infl uence of advertising; the over-reliance
on information from the powerful; “fl ak” against transgressors; and an ethos of anti-communism—combine
to produce “the news fi t to print” (p. 2). Debate and dissent are permitted, but
only within a largely internalised consensus.
Studies of news coverage of marginalised groups such as trade unionists would appear to
confi rm this (Beharrell & Philo, 1977; Jones, Petley, Power, & Wood, 1985; Greenberg, 2004;
O’Neill, 2007). However, in her study of a national fi refi ghters’ strike, Deirdre O’Neill also
found that by appealing to human interest news values the union was able to achieve publication
of a number of news stories that highlighted its members’ case, thus, to some extent, militating
against the dominance of establishment views (O’Neill, 2007).
UNIVERSAL NEWS VALUES?
Studies have also examined the universality of news values: are they changed by socio-economic,
cultural and political differences? For example, a study of male and female editors in
seven Israeli papers found that both sexes applied broadly similar criteria to news selection and
practice, with little in the way of gender distinctions (Lavie & Lehman-Wilzig, 2003). In the
same way that news values were adhered to by both sexes, news values appeared to drive French
television coverage of the 2002 presidential elections, rather than any party political bias of
newsroom staff (Kuhn, 2005). News values were also found to dominate professional practice
in a study of long-term trends in campaign coverage in the German press. Wilke and Reinemann
(2001) found that German political journalists used the same news values in or out of election
campaigns.
Investigating news values in different countries, Chaudhary (1974) compared the news
judgements of American and Indian journalists. Despite being culturally dissimilar, journalists
of English language newspapers in democratic countries used the same news values. However,
Lange (1984) found that the socio-political environment in which journalists operated—including
the severe sanctions for criticizing the government that some Third World journalists face—
did affect their news values. He found that the less developed a nation, the more emphasis on
direct exhortations in the news, the more emphasis on news stories set in the future, the more
emphasis on news stories about co-operation and the more emphasis on positive evaluations of