The Handbook of Journalism Studies

76 SHOEMAKER, VOS, AND REESE
fi rst studies of its kind,” examined the reasons expressed by a news editor for accepting or rejecting
a list of potential news items. Although it addressed the decisions of only a single person, the
model proved highly infl uential.
In reviewing the reasons given for selecting one-tenth of the wire stories for inclusion in the
Peoria Star, White observed “how highly subjective, how reliant upon value judgments based
on the ‘gatekeeper’s’ own set of experiences, attitudes and expectations the communication of
‘news’ really is” (1950, p. 386). His adaptation of Lewin was fi rmly individualistic, placing more
emphasis on the gatekeeper than the channel, and subsequent studies followed suit, identifying
journalist selectivity as the main source of news “bias.” In White’s recollection of his own earlier
professional work, he had a similar insight:
I quickly became quite aware of my antipathy to the incoming columns of Westbrook Pegler, but
I tried to edit his vitriolic prose with objectivity. One afternoon, though, the paper’s managing
editor called me into his offi ce and said, “David, I’ve noticed lately that Pegler’s columns are
considerably shorter these past few weeks.”…Either subconsciously or with palpable awareness I
had been cutting out sentences or whole paragraphs of vintage Pegler. (p. 647)
The model strongly suggests that the main reason for media distortion is the need to narrow
a multitude of happenings in the world to a modest number that eventually make the news. That
implies that were that less the case and editors better able to choose appropriately, then news
selection would be less problematic. Furthermore, the gatekeeping model includes room for a
number of decision makers along the path of selection, but the tendency of many studies, including
White’s, is to focus on one section of that process. “Mr. Gates” was perhaps given too much
credit for wielding infl uence, given that he did not have at his command an entire selection of the
day’s happenings. And his job was mainly to choose from among stories in the major wire services,
which were largely comparable, meaning his selections were from among a narrow range
of choices to begin with (as advanced later by Gieber, 1964).
Although not a “gatekeeping” study as such, Warren Breed’s (1955) research on social control
in the newsroom is a close contemporary of White’s and often mentioned together. In “Social
control in the newsroom: A functional analysis,” Breed—also a former newspaper reporter—
interviewed a sample of newsmen at medium-sized newspapers to determine how they discerned
the appropriate way to handle their story selection. Breed, in a sense, identifi ed newspaper publishers
as the de facto gatekeepers who operate through indirect means to ensure that only news
consistent with organizational policy gets through. The relevant gatekeeping issue for Breed was
that “policy news may be slanted or buried so that some important information is denied the
citizenry” (p. 193).
Breed’s contribution was to show how the most important gatekeeper may not be the one
who is most immediately involved in the selection, but may reside elsewhere within more infl
uential levels of the organization. If news is what the journalist says it is, the subjectivity of
the gatekeeper would seem to profoundly problematize the news process, and yet the fi eld was
slow to follow up on this key insight. Reese and Ballinger (2001) argue that the reason lay in the
expectation that acting adequately on behalf of the community, the gatekeeper “sees to it (even
though he may never be consciously aware of it) that the community shall hear as a fact only
those events which the newsman, as the representative of his culture, believes to be true” (White,
1950, p. 390). Like White, Breed implied (as did subsequent interpretations by fi eld synthesizers)
that the gatekeeping process could work to the satisfaction of the community via journalistic
codes and other guidance, were the undue infl uence of publishers to be curtailed. According to
these views, then, as long as gatekeepers remained faithful cultural representatives, the society
need not fear their decisions.