News Organizations - Assignment Example

?Identify and analyze some of the main ways in which stories are selected by news organizations. News organizations select stories according to the news worthiness of these stories. The discussion below will include examples to expound on the three major origins of the news stories, factors that determine the news worthiness of a story, and gate keeping as a final stage in the selection process. According to Allan (2004), news stories emanate from three major origins; from naturally occurring events, created news and enterprise news. Naturally occurring events include disasters such as floods, airline crashes or fires that are inherently predictable. News about disasters follows a predictable pattern i.e. early reports and late reports. Early reports are dependent on the inconclusive information about the event from the witnesses on the severity of the disaster. Later stories offer more conclusive and newsworthy details on the event and occur after several days (Schlesinger, 1987). Created news is more frequent that unpredicted news. These emanates from the behaviour of an individual or an organization committing a certain act in a bid to seek publicity. For instance, the public relations official may participate in the process of news making to seek publicity. Enterprise news is created when the reporters engage in acting rather than reacting to disaster reporting. Enterprise news is common with investigative reporting. The regular sources of news can be summarised into the news net, institutional sources such as news beat, pre-selection of events such as the case of news diary and manufactured news such as the public relations events. A piece of information should be newsworthy for it to be published. According to Lester M. (2002) and Galtung & Ruge, (1965), the newsworthiness of a story is determined by news values. The first is impact whereby a story is more newsworthy if it appeals to a greater number of people. Timelessness is also crucial whereby more recent stories are more newsworthy compared to old pieces of information. However, timelessness is also relative as an event could have occurred in the past but realized lately. Occurrences based on prominence are also newsworthy. For instance, stories related top prominent individuals such as celebrities or powerful personalities appeal to the masses. Proximity of the news article to the audience attracts their interest. Proximity can be gauged either geographically or depending on the expected expectations and interest of the public. The bizarreness of a piece of news article attracts the attention of the public. Popular stories among the public are those related to conflict or controversy. News currency promotes newsworthiness whereby an idea whose time has come attracts the attention of the audience. The idea assumes a life of its own and captures the public imagination for some time. The final key consideration is the human interests whereby most people are interested in those stories that are possess an amusing theme. Other factors that determine the news worthiness of a news article include competition; commercial or profession competition of the media may affect the journalists’ endorsement on the value of news given to an article by a rival. For instance, Philo and Berry (2004) portends that the media coverage of the conflicts in Israel was based on competition among the media channels that obtained their news anyhow with some based on false hood. Another factor is time constraints for instance, traditional news media such as radios have strict deadlines and short production periods implying that they are efficient in the coverage of news that can be researched and reported hastily. Logistics is also a determining factor that determines the availability of global communications and functionality of technical or financial resources that determines whether a story will be covered or not. The final process in the selection process is gate keeping i.e. the way in which information is filtered for dissemination. Gate keeping provides the information ready for broadcasting, publication or any other mode of communication (Branston and Stafford, 2010). Gate keeping regulate the flow of news. It entails culling and drafting numerous information bits into limited messages that are communicated to the public regularly. The process is crucial in that it not only determine which information is chosen, but also the nature and the content of the messages. Gate keeping is conducted by gate keepers e.g. journalist, producers, editors or anchors. A story passes through many gates. For instance, someone who supposes that he or she has a news story acts as the first goal keeper. They relay the story to the journalist who decides if the story is news worthy or not. The journalist conveys the story to the editor who hears it and decides to allow the journalists to pursue it. The story is then covered and conveyed for telecasting with the arrangement based on the news values. What gets through the gate is dependent on a number of factors namely the news value, source of the story, knowledge of the audience, viewing area, previous day or the next day’s news and the news diary. Outline and analyze the claim that news does not serve the needs of citizens. Your answer should draw on appropriate examples from research. Most of the news reporting is dependent on the criteria chosen by journalists, which mostly exclude the needs of citizens. Stories are normally reported to serve the interests of influential personalities than that of the citizens. The relayed news does not serve the interests of the public largely because most of them are characterized by bias and interventions. The discussion below will focus on the interventions and modes of bias that substantiate the claim that news does not serve the needs of citizens. Limitations to the media neutrality are based on the failure of journalists to report genuine and detailed facts related to a certain story and the legal restrictions of the selected facts relative to their linkage on their coherent narrative. For instance, Nick Davies (2008) found out that the act of reporting the truth has been clouded by reporting of ignorance in reference to a prestigious Sunday newspaper that allowed the M16 and the CIA to include fiction in its columns. Selectivity is inevitable as it is impossible to report everything. According to Bennet (2007), information bias take can occur in three forms; personalization, dramatization and fragmentation. Biased reporting emanates from marketing forces such as the ownerships of the news sources, the selection of the staff, the preference of the intended audience, negative influence from advertisers and the nature of media ownership. The most common modes of media bias occur when the media attacks or supports a certain political grouping, ideology or candidate. For instance, during the American civil war, Abraham Lincoln accused the newspapers in the border states of favouring the Southerners leading to a ban. Advertisements can also be biased if they are designed to suit the needs of the advertisers while ignoring the needs of citizens (Stanton, 2007). At a corporate level, the media stories are selected to suit the corporate owners of the media irrespective of the harm they might be causing to the public. Most journalists have a tendency of reporting popular stories that appeal to the majority while avoiding those stories that may offend anyone even if they are appropriate in catering for the welfare of the public. For instance, the recent reporting of the 2012 US elections ignored the impacts of the hurricane that had affected the country even though the moment could have been the most opportune for making the audience listen to the perils of the victims. Every journalist was reporting about the event, therefore most journalists felt that it would be unfashionable for them to cover other non-political stories. Sensationalism of journalists amounts to bias as they report most exceptional stories in favour of the ordinary. For instance, airplane crashes are more widely reported compared to automobile accidents. The victims are those affected by the automobile accidents would be most interested in the stories related to the automobile accidents rather that the plane crashes. Therefore, it would be unfair to ignore such stories and instead report on the events that they think are more crucial without considering the needs of the masses. Bias is also experienced when the news cast demeans certain racial or religious groupings while favouring others. Most of the times, journalist may ignore neither information nor a series of information covering the welfare of the citizens for a long time. The news casts have a tendency of ignoring the facts that disproves liberal claims which are normally raised by citizens or those that support conservative beliefs. For instance, the internet is full of information on the western culture with minimal cultural values portrayed by communities from the developing communities. Bias is also visible in the placement of the stories in a news cast. Most journalists are aware that the audience have a tendency of focusing on the headlines and ignoring the contents especially in the case of print media (Allan, 2004). The stories are arranged according to the reporters view on the importance of the story. For instance, most political stories normally appears on the first page of a newspaper or on the headlines of a telecast while the news related to education or culture are placed at the inside page or televised lastly (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2007). Most stories that are not important to the media have less content compared to the ones that are perceived crucial. The media may also fail to cater for the needs of the public due to the intervention by the government. For instance, in the United Kingdom, freedom of information is weakly protected with the influence of the official secret act being influential (Seaton, 2005). The two factors allow the government to manipulate and control information flow and maintenance of the state secrets even if the welfare of the public is affected. The daily press releases are normally manipulated through spinning the information for the interest of the government. This implies that news reporting is majorly government controlled with the needs of the public at the mercy of the legislature. In conclusion, the media may not tell the citizens what to think but they can inform people what to think about. Bias in news leads to cultivate a negative perception from the public. Reliance on the news full of falsehood and bias hinders our ability to be effective citizens. The media has a social responsibility towards citizens as the dissemination of the most crucial organ of nation development i.e. information originates from the media. Reporting should be conducted in a way that positively informs the public. News development should be conducted in a responsible manner. All forms of biases and personal opinions should be eliminated from any news piece. All the news details should be accurate and relevant to the topic chosen. References Allan, S. (2004) News culture, London: Sage, Open University Press. Bennett, L. (2007) News: the politics of illusion, New York, Pearson Longman. Branston, G. & Stafford, R. (2010) The media student’s book, London, Routledge. Davies, N. (2008) Flat earth news: an award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media, London, Chatto and Windus. Galtung, J. & Ruge, M. (1965) The structure of foreign news: the presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four foreign newspapers, Journal of International Peace Research, vol. 1, pp. 64- 90. Hoskins, A. & O’Loughlin, B. (2007) Television and terror: conflicting times and the crisis of news discourse, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan Lester, M. (2002) Generating newsworthiness: the interpretive construction of public events, American Sociological Review, vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 984-994 Philo, G. & Berry, M. (2004) Bad news from Israel, London, Pluto Press. Schlesinger, P. (1987) Putting reality together, London, Methuen Seaton, J. (2005) Carnage and the media: the making and breaking of news about violence, London, Allen Lane Stanton, R.C. (2007) All news is local: the failure of the media to reflect world events in a globalised age, London, Macfarland. Read More