Mass media: news values

News values

Every event which is reported in the news has gone through some kind of gatekeeping process. How does a journalist or an editor decide what's newsworthy and what's not. According to some media researchers, they refer to a set of so-called 'news values'. These are the criteria which enable them to determine whether a 'story' is followed up in the first place and then whether it makes it into the news, competing against all the other possible items.

There is no suggestion, of course, that journalists and editors refer to a list pinned on the wall of the office, but, rather, that they unconsciously measure a potential news item against these criteria. Research conducted in the USA involved giving twelve television editors sixty-four news stories which they were asked to classify for newsworthiness. All classified them in a similar manner and those items with the greatest number of news values made it to a higher position on the list. (Buckalev (1969/70) in Staab (1990))

Galtung and Ruge

One of the best known lists of news values is supplied by Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge. Although there research was conducted three decades ago (1965), virtually any media analyst's discussion of news values will always refer to their list, which was initially intended for the coverage of international events.

The values they identified are:

• Frequency: the time-span of an event and the extent to which it 'fits' the frequency of the newspaper's or news broadcast's schedule. On this basis, motorway pile-ups, murders, plane crashes will qualify as they are all of short duration and therefore nearly always fit into the schedule. Such events are also unambiguous, their meaning is quickly arrived at and they don't need any explanation (see 'unambiguity' below).
  Background to the news, though - e.g. economic, social or political trends - is less likely to make it into the news as such trends take a long time to unfold. When they do make it into the news, then normally via a clearly defined event such as the publication of employment or trade figures on a particular day. Political parties' news management techniques will try to take advantage of this news value by, for example in the run-up to an election, holding press conferences or arranging photo-opportunities at times which do 'fit in'.
• Threshold: How big is an event? Is it big enough to make it into the news? That depends of course on the news organ. The drunk driver who wrote off my parked car made it into the local paper, but he would have needed to write off half a dozen to make it into the national dailies. The size of an event tends also to be mitigated somewhat by its degree of 'meaningfulness' (see below).
• Unambiguity How clear is the meaning of an event? The mass media generally tend to go for closure, unlike literature, where the polysemy of events is exploited and explored. An event such as a murder, a car crash and so on raises no problems, its meaning is immediately grasped, so it is likely to make it into the news. In an Observer article of June 11 2000, Peter Preston quoted the results of a survey of 300 leading US media professionals across the US, conducted by The Columbia Journalism Review, which revealed that the most regular reason why stories don't appear is that they are 'too complicated'.
• Meaningfulness: How meaningful will the event appear to the receivers of the news? Hartley (19??) stresses in this context what he refers to as 'cultural proximity'. Events happening in cultures very different from our own will not be seen as being inherently meaningful to audiences here. On the other hand, events in continental Europe and the USA will make it into the news. The same is likely to apply within our own society, ethnic groups, the underprivileged etc. receiving less coverage. It seems even that events within the UK which are remote from the main news centres are likely to receive limited attention. (The headline in the Daily News today reads BRUNETTE STABBED TO DEATH. Underneath in lower case letters '6000 Killed in Iranian Earthquake' ... I wonder what colour hair they had - Abbie Hoffman in Tuchman (1978))
  However, if the Kashmiri separatists seize Western hostages or if the underprivileged with their joyriding and ram-raiding pose a threat to the supposed core values of our society, then they suddenly become interesting.
• Consonance: Does the event match the media's expectations? Journalists have a pretty good idea of the 'angle' they want to report an event from, even before they get there. If the media expect something to happen, then it will. The classic example of this is said by Hartley to be the 1968 anti-Vietnam demonstration in front of the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The media expected violence. As a result, it was the very minor amount of violence which in fact claimed all the attention.
• Unexpectedness: 'Man bites dog' is news. If an event is highly unpredictable, then it is likely to make it into the news. The unpredictability does, however, need to be within the confines of meaningfulness and unambiguity. Thus, the group of lesbians who abseiled into the House of Lords were virtually guaranteed media coverage, as their action was unexpected and unambiguous. Although militant lesbianism is hardly presented by the media as part of the core values of our society, and may therefore not benefit from 'cultural proximity', the sanctity of the parliamentary process can benefit from that news value. So, the event would be likely to be reported in a way unfavourable to the lesbians' cause. To them, though, that doesn't necessarily matter -after all, 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'.
• Continuity: Once an event has been covered, it is convenient to cover it some more - the running story. Apart from anything else it allows media organisations they already put in place to cover the original event. This will depend very much on the nature of the event.
• Composition: This is a matter of the balance of the news. It's a matter of the editors' judgement, more than anything else. If there's a lot of foreign news around, some of it will be dropped in favour of more domestic news. If some major event is seizing a huge amount of attention, there will be a 'round-up' of less important stories.
• Reference to élite nations: This relates again to 'cultural proximity'. Those nations which are culturally closest to our own will receive most of the coverage - Bosnia-Herzegovina receives more coverage than Rwanda, Northern Ireland receives more coverage than Chad. And who had until recently ever even heard of genocide in East Timor?
  This is apparent not only in political and war coverage, but also in accidents, where the body-count threshold increases the more culturally different the country is from ours.
  In part, of course, this is conditioned by the fact that news organisations will have reporters already stationed in European countries and in the USA so that when a story arises there's someone there to cover it.
• Reference to élite persons: The media pay attention to important people. Anyone the media pay attention to must be important. The Labour Party leader falls in the sea - that is news. The Queen's finger is nipped by a royal corgi - that is news. For the rest of us it would take a life-threatening savaging by a rabid Rottweiler.
• Personalisation: This connects with unambiguity and meaningfulness. Events are seen as the actions of individuals. Incompatibility between the Government's policies and the Opposition's is presented as a personal showdown between the two party leaders, especially if there is sexy footage of the two engaged in a parliamentary slanging match, complete with cheers and jeers.

  Clearly the news is peopled by real individuals, but in representing events through people the news is following the conventions of classic realism, for it assumes that the way to construct an understandable and authentic version of the real is through the actions, words and reactions of the individuals involved. Social and political issues are only reported if they can be embodied in an individual, and thus social conflict of interest is personalised into conflict between individuals. The effect of this is that the social origins of events are lost, and individual motivation is assumed to be the origin of all action.

Fiske (1987) p.294

• Negativity: Bad news is good news. Bad news has many of the other characteristics as well - it may be unexpected, unambiguous, consonant with our general expectations about the world, it may be 'big', e.g. a major catastrophe etc. Fiske (1987) refers to an American journalist arriving in the Belgian Congo during the war there, running up to a group of white women waiting for a plane to leave and shouting out: 'Has anyone here been raped and speaks English?'

You will probably feel that there are certainly some news values missing from the list - footage seems a fairly obvious one, for example: if there's footage available, then the event is more likely to be covered. Entertainment value would seem another obvious candidate for the list - if a news item isn't entertaining then it's not covered. In an Observer article of June 11 2000, Peter Preston quoted the results of a survey of 300 leading US media professionals across the US, conducted by The Columbia Journalism Review, which revealed that 84% of journalists polled felt that a story would not be covered if it was 'important but dull'. As Preston dryly observed, 'this is not dumbing down; it is dumbing out'.

For examples of a variety of significant stories that failed to make the news, see Project Censored

Schulz

Schulz came up with a somewhat different list, which included nineteen different factors, subsumed under six dimensions:

Status
élite nation, élite nation, élite institution, élite person

Identification
proximity, ethnocentrism, personalisation, emotions

Valence
aggression, controversy, values, success

Consonance
theme, stereotype, predictability

Relevance
consequence, concern

Dynamics
timeliness, uncertainty, unexpectedness

Schulz (1982) in Staab (1990))

News Values as 'Objective' Factors in Selection

The implication in many studies of news values seems to be that they are virtually objective factors, to which journalists and editors react reflexively. According to this view news items are subjected to a gatekeeping process which is apolitical and unbiased. However, many studies of news production have led to the same conclusion as Tuchman:

I do not mean to accuse newsworkers of bias. The news professionals rightly insist that those who shout 'bias' be able to define objective truth in a definitive manner. I do not claim that ability. But I do claim that it is valuable to identify news as an artful accomplishment attuned to specific understandings of social reality. Those understandings, constituted in specific work processes and practices, legitimate the status quo.

Tuchman (1978))

From this point of view, the selection of news events is not a reflex action, but the socially determined construction of reality. It suggests that journalistic choices are intentional and not merely the effects of certain causes called news values.

In any case, what constitutes an 'event'? The term is not unproblematic. Is an air crash the event of the plane hitting the ground, or does it include the events of the passengers boarding the plane, the rescue services arriving etc? In effect what constitutes an event is what a journalist, editor et al consider to constitute an event.

Staab (1990) concludes that

the concept of news factors ... is not so much a theory to explain news selection but rather a model to describe and analyse structures and relationships in media reality.

Introduction to Mass Media Effects

Glossary of media studies terms