lecture 8: journalism

political economy

objectivity and pluralism

• democratic theory: society needs journalism that is watchdog of those in power, can ferret out truth from lies and can present wide range fo informed positions on important issues of the day

= functions revisited

• watchdog fu,ction (fourth estate)

• information function (objectivity)

• representation function (diversity, pluralism)

• engagement ↔ neutrality

objectivity as criterion

• objectivity not always criterion for press

• partizan press systeù has much to offer democratic society as long as there are numerous well-subsidized media providing broad range of opinions

objectivity as commercial strategy

• problem objectivity arises as result of concentration tendencies in press industry: partisan press reflecting opinions of only a few owners, yield reaction from

  • activists, but also from press itself: fear for decreasing slaes due to lack of credibility of journalism

• stimulated development journalism as profession and development of journalistic ethics: emphasis on factual accuracy and discrediting of sensationalism

objectivity as journalistic ethic

• way journalism evolved … was to incorporate certain key values into professional code; there was nothing naturally objective or professional about those values. In core respects they responded to commercial and political needs of their owners

• over time it has become clear one problem with theory professional journalism; claim that it was possible to provide neutral and objective news was supect → doesn’t mean some journalism can’t be more nonpartisan or more accurate than others, it only means that journalism can’t actually be neutral or objective

problem of objectivity

problem(s) of objectivity

• 3 biases

  • sleectivity of sources

  • lack of contextualisation

  • implicit commercialisation

selectivity of sources

• official sources and prominent figures often seen as (most) legitimate sources

• experts often seen as ligitimate sources. just as with sources, experts often drawn from the establishment

lack of contextualisation

• contextualization tends to be avoided

• PR officers shape the news to suit interests their sponsors and of journalists by framing information as objective news or expert opinions

• and in a ready made format that can be readily used (time and cost saving)

• however, excellent journalistic work has been produced

  • importance of conflicts between owners (even among dominant groups, conflict remain, extent to which is dependent on quality of democracy)

  • importance of journalistic culture (even though establishment of a journalistic culture served interests of media owners to certain extent, there has been struggle to determine its contours between media owners and journalistic profession)

implicit commercialisation

• rationalisation: more pressure on journalistic work

  • declining quality journalistic work in terms of

    • genres: less investigative journalism, less international journalism

    • content: less diversity of sources, no double fact checking, …

  • more copy paste (from press agencies, other news papers, … even from official sources)

  • growing share of cheap formats (celebrities etc.)

• digitalisation = further rationalisation

  • journalists have become multitaskers that work for different platforms

• economic effects of digitalisation

  • econmies of scale: reduction in per unit cost of production of single product as volume of production of that product increases

  • economies of scope: reduction average cost of production when two/more products are produced using the same production facilities

politisation, depolitisation

• journalism smuggles in values that reflect commercial claims of media owners and advertisers as well as the political owning class

• editorial coverage to serve the interests of the advertisers

• journalists become celebrities, journalists accept bribes

• as journalism becomes more explicitly directed by market concerns, overall depoliticization of society will hardly encourage development of political coverage

• however, implicit politicisation by promotion of

  • certain values or certain themes

• + depoliticisation, by priming popular themes that boost reach of sales: celebrities, royals, health, disasters, …

• => depoliticisation = implicit politicisation

how to solve the dilemma

• from political economy pov, underlying question: whose interst is being served/what are the underlying relations of power

• diversity is key

• being responsive to users is not the same as being commercial in substance and in form

• a critical journalism = a journalism that always questions

  • sources (who is behind the news)

  • facts (how are things being represented)

  • opinions (whose agenda is being promoted)

cultural studies

news as ideological construct

major questions

• what may one understand about constructed nature of news?

• how news represent world?

• what values and practices inform news work?

• how cna we understand different types of news as manufactures in different ways for different audiences?

• how do concepts such as discourse, representation and ideology help one understand news texts?

• how cna we understand the concepts of objectivity and impartiality (in relation to the notion of consensus) when one looks at how news is made?

constructed nature of news

• variation across media products (broadsheets vs tabloids, television vs newspapers)

• regulatory regimes: ifferetn rules and obligations may apply to different media (example public service media and private media)

• even if there is dominant agenda of news items across news media in a given week still this doesn’t mean that all people have the same news experience

• however,

  • just because there is variety of news content and news presentation styles, this doesn’t mean that news is truly plural

  • versions of news can differ and yet at same time similar in some respects. THere are consistent discourses and ideological threads running through different versions of news

how does news represent the world?

• is kind of narrative, it’s a media representation, it’s a selective version of original events, utterances and behaviours

• although it’s a constructed reality, the illusion is created that the news is social reality or at least shared information and shared understanding of how the world is

• it confers to the media the power to decide what core news is, i.e. what is important and what not

what values and practices inform news work

• certain values inform slection and construction. that which is valued is included. Certain ways of telling stories are valued

  • whar certain events selected and others left out?

  • why are news items treated in the ways that they are?

• while news values always changing over time and inflected differently from one news organization to the next, it is still possible to point to these and related news values as being relatively consistent criteria informing these assignments of significance

news agenda: news value

• preference of media for negative news agenda is ideological because

  • defines what it meant by unacceptable behaviour

  • defines which are to be seen as unacceptable (deviant, unimportant, not valuable) social groups

  • defines beliefs that are unacceptable to dominant ideology

how is news manufactured for audiences?

• consonance with audience beliefs

• continuity with what is already in the news

• cultural proximity

• elites

• personification of what happened (personification = personalize, closer to ourself, personal easier to understand)

• spectacle

• size

• unexpectedness

• conflict

hard vs soft news

news genres

• ideas of news agenda is that news operations tend to consistently prioritize certain categories of news material

  • politics

  • economy

  • foreign affairs

  • domestic stories

  • one-off items

  • sports

• … that manifest structure of thinking about the world

hard news vs soft news

• distinguishing ebtween hard and soft news is ideological practice: draws on approach in which proper news provides reliable source of information for the good citizen

hard news

• distinction is matter of both content and style

  • proper news is assumed to be about weighty political and social matters - hard news

  • it’s also assumed that gossip, celebrity news, and even the human interest angle on disasters, is just soft news

soft news

• shift towards netertainment values?

• dumbing down of journalism

• news has always covered this range

soft news or human interst?

• danger that criticism confuses arguments about the morality of the way that news is gathered with those about the worth of the subject of news

• human interest stories don’t have to be expresses in simplistic terùs, nor are they unworthy in themselves

• political and ideological nature of soft news: soft news secures hegemonic consent as much as does hard news (endorses ideas elites)

ideological work of journalism

• news is ideological force, communication not just facts, but also way of understanding and making sense of the facts

• news as social knowledge: shared information and shared understanding about how the world is

• news patently brings us version(s) of teh world: brings certain kinds of understanding of the world, and indeed of what we refer to as truth and as reality

• news as arena between competing ways of sense-making

• may be said that news talks about and visualizes world in ways which privilege and make dominant some cultures and some ways of understanding the world

what values and practices inform news work

• news values and news agenda give form and direction to practices of news gathering and news making. In a sense they legitimize their illegitimate normative power. It feels acceptable to see certain kinds of story because that is what one expects to see. it denies alternative views, and in that sense denies real pluralism

• where are news values located: news values are part of more general social values and ideological positions that are shared by other institutions or indeed by society at large