Factors Influencing News Selection

News People

Political Bias

  • Journalists typically care about public affairs and politics; this interest inevitably carries personal ideological leanings that shape news judgment.
  • Long‐standing accusations of liberal bias:
    • Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew (Nixon era, 1960\text{s}–1970\text{s}) claimed U.S. newsrooms were run by an “Eastern Establishment liberal elite” (mostly Ivy-League-educated men from Harvard, Yale, Princeton).
    • Empirical surveys have repeatedly found that entry-level reporters as a group lean left on topics such as race, abortion, and the environment.
  • Counter-evidence of conservatism higher up the ladder:
    • Producers, publishers, owners, and corporate boards skew moderate-to-conservative, reminding us that “news is big business.”
    • Even self-identified liberals inside newsrooms rarely challenge core U.S. cultural premises (representative democracy, individualism, Judeo-Christian ethics); in that sense they defend the status quo.
  • Marketplace proliferation (cable, online) has amplified explicit partisanship:
    • Fox News ⇒ right, often synchronized with the Republican Party.
    • MSNBC and Huffington Post ⇒ left.
    • The Drudge Report ⇒ conservative.
    • CNN, once centrist, is now perceived as slightly left.
  • Perception gap: liberals accuse conservatives of dominating the press and vice-versa; critiques often mirror critics’ own ideology.
  • Audience-driven alignment (Gentzkow & Shapiro 2014):
    • Newspaper slant correlates more with community ideology than with owner ideology.
    • Conservative markets (e.g.
      • Washington Times (DC’s conservative paper)
      • Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City, Utah)) employ Republican‐friendly wording: “illegal alien,” “death tax.”
    • Liberal markets (e.g.
      • San Francisco Chronicle
      • Boston Globe) favor Democratic wording: “undocumented worker,” “estate tax.”
    • Profit motive ⇒ “give customers what they want,” not “mold customers.”
  • Practical effects on news content:
    • Word choice frames (“death tax” vs “estate tax”).
    • Decisions about which facts, experts, or visuals to include or omit.
    • Sometimes subconscious rather than overt.

Subcultural Bias (Journalistic Worldview)

  • U.S. journalism constitutes a semi‐closed subculture:
    • Shared educational pipeline (journalism schools, similar curricula).
    • Common professional reading (Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Journalism Review).
    • Membership in the same press clubs and professional societies.
    • Geographic clustering at power centers (NYC, Washington, D.C.).
    • Social overlap (same parties, same sources).
  • Consequences:
    • Homogeneous assumptions about what “counts” as a story.
    • Tendency toward herd definitions of newsworthiness, even apart from partisan ideology.

Organizational Pressures

The BEAT System

  • News organizations possess finite staff and gear; they pre-position resources where news is likely to break.
  • A “beat” = routine assignment to a location or subject area:
    • Geographic: White House, Congress, Supreme Court, City Hall, State Capitol.
    • Topical: education, science, environment, entertainment.
  • Large outlets rely heavily on beats; small outlets may default to general-assignment reporters.
  • Beats define who is considered an “official” source; when beat actors act, news automatically follows.

Pack Journalism

  • Reporters on the same beat often converge on a single narrative after a prestige outlet deems it newsworthy.
  • Chain reaction: Washington Post ⇒ New York Times ⇒ L.A. Times ⇒ TV networks ⇒ local papers ⇒ radio talk shows.
  • Result: uniform coverage, magnified agenda-setting, and limited diversity of angles.

Regularized Output

  • News is produced on a clock:
    • Newspapers every 24 hours.
    • Evening television at fixed slots.
  • Space/time must be filled even on slow days; conversely, important stories may be squeezed for lack of space.
  • Viewers will never hear, “Nothing happened today, here’s 25 minutes instead of 60.”

Deadlines

  • Each outlet has cutoff times so editors can polish copy/video.
    • TV prefers events around late morning (≈ 10{:}30–12{:}00) for inclusion in the 18{:}00 newscast.
  • Miss the cutoff ⇒ story may die (“old news” by next cycle).
  • 1980\text{s} innovations reshaped the cycle:
    • CNN’s 24-hour model shrank the window; “internal” rolling deadlines emerged every 30 minutes.
    • Internet and mobile alerts created near-continuous micro-deadlines; messier but still real.

Technology

Satellites (Boom of 1980\text{s})

  • Enabled local affiliates to uplink national/international footage on their own.
  • Case studies:
    • Oklahoma City bombing (1995): local crews from across the U.S. beamed live shots home.
    • O.J. Simpson trial (1994–1995): saturation coverage by stations far from L.A.
  • Effect: local outlets now select some national stories once reserved for network newsrooms.

Lightweight Digital Gear

  • Cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, satellite phones:
    • A lone reporter in Iraq/Afghanistan can shoot, edit, and transmit video in real time.
  • Historical contrast:
    • Vietnam War era required bulky film cameras, multi-person crews, and physical transport of reels (Saigon ⇒ New York).
    • Today a single click bounces HD files off a satellite to a server in seconds.
  • Outcomes: faster, cheaper, broader geographic reach; more on-scene variety; previously inaccessible stories now covered.

Helicopters

  • Expensive acquisition ⇒ pressure to deploy them.
  • Good for visually dramatic, real-time stories:
    • Car chases, wildfires, multi-vehicle accidents, natural disasters.
  • Investment biases the newsroom toward selecting events that justify helicopter use.

Integrative Remarks & Implications

  • Selection is multi-causal: individual ideology, professional subculture, institutional routines, and enabling technology interact.
  • Commercial logic (profit) underlies many factors: from audience‐pleasing ideological slants to capitalizing on costly equipment.
  • Ethical tension:
    • Striving for objectivity vs unconscious framing via word choice.
    • Serving public interest vs entertainment values amplified by technology (e.g.
      helicopter chase voyeurism).
  • Real-world relevance:
    • Media literacy requires recognizing beats, deadlines, pack effects, and technological showmanship.
    • Citizens can diversify sources to compensate for ideological and subcultural blind spots.
  • Link to previous lectures (implicit): reinforces agenda-setting theory (media tell us what to think about) and gatekeeping (who controls story flow).