As the old cliché goes ‘dog bites man isn’t news; man bites dog is’
It has been said that “advertisements constitute the only good news in a newspaper.’’[1] Whilst in life no news is said to be good news, in the world of the media, it is usually bad news that is favoured over good news as it sells more newspapers and programmes. But it is also off putting, how many times have you been watching the news and have turned over, sickened or saddened or just bored of constant reportage of war, murder, rape, natural disasters and the like? It must be reported on, but could be better balanced with more good news? Sadly, the preference for the darker side of life is further confirmed by a flick around the five terrestrial channels on any one night, at 10pm last night the choice was ‘9/11: The Twin Towers vs. ‘Diana: The week she died’ vs. the crime series ‘Criminal Minds’ vs. a horror movie ‘Wrong turn’ (about cannibalistic mountain men) vs. (and thank goodness) ‘Time Trumpet with Armando Iannucci’; ironically, a satire on news and current affairs programmes. Whilst cable may contain much of the same and more of it, the very nature of speciality channels allows at least greater choice, be your choice more murder or more docusoap or some light relief. Phew.
And so to the front pages of the newspapers where more doom and gloom resides. Obesity is the latest hot topic on the media agenda. The ‘epidemic’ is now much more worrying than the bird flu one, which has all but flown away. It is a serious issue which needs addressing but the way it has saturated the media agenda is resonant of bread and dripping, or the ‘mucky fat sandwich’ as it is affectionately known in Yorkshire. Different hooks keep the story alive, for example yesterday came the revelation that overweight people are twice as likely to lose their eyesight. This is probably a good thing, so they can avoid reading all the stories which serve to make them feel worse about themselves. Another story revealed that not eating that ‘daily biscuit’ will result in significant weight loss after a year. This is the media which paradoxically promotes consumption and wealth but dismisses people that are too fat, as well as those that are too thin.
Last week immigrant workers were the focus of the wrath and recently the press favourites; asylum seekers, and paedophiles. The news agenda shifts regularly and there is always something else we are encouraged to worry about or another group to victimise. Whilst the topic of choice is replaced, it is often re-referenced, as a result of a new development in the story or because certain newspapers seek to influence political debate by their continued campaigns on an issue. For example, the News of the World has campaigned for six years in order to persuade the Home Office to introduce ‘Sarah’s law’, a UK version of the US ‘Megan's law’; the bill which allows parents the right to know whether a paedophile lives in their area. It is under consideration, a decision which has led the Chief of Police to accuse the government of pandering to tabloid pressure. Jamie Oliver’s Channel 4 ‘School Dinners’ is credited with persuading the government to improve school meals, and thus keeping the obesity debate alive. The government is banning unhealthy foods in schools and now also advertisements for ‘junk food’. Whilst this is a positive step, it also worries anti ‘nanny-state’ campaigners as the government dictates what we put in our mouths, leaving less and less for the individual to decide.
Whilst the various papers cover topics in different ways, generally with tabloids sensationalising issues and broadsheets referencing wider debates, on any given day a glance across the front pages shows a broad similarity in the stories covered. So how do they choose which stories are important to us? How is the media agenda set, so as to impose some kind of order on the social world? It is summarised absolutely by Roland Barthes’ observation; ‘What is noted is by definition notable’. Short of working inside a newspaper, we can only imagine how an editor chooses which stories to run with or we can do as weathermen do, and predict patterns from past experience. However, there has been extensive research into the kind of criteria that leads to a story being deemed ‘newsworthy’, and these are known as ‘news values’.[2] These are unspoken, informal rules or codes which vary from news outlet and over time, but are useful shared assumptions nonetheless.
1. Conflict – stories with two sides (for example wars and employment disputes) are newsworthy and create the opportunity for ‘objectivity’
2. Relevance – stories relevant to reader’s lives and experience
3. Timeliness – recent events are favoured as they can be monitored as they unfold
4. Simplification – stories that are not overcomplicated can easily be made sense of by the public
5. Personalisation – stories with an emphasis on a ‘human’ perspective over a faceless institution for example
6. Unexpectedness – Events out of the ordinary such as terrorist acts
7. Continuity – Stories which can ‘fit in' with the schedule
8. Composition – a mixture of news must appear for example local, international, business and thus stories can appear purely to provide balance in categorisation
9. Reference to elite nations or persons – UK/US/first world events and people (politicians and famous people such as royalty and celebrities) are deemed more newsworthy than ‘ordinary’ people or third world countries
10. Cultural specificity – stories culturally relevant to the reader and journalist are favoured at the expense of other cultures, creating an ‘us and them’ mentality
11. Negativity – bad news is always more newsworthy than good news
The news is ideological, a way of making sense of the social world, and events and discourses are naturalised or normalised. They become common sense, and the media both informs and creates strong consensus. In this way people are influenced by what they read but also can become desensitised, thus bad news becomes normal, even boring. For example, it is only when a significant number of British or US soldiers die that we are reminded we are at war in Iraq, otherwise we almost forget as the media encourages us to worry about something else. (Stories about the death of British soldiers in Iraq embody almost all of the above ‘news values’).
“Journalism used to mirror a world of worried reality, now it paints a landscape of lies”
This was a reference to 1981 when the Washington Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize it had won for a fabricated story on drug addicts. It is still applicable 25 years later as there are countless lawsuits against newspapers for telling ‘untruths’, most recently with Prince Harry caught in a compromising position in a nightclub, a photograph which was actually three years old, not recent, as the paper claimed.
The media must report on the world and its problems, but like the fictional ‘Eastenders’, the world being depicted is in the main depressing, unrealistic and almost one without hope. I for one won’t let myself worry about getting bird flu, my job being ‘taken’ by immigrants, about becoming obese, that my mobile phone will make me infertile or that hoodies will attack me, as life’s too short and I believe, much more positive.
[1] *By the media theorist Marshal McLuhan
[2] As summarised in News Culture (Stuart Allen, 1999).
And so to the front pages of the newspapers where more doom and gloom resides. Obesity is the latest hot topic on the media agenda. The ‘epidemic’ is now much more worrying than the bird flu one, which has all but flown away. It is a serious issue which needs addressing but the way it has saturated the media agenda is resonant of bread and dripping, or the ‘mucky fat sandwich’ as it is affectionately known in Yorkshire. Different hooks keep the story alive, for example yesterday came the revelation that overweight people are twice as likely to lose their eyesight. This is probably a good thing, so they can avoid reading all the stories which serve to make them feel worse about themselves. Another story revealed that not eating that ‘daily biscuit’ will result in significant weight loss after a year. This is the media which paradoxically promotes consumption and wealth but dismisses people that are too fat, as well as those that are too thin.
Last week immigrant workers were the focus of the wrath and recently the press favourites; asylum seekers, and paedophiles. The news agenda shifts regularly and there is always something else we are encouraged to worry about or another group to victimise. Whilst the topic of choice is replaced, it is often re-referenced, as a result of a new development in the story or because certain newspapers seek to influence political debate by their continued campaigns on an issue. For example, the News of the World has campaigned for six years in order to persuade the Home Office to introduce ‘Sarah’s law’, a UK version of the US ‘Megan's law’; the bill which allows parents the right to know whether a paedophile lives in their area. It is under consideration, a decision which has led the Chief of Police to accuse the government of pandering to tabloid pressure. Jamie Oliver’s Channel 4 ‘School Dinners’ is credited with persuading the government to improve school meals, and thus keeping the obesity debate alive. The government is banning unhealthy foods in schools and now also advertisements for ‘junk food’. Whilst this is a positive step, it also worries anti ‘nanny-state’ campaigners as the government dictates what we put in our mouths, leaving less and less for the individual to decide.
Whilst the various papers cover topics in different ways, generally with tabloids sensationalising issues and broadsheets referencing wider debates, on any given day a glance across the front pages shows a broad similarity in the stories covered. So how do they choose which stories are important to us? How is the media agenda set, so as to impose some kind of order on the social world? It is summarised absolutely by Roland Barthes’ observation; ‘What is noted is by definition notable’. Short of working inside a newspaper, we can only imagine how an editor chooses which stories to run with or we can do as weathermen do, and predict patterns from past experience. However, there has been extensive research into the kind of criteria that leads to a story being deemed ‘newsworthy’, and these are known as ‘news values’.[2] These are unspoken, informal rules or codes which vary from news outlet and over time, but are useful shared assumptions nonetheless.
1. Conflict – stories with two sides (for example wars and employment disputes) are newsworthy and create the opportunity for ‘objectivity’
2. Relevance – stories relevant to reader’s lives and experience
3. Timeliness – recent events are favoured as they can be monitored as they unfold
4. Simplification – stories that are not overcomplicated can easily be made sense of by the public
5. Personalisation – stories with an emphasis on a ‘human’ perspective over a faceless institution for example
6. Unexpectedness – Events out of the ordinary such as terrorist acts
7. Continuity – Stories which can ‘fit in' with the schedule
8. Composition – a mixture of news must appear for example local, international, business and thus stories can appear purely to provide balance in categorisation
9. Reference to elite nations or persons – UK/US/first world events and people (politicians and famous people such as royalty and celebrities) are deemed more newsworthy than ‘ordinary’ people or third world countries
10. Cultural specificity – stories culturally relevant to the reader and journalist are favoured at the expense of other cultures, creating an ‘us and them’ mentality
11. Negativity – bad news is always more newsworthy than good news
The news is ideological, a way of making sense of the social world, and events and discourses are naturalised or normalised. They become common sense, and the media both informs and creates strong consensus. In this way people are influenced by what they read but also can become desensitised, thus bad news becomes normal, even boring. For example, it is only when a significant number of British or US soldiers die that we are reminded we are at war in Iraq, otherwise we almost forget as the media encourages us to worry about something else. (Stories about the death of British soldiers in Iraq embody almost all of the above ‘news values’).
“Journalism used to mirror a world of worried reality, now it paints a landscape of lies”
This was a reference to 1981 when the Washington Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize it had won for a fabricated story on drug addicts. It is still applicable 25 years later as there are countless lawsuits against newspapers for telling ‘untruths’, most recently with Prince Harry caught in a compromising position in a nightclub, a photograph which was actually three years old, not recent, as the paper claimed.
The media must report on the world and its problems, but like the fictional ‘Eastenders’, the world being depicted is in the main depressing, unrealistic and almost one without hope. I for one won’t let myself worry about getting bird flu, my job being ‘taken’ by immigrants, about becoming obese, that my mobile phone will make me infertile or that hoodies will attack me, as life’s too short and I believe, much more positive.
[1] *By the media theorist Marshal McLuhan
[2] As summarised in News Culture (Stuart Allen, 1999).
posted by HowardDavies at 11:12 AM
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