NEWS AS PHENOMENON

NEWS AS PHENOMENON

Just as a reductionist might say that art is anything displayed as art by

a museum or gallery (institutions with the power to define art), so too someone might respond that news is any item that is not advertising and is presented by a news medium. Using quantitative logic, the next step for this reductionist would be content analysis, a systematic determination of what is disseminated as news.

Such reductionism seems as absurd in the case of news as it does in the case of art. The early sociologists clearly recognized that news was more than the items found in the newspapers of their day. One early social-scientific statement about news is Max Weber’s comparative discussion of news in Germany versus news in the Allied nations during World War I. The terms of the comparison are not particularly relevant today. What matters more is the context: Weber commented about journalists and journalism in “Politics as a vocation” (1918/58), the companion to his classic “Science as a vocation.” Situating his argument in a discussion of politics, Weber makes clear that news is not mere information. He explicitly adds that journalists are not best viewed as purveyors of either information or scandals (although they may do both), but are rather “professional politicians.” Furthermore, newspapers are not simply profit-making capitalist enterprises, as was the case in England during the Great War, but political organizations which “function” as political clubs. To talk about news, Weber claims, is to talk about politics in society.

The ex-journalist Robert Park wrote the earliest extensive treatment of news by an American social scientist. He asked different questions than Weber. Rather than considering politics in the context of war and the aftermath of Versailles, situations clearly important to Germany, Park addressed an American social problem: growing urbanization produced by European immigration and internal migration (the movement from farms to growing urban centers). Park (1922) wanted to know not simply what news was, but rather how it functioned in cities composed of very different groups living largely in segregated enclaves. His answer seems simple: news is the functional equivalent of the town crier who once made his rounds announcing “Ten o’clock and all is well,” or, perhaps, “Eleven o’clock and Mrs Smith just birthed

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a healthy boy.” But, Park knew well, city life is inextricably different from life in a village. In a city there are so many births and deaths each day that each one is irrelevant to those not personally touched, church bells compete for attention, and groups adhere to conflicting norms. Furthermore, news in an American city of that time might serve different functions than news in a European setting. Park’s Chicago was a tumultuous city; like other major American urban centers, it faced the problem of integrating vastly different groups into a sociopolitical entity. For Park, news entailed the task of building social cohesion. The purpose of news was to locate what everyone had to know to act in their environment and through their actions to build a common identity.

Perhaps because he had studied in Germany, Park reflected on the nature of news, including the nature of culture in the modern era. Systematic reflection on his previous occupational experience as a journalist (retrospective participant observation, if you will) had led Park to place news in a literary context and so to raise issues of culture as well as of form. Park mistakenly believed that news would replace the short story as a literary form. The short story is still alive and well in North America, but Park’s mistake is less important than his comparison. For Park’s error led him to identify a characteristic of news so basic as to be sometimes invisible: news is a story. Stories follow their own intrinsic and coherent logic. News stories may be responses to the general American query, “what’s new?” As stories, they may also make one stand up and take note. Park (1940) wrote that news is a story that may make the reader say “Gee Whiz!”

For the most part, the reflective and systematic examination of imaginable alternatives (qualitative reasoning) later diminished in social scientists’ study of news—although at least one of Park’s students, Helen MacGill Hughes, continued creative musing about the nature of news (see Hughes, 1940). However, by the 1950s, how Americans studied news had shifted significantly, as seen in the work of another Chicago sociologist, Morris Janowitz (1952/67). I discuss a Chicago work because through the late 1950s many University of Chicago graduate students were still being trained as participant observers. 2

Janowitz’ work represents a change in two ways, one in methods and the other in theoretical focus. To study the community press, Janowitz used both qualitative and quantitative methods. Unlike some earlier Chicago sociologists, Janowitz did not identify participant observation as either a systematic or a rigorous method. In the preface

82 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

to the second edition of his book, he explained, “The Community Press in an Urban Setting was an exercise in the Chicago school of sociology with an attempt to incorporate more systematic research procedures” than participant observation, such as survey research (Janowitz, 1967:viii). In 1967 Janowitz also criticized some of the interview techniques he and his assistants had used as “too primitive” (p. xviii). Thus, by 1967, the year the second edition was published, Janowitz seems to have accepted more of quantitative researchers’ criticisms of participant observation than he had in 1952.

Additionally, reflecting on his work in the preface to the second edition, Janowitz noted the theoretical breach between his work and earlier studies of news. Unlike Weber, Park, and Hughes, who had addressed themselves to cultural and political issues, Janowitz asked questions relevant to what by the 1950s had become identified as communications research. As he put it,

No doubt we were able to identify the social role of [the community press] as one aspect of the normative system of the urban community. In another sense our definitions and our assumptions in retrospect were too limited. There was an excessive concern with the strategy of communication research which focuses on specific responses, and not enough on the natural history of a social institution [a particular concern of Park’s] and the collective representations it created.

(p. xvii; emphasis added)

In The Community Press, the term “politics” refers to the activity of politicians who, Janowitz explained, keep close ties with the community press. The term was bereft of its earlier association with ideology, demagoguery, and the newspaper as a political club. In this retrospective self-criticism Janowitz seems to foreshadow what would become the theoretical approach to news in the 1970s and 1980s.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the USA, the empirical study of news concentrated on aspects of communications research— “who said what to whom in which channel with what effect.” Most research entailed either content analysis or, during and after the 1950s, quantitative examination of the decisions of individuals termed “gatekeepers.” One of the best known of these is based on actions and justifications for action given by the pseudonymous “Mr Gates” (White, 1950). The few studies depending on participant observation

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were sometimes dismissed by quantitative researchers (as was Lang and Lang’s “Unique perspective of television,” originally published

in 1953) or placed in a functionalist context. 3 Warren Breed’s “Social control in the newsroom” (1955) is a good example of this latter tendency.

Studies of news have always been responsive to political conditions. In the late 1960s, a period of dissent in many Western capitalist nations, researchers again turned to qualitative methods to raise critical issues about news, culture, and society. In the 1970s, analyses of news began to contain semiotic analyses. For instance, in his doctoral dissertation Peter Dahlgren (1977) used semiotics to parse the meanings implicit in the opening of the CBS evening news, including the sense of urgency created by the sound of a wire service machine clicking in the background.

By the 1980s, qualitative methods included additional systematic means of reflection, such as discourse analysis (see van Dijk, 1988a and in this volume, and German studies discussed below). As does much of the research on news organizations undertaken during and after the 1960s, discourse analysis emphasizes how the ideological significance of news is part and parcel of the methods used to process news. Thus, ultimately linguistic and discourse analysis of news content raises the same epistemological questions addressed by the participant-observation studies of news organizations of the 1960s and 1970s.