WHAT IS NEWS?

WHAT IS NEWS?

Jamieson and Campbell (1992, p. 31) defined hard news as “any report of an event that happened or was disclosed within the previous 24 hours and treats an issue of ongoing concern.” The event itself need not be recent (although usually it is) but it must involve some new revelation or previously unknown connection. Revelations of Abraham Lincoln’s suffering from depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s previously unknown extramarital affair, or the discovery of the asteroid crater that probably led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago have all been news in recent years.

In contrast to hard news are human interest stories, which touch universal concerns and are less tied to place and time. These features are most prevalent on so-called slow news days (such as weekends) and may include anything from a farmer in west Texas who planted 1959 Cadillacs tail-fin- upward in his field to the heartwarming story of a poor Mississippi sharecropper whose nine children have all graduated from college (most with

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advanced degrees), to the mildly titillating story of a brothel madam with a master’s degree.

Primary Characteristics of a Newsworthy Event

Jamieson and Campbell (1992) identified five qualities of a newsworthy event. They may not all be present in every story, but no doubt several of them will be for each hard news story. The more of these characteristics a story has naturally, the more likely it is to be heavily covered in the news. An understanding of these qualities goes a long way toward explaining why certain events receive so much coverage and certain others so little.

Personalization. First, a newsworthy story is personalized—it is about individuals. This allows audience identification with the person and may make a dauntingly complex event easier to comprehend. It lends itself well to photography and the interview format, which works well on either TV or print, but it may be at the cost of oversimplifying (and possibly distorting) complex events and overemphasizing stars such as the president, the Pope, a serial killer, or a terrorist looking for a media platform.

Drama and Conflict. Second, a newsworthy event is dramatic and conflict-filled, even violent, in the pattern of entertainment TV. Shots of police beating protesters makes more exciting news copy than a debate among politicians about the economy. With its emphasis on conflict, this tendency helps to ensure coverage of opposing views but, on the negative side, may overemphasize the confrontational and violent nature of the story. Very infrequent violent events may be assumed by viewers to be the norm. Nonviolent events may be neglected, and very important issues not conducive to drama, conflict, or personalization may be grossly underreported. Complex economic stories like the Third World debt crisis or changing interest rates are often covered only in the context of specific conflicts growing out of those problems. See Box 7.2 for coverage of a less dramatic but very important story.

There is some reason to think that the emphasis on conflict has escalated in recent years. In a very provocative book, The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words, sociolinguist Deborah Tannen (1998) argues that American society at all levels has become more confrontational and argumentative in recent decades, with this contentiousness seen in the press, politics, the legal system, and even in family and interpersonal relationships. At least for the press, Tannen traces much of this back to Watergate in the 1970s, where investigative journalism did indeed play a strongly, and constitutionally important, adversarial role in rooting out the scandal in the Nixon administration. She worries that the mindset has never really changed

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and news media, as well as office holders, continue to believe they must attack and challenge at every opportunity. Thus one sees, for example, candidates for office or nominees for cabinet positions subject to unprecedented intense scrutiny of all aspects of their personal lives. Sometimes this is so intense that highly qualified people withdraw from consideration rather than subject themselves and their families to such treatment.