STUDIES OF NEWS ORGANIZATIONS

STUDIES OF NEWS ORGANIZATIONS

In the 1960s the Cuban Missile Crisis (Gans, 1979), the civil rights movement (Epstein, 1973), and the Vietnam War (Gitlin, 1980; Halloran et al., 1970; Tuchman, 1978) provoked a series of participant- observation studies of news organizations. Many of these emphasized how the processes of making news resulted in embedded ideological meanings. Within the decade, racism (Hall et al., 1978), the war in Northern Ireland (Schlesinger, 1978), anti-unionism (Glasgow Group, 1976), and conservative views of deviance (Chibnall, 1977; Cohen and Young, 1973; Fishman, 1980) prompted more participant- observation studies with similar conclusions. Although these studies were done in both Britain and the USA, at local media organizations and at national media, their conclusions were so similar that they seemed to replicate and so to validate one another.

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These studies were a significant departure from earlier work in three ways. First, their unit of analysis was not the individual reporter or editor, such as the pseudonymous Mr Gates; rather, they examined news organizations as complex institutions. Second, although framed in “neutral” academic language, these studies were implicitly political. Their authors sought to understand how news came to support official interpretations of controversial events. Third, sometimes implicitly but often explicitly, these studies raised a key epistemological issue: how do news organizations come to “know” what they “know.” At least three participant observers (Fishman, 1980; Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1972; 1978) compared the validity of news reports with the methods of social science. Doing so, they explicitly worked at the juncture of the sociologies of organizations and of occupations and professions. Additionally, by examining how organizations define “facts,” they challenged ideologies of facticity common to both news and American sociology (see Tuchman, 1980).

Although key studies in the USA and Britain used participant observation, researchers employed that technique in several different ways. I will concentrate on the American studies. I employed classic old-style Chicago sociological observation (see Junker, 1960, including the introduction by Everett Hughes). That is, I observed the activities of news staff both inside and outside of the newsroom, following stories from their assignment through their editing and dissemination. (In the case of television, they were aired at 6:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. At the newspaper studied, I attended morning editorial meetings and sat in on the copy desk through the revision of the second edition at 11:30 p.m.) I attended events with general reporters, made the rounds with beat reporters (some identified by editors as their “best” and others as their “weakest”), and put in time at news bureaus. I did general open- ended interviewing as well. All observations and interviews were recorded in field notes the day they were made.

Herbert Gans (1979) followed similar procedures at the organizations he observed. However, he complemented his observations and interviews with quantitative content analyses that revealed some general characteristics of news reports (they are more likely to tell about people who are “knowns” than those who are “unknowns”) and American news values (such as pastoralism and ethnocentrism). He analysed reporters’ professional and political attitudes (what he termed their “para-ideology”) as well.

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Mark Fishman (1980) and Marilyn Lester (1975) were less observers and more participants than either Gans or I. My “participation” was frequently reduced to the role of “go-for” (the person who returned film to the studio or fetched coffee) and personal confidant. Both Fishman and Lester spent time as novice reporters. Fishman worked as a reporter for seven months at a local newspaper; Lester, as a summer intern at a national daily. However, Fishman and Lester approached their participation differently. Lester favored participant observation guided by what Glaser and Strauss (1967) have termed “grounded theory.” That is, as the fieldwork proceeded, she developed hypotheses and systematically gathered data to test and refine them. This type of participant observation claims to link theory and data more closely than the other variants I have described. But other ways of being a participant-observer include ways to link theory and data. Gans’ content analysis helped him to develop the hypotheses

he would test in the field. Fishman was able to look more intensively at some news practices than had other researchers because D.L.Wieder provided him with the field notes of Wieder’s own “extensive participant observation” (Fishman, 1980:24) gathered roughly ten years earlier at one of the newspapers where Fishman worked.

Finally, Todd Gitlin’s (1980) work was guided by past participation in the phenomenon he studied, the impact of reporting on the anti- war movement. A founder and past president of Students for a Democratic Society, Gitlin had saved many documents from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and had access to other key activists and to news workers, as well. When interviewed, they described their memories of specific events, including encounters between activists and reporters and between reporters and editors. Gitlin also used archival materials, such as telecasts and news reports.

Each type of participant observation had advantages and drawbacks (reviewed in the essays in Filstead, 1970). Accounts that reporters and sources give about stories covered years before may have been altered by informants’ retrospective construction of events. Participation may facilitate an insider’s view, but may hamper one’s ability to understand other aspects of the editorial process. Lengthy periods of daily observation are tiring. Some days I observed from 8:00 a.m. until midnight so that I might follow a story from assignment to either the revision of the first edition or the end of the 11:00 p.m. news. Exhausted when I got home and enervated at the thought of returning to observe in the morning, I sometimes took such shortcuts

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as tape-recording what I thought were the days’ highlights instead of writing field notes before I slept. I necessarily lost information. As young graduate students, Fishman, Lester, and I may have received confidences that would have been withheld from older researchers; we could have been seen as young people to take in hand. However, we might not have had access to some sorts of information gathered by Gans, who was the peer of his most senior informants.

Despite such variations, one might argue that these five researchers had enough in common essentially to reproduce one another’s key findings. All five American researchers have vaguely similar political ideals, varying from what Americans would term left-liberal to what Americans would call social democratic. Some had similar theoretical grounding. But I do not believe that either similar theoretical perspectives or political leanings account for the resemblance among their studies. Many of the same themes about how the constraints and resources of news organizations influence the news process occur in British studies (see especially Schlesinger, 1978). I find it especially significant that all of these studies linked the news process to ideology (or in Gans’ case “para-ideology”) and argued that news organizations necessarily developed special ties to legitimated and centralized sources of information. Indeed, these same themes occur in more recent qualitative research that concentrates on the interactions between reporters and sources.