REPORTERS AND SOURCES

REPORTERS AND SOURCES

Two recent studies are particularly significant, because they affirm the participant-observers’ findings that news organizations are heavily dependent on legitimated sources, even while using different sources of data than the earlier studies of news organizations. One book is Negotiating Control: a Study of News Sources (1989) by Richard V.Ericson, Patricia M.Baranek, and Janet B.L.Chan; the other, The “Uncensored War”: the Media and Vietnam (1986) by Daniel C.Hallin. Both are qualitative. Ericson, Baranek, and Chan based their book on fieldwork, interviews, and a supplementary content analysis of letters to the editors. To reconstruct the processes influencing news reports about both the war and dissent from government policies, Hallin used historical documents, news reports, and “deep background” interviews with reporters, correspondence with officials, and content analysis— though he did not present his content analyses in tabular form.

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Ericson et al. (1989) confirm both Herbert Gans’ insistence that most news is about “knowns” (roughly fifty people, Gans [1979] suggests) and my argument (Tuchman, 1972; 1978) that the statement of an official source is an “event.” In their conclusion they stress,

News is a product of transactions between journalists and their sources. The primary source of reality for news is not what is displayed or what happens in the real world. The reality of news is embedded in the nature and type of social and cultural relations that develop between journalists and their sources, and in the politics of knowledge that emerges on each specific newsbeat.

(Ericson et al., 1989:377; see also Shibutani, 1966)

Because Ericson et al. (1989) used participant observation, they could learn what those “politics of knowledge” were. Most important, by being with reporters they could analyse what reporters chose not to report and demonstrate how the proverbial exception proves the rule. Such information could never be gleaned from a content analysis of published material (see Tuchman, 1977; also Molotch and Lester, 1975). For instance, Ericson et al. (1989) explain that the politics of knowledge gained on the court beat led a reporter to go against what

he knew to be his editor’s preferences. A court reporter did not file a newsworthy story about a very reputable man who had shoplifted a toothbrush even though he felt the story would have received page- one coverage. Such coverage would contravene the sense of fairness that the reporter had developed interacting with routine sources on his beat. But, Ericson et al. note, such decisions are still framed within the pragmatics of newswork. This reporter could choose not to file his story, because he found another story to file that day and so could satisfy the primary requirement of his job—producing copy.

Furthermore, because they had used participant observation, Ericson et al. (1989) could glean richer data in their interviews with sources. Frequently, having observed occurrences in which sources interacted with reporters, they were able to hold concrete discussions about published stories and the sources’ interactions with reporters. Such data transform the “non-observable” into the “observable.” They are far preferable to inferences, even when the inferences seem statistically irrefutable (see Molotch and Lester, 1975). They enabled statements about how sources tried to influence reporters and the conditions under which they succeeded. They also facilitated generalizations about how

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sources could react when they felt that reporters had been inaccurate or unfair. In this specific sense, these researchers’ data are superior to responses elicited by scenarios constructed to serve as the basis of interviews. (However, “constructed scenarios” may facilitate statements about representativeness, such as “Given a set of variables we can predict how a source will react to this scenario 95 per cent of the time.”) 4

Qualitative historical research also emphasizes the importance of negotiations with sources. Studying American coverage of the Vietnam War, Hallin notes that reporters ignored issues about the war that their sources would have found beyond the pale. This tendency was probably exacerbated by the seeming confluence of sources’ views. Particularly in the early years of American military involvement, reporters never even conceived of such issues as “Should the United States have wanted to persist in Indochina, or to intervene there to begin with?… What outcome was best for the people of Indochina?” (Hallin, 1986:214).

American journalists only began to question the war when elite sources were willing to disclose their disagreements with one another. As Schudson (1989:268) summarizes Hallin’s generalizations,

The behavior of the American press in questioning the Vietnam war…can be understood as happening only because the political elite was divided much more profoundly than it ordinarily is. Even then, the press seems largely to have gone about its normal business of citing official leaders —it just so happened that the officials were at odds with one another.

(emphasis added)

So long as Presidents John F.Kennedy and Lyndon B.Johnson were able to control leaks within their administration, reporters had no one to whom to turn for an “official” dissident view.

Discourse analysis of content, participant observation within news organizations, and interviews with sources thus all confirm that official views are embedded in news accounts. In this specific sense, news is ideological. However, although the news media may unconsciously embed a “preferred reading” in their stories, even that “preferred reading” may constitute a “contested terrain” (Hall, 1979). That is, groups of readers or viewers (or individuals) may reject the preferred reading or argue about its validity.

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