Writer's Note: I used old news because I had extensive clip files on these items. Please note that, while the news is a few months old, the ideas are still current and applicable. I have decided to interpret these events through a number of different viewpoints, but none has been as valuable as Herbert Gans' Deciding What's News. His theory of newsworthiness, his methodology, and his unceasing determination started me in the right direction. This paper in part attempts to putty up some of his holes and on the whole to satisfy my own curiosity.
The job of major daily newspapers has traditionally been to report the news - events that happen. But there's a lot more to daily journalism than the mere coverage of events. When breaking stories are judged important enough, related stories begin to appear on the pages of our newspapers. How and why newsworthiness is assigned to these related stories, and the consequences of assigning newsworthiness in this fashion is my focus in this essay.In analyzing the coverage of Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings, I found that a few different criteria were employed to determine newsworthiness. The first related story that appeared in print in almost all of the major dailies was the "What is Sexual Harassment?" story. "We see it as a reader service," says Marybeth Varcados, Bay Living editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel. "We want to help the reader to understand the issues fully so that the news will have more meaning to them." While this is indeed true, we must remember not to take editors' statements entirely at face value. While editors strive to educate their readers, they are also participating in defining the crucial issues involved. This explains why, during the Gulf War, so many military analysts were brought out to explain key aspects of the war.
The media also focus on the most "interesting" aspects of the story and then search for stories that exemplify this aspect. "The Thomas story presented an incredible human drama," says Deputy Managing Editor of the San Jose Mercury News Tom Konkel. "The most interesting part for most people was that it's a male-female thing, and gender is a very personal, gut-level thing for most people." This "battle of the sexes" ideology was pervasive in both main and related stories and, while it may have provoked an exciting air of conflict, wasn't necessarily the issue. The real issue seemed to be one of fairness; many on the committee seemed not to care that Hill get a fair hearing. Yet by making assumptions about what the public was interested in, the media helped to define the important issues in the story.
In addition, many stories that would be seemingly unrelated to the specific issue, but were centered on male-female controversies achieved a more prominent status in the news. The second day after the "scandal" broke, the Chronicle ran a front-page story about a black professor who thought women were inferior. The parallels are obvious, and, had it not been for the Thomas story, this story would have been relegated to one of the back pages, rather than alongside the lead Thomas piece that day
In fact, many stories that would never have even been considered newsworthy were presented in all of the papers as a direct result of the Thomas story. People file harassment charges every day, but they rarely make the news. But because sexual harassment was such a "hot" issue, these stories were presented regularly, often with leads emphasizing some connection. Konkel describes the rationale for assigning newsworthy status to these stories this way:
- we must remember not to take editors' statements entirely at face value
"The Thomas story forced people to confront the problem of sexual harassment in their own lives. Before the story broke, sexual harassment was something people lived with, but afterwards, it was something people talked about. You couldn't help talking about it. In this kind of atmosphere, people suddenly started to become aware - aware that it was happening to them, and aware that there was a solution. We wanted to share that trend with our readers. That's why we printed so many of those stories."
However, if that is the case, then the media failed to make its point adequately. There may be a story in that statement that we never saw treated in the pages of the daily press, but printing a lot of individual cases is not the best illustration of a trend. These needed to be tied together in a coherent fashion, and a trend in increased reporting needed to be investigated and reported, rather than merely implied.
A similar phenomenon happened with the coverage of the Berkeley hills fire, when the San Jose Mercury News ran a story on five other fires in California that same day. Fires in California are rarely covered in print, but because of extensive interest in the Berkeley fire they suddenly became important - the concept of fire in general was one judged newsworthy within this context.
Another newsworthy angle on a breaking story is the local perspective, or a perspective that "brings the story home" to the readers. When people read news, they want to apply it to their own lives. The media seeks to facilitate this process by covering local stories. With the Berkeley fire, a story was run on, "It Could Happen Here - Why Santa Clara County is vulnerable to a similar fire." During the Thomas-Hill controversy, many papers ran stories on how the reader could deal with sexual harassment on a personal level.
In the course of trying to satisfy its readers, the media searches for "interesting" stories. However, few stories qualify as interesting in their own right. Many need a "peg" to make them interesting (Gans). It is the ways in which the media selects and utilizes this peg that decides which other stories will be covered.
In seeking to satisfy its audience's demand for novelty in stories, the media seeks to cover stories it deems interesting and important. These labels are assigned by editors, and are based on issues which have currency within the framework of the news, as opposed to the framework of society in general. Social and historical contexts are generally ignored (Gans.)
The reason for this is simple, and, while Gans doesn't apply this theory to novelty, he alludes to it in other parts of the book. The reason lies in the lives and minds of the editors, whose lives are structured around the news, and media coverage of events. "The media is guilty. We perpetuate the trend of the day while a story's hot, but as soon as it cools off, we just walk away," Konkel says.
This is partly due to convention and partly to competition considerations. If all of the other newspapers are running a lot of related stories, one major daily could hardly refuse to follow suit, since it would encounter outrage from its readers.
It is also important to realize that editors are immersed in the world of news, and don't view the world from a sociological or historical perspective. News, in the mind of an editor, is a collection of disparate and single events (Gans.) Editors look for links between stories, but their ideology informs their selection. They are unlikely to see a peg that involves historical or social trends unless the trend itself is part of a new study, whose results were recently released to the press.
Instead, the media often creates trends by linking different stories which on the surface share a common thread. For example, a story which emphasizes the male-female issues (like the professor who thought women were inferior,) might be popular, but a story exploring the socialization of young men in society would be considered more fit for an academic journal.
- "The media is guilty. We perpetuate the trend of the day while a story's hot, but as soon as it cools off, we just walk away," Konkel says.
Editors are more likely to focus on a wide selection of individual harassment cases rather than look at how media coverage has increased incidences of harassment reporting. Another good example can be found in the coverage of the S&L scandal. While there was some coverage of the causes in the alternative press, dailies mostly concentrated on, "Yet Another Bank Fails," stories, assigning bank failure a high degree of newsworthiness.
While this makes for an easy formula for determining which stories are important, it often results in lack of depth. As a result, readers know every bank that has failed, but they still don't know why it happened in the first place.
This is one of the major failings of modern media. I would argue that, while more difficult to report, stories that offer more analysis are more interesting and informative than stories that simply share a common theme.
There is another issue at work in the selection of related stories, and that is the role of the peg itself. There are both advantages and disadvantages to utilizing this concept in a practical way. The obvious disadvantage is that, when media is covering a trend, it is covering trends in the media itself, and not in society as a whole. This is at the center of the media's power to both create and direct trends. People are mobilized to take action when the media creates a trend, but when an issue "cools off" for the media, it is also forgotten in the minds of the public, even if the issue isn't resolved.
The advantage lies in the way "pegged" stories are interpreted by the reader. Varcados said, "We've done a lot of stories on sexual harassment before, but when this scandal broke, we got innumerable letters from readers asking, 'Why did you discover this issue so suddenly, why wasn't it ever covered before?'" Without a context, readers tend to forget stories. However, according to the editors I spoke with, readers are much more likely to remember something that was set in a specific context.
The question I had when I began this paper was simple. I was curious why there was so much space devoted to stories related to breaking news. The answer lies mainly in the fact that readers' awareness to certain issues is heightened when they are featured heavily in the news, and their hunger for stories that relate to this breaking news is pronounced. I was also curious about the phenomenon of the "peg," and discovered that readers are more directly affected by stories that either touch their own lives or are connected with major events in the news.
However, as I delved further into the subject matter, Deciding What's News, and interviewed editors, I wondered about the choice of content, and this was a more difficult question to answer. Establishing relationships between the events in the news is vital to determining the newsworthiness of stories. But the ways in which these relationships are established are deeply rooted in convention and in the mindset of editors. As a result, certain areas are traditionally not covered, and will remain so until the audience becomes dissatisfied and demands more in-depth analysis in related stories.