Critical Appraisal Deadline Thursday 9 June

1. Critical AppraisalDeadline Thursday 9 June So you think you know what’s news

2. What is News? News is more easily pursued than defined, a characteristic it shares with such other enthralling abstractions as love and truth Roshco, B. (1975) ‘Newsmaking’, reprinted in H. Tumber (1999) News: a reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.32-6, p.32.

3. Ways of understanding news a)What is news – ways to research news and journalism – ways to think about what is produced - CONTENT STUDIES b) Why is news produced in such a way – ways to think about the constraints and influences on journalists (which affects their practice and arguably the content of the news) - PRODUCTION STUDIES c) Who receives the news? AUDIENCE RESEARCH

4. Content Content analysis can only concentrate on what is actually broadcast. It has the obvious disadvantage of missing anything the editors and journalists decided not to broadcast and the reasons for such decisions, and ignores the production process itself. News Factors:- Galtung and Ruge (1965); Harcup and O’Neil

5. Production Gatekeeper Studies David Manning White (1950) Pamela Shoemaker (1991)

6. Audience Studies • Measuring ratings (news organisations’ concern) • Interpreting the audience – what does the audience want? (News organisations’ concern) • Influences of the media on the audience (certain characteristics of violence upset people), agenda setting can tell you what to think about but not what to think and direct effects (academic and regulatory concerns)

7. News Values: The Ideal and the Real What’s the difference?

8. The ideal For news to be worthwhile it should accord to something we value. But what exactly are these values to which news journalism should accord?

9. The Ideal News journalism is at its best when undertaken by news journalists who retain their identity as critical interpreters of contemporary events and are governed by the desire to be truthful and to be trusted by their audiences.

10. What is news? • A truthful account of a contemporary event • Four core values:- • Accuracy • Sincerity/honesty • Management of time • A relationship with space/place

11. Accuracy Is what the philosopher Bernard Williams refers to as attitudes, desires and wishes, the spirit of the investigator’s attempts, the care that is taken and the methods that the investigator uses. Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness, New Jersey, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

12. Accuracy Accuracy involves resisting being deceived and trying to establish (methodically) the truth. In journalism this is done conventionally by seeking out the facts and by hearing several accounts of the event

13. Sincerity/Honest Reporting Sincerity is surrounded by questions of when is an account or report of a contemporary event truthful. Often it may be partially true (and as far as it goes it is accurate) but it is incomplete. Should news journalism reflect that or is it the responsibility of the audience to ‘fill in the gaps’?

14. Sincerity Also the pressure to report live, to stress immediacy, to update stories, to use footage from the scene etc. can undermine the accuracy of the story. And tempt the journalist into fabrication or deliberately misleading the audience

15. Telling stories about particular spaces/places These can be deeply judgemental as they transform specific spaces: locations and peoples into expressions of: ‘included or excluded’, ‘insider or outsider’, ‘member or stranger’

16. Stories in the News Media: Use of Language • Philo and Berry’s analysis of the coverage of the Israeli Palestinian content identified patterns of coverage. • For example, the idea of Israeli ‘retaliation’ was a persistent theme See Philo, G. and Berry, M. (2004) Bad News from Israel, London: Pluto Press.

17. Stories and the News Media Three examples, from Philo and Berry (2004: 186) BBC1 10pm News, 3 March 2002 ‘Israel has retaliated with a renewed offensive’ ITV 10.30pm News, 3 March 2002 ‘Predictably, the Israelis launched fierce military reprisals’ BBC 1 10pm News, 5 March 2002 ‘Blood for blood: Palestinian suicide attacks trigger more Israeli raids’

18. Stories and the News Media Channel 4 reporter Lindsey Hilsum said of reporting the Israeli-Palestine conflict:- ‘There are two problems … how far back do you go is one and the other is with a conflict like this nearly every single fact is disputed’.

19. Managing Time There is a recognised tendency for the news to be framed in a discontinuous and ahistorical way. Removal of ‘context’ can reduce the meaningfulness (for the audience) the accuracy of the story and the ability of the journalist to sincerely tell the story.

20. Time as mediated time Trying to be accurate while being hurried is difficult. The risks are obvious and well understood.

21. What is ‘mediated time’ Mediated time is a pseudo temporal realm It consists of imposed:- deadlines urgency live feeds, 24hour news instantaneity and simultaneity

22. Time as mediated time As the market for news expands, and has become global, so the economic benefits of ‘being ahead of the game’ are greater

23. Journalism is a ‘stop-watch culture’ Philip Schlesinger argues that ‘in the occupational mythology of the newsman [sic] time looms large among the wicked beasts to be defeated daily in the battle of production. Journalists’ production concepts are shaped by the constraints of time and this has implications for the form and content of the news’. Schlesinger, P. (1987) Putting Reality Together, London: Methuen.

24. The Management of time The ‘management of time’ is a valued and authentic aspect of news journalism and valued as a being part of professional practice

25. NEWSTruthful accounts of contemporary events NEWS JOURNALISM Disposition towards truthfulness Interest in understanding contemporary events THE VALUES OF NEWS Accuracy Sincerity Time ‘Now, contemporaneousness, unstable/mediated time and multiple histories Space ‘Here’ location, place, spatial stories, diverse representations and mediated identities

26. All the core values of news can be undermined • Inaccuracy • Dishonesty • Misleading the audience, not reporting complexity, not questioning sources • Meaningless - going "live for the sake of live” – more "black hole" live shots and live two-ways • Over dramatises - ‘Going live’ has become a news value itself and may make a story seem more important than it is – adds drama, excitement etc.

27. Inaccuracy • Lots of accurate facts don’t necessarily tell the whole story accurately • Facts may be disputed in different accounts of events (eyewitnesses, institutions etc.) • Being accurate requires resisting being deceived and trying to establish (methodically) a truthful account.

28. Dishonesty • In particular ‘digital dishonesty’ is easy to undertake. • Brian Walski – LA Times, staff photographer Iraq 2003. Merged two photographs. • http://www.sree.net/teaching/lateditors.html

29. Misleading the Audience “Ladies and gentlemen we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. We are bringing you an eyewitness account of what s happening on the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Ladies and gentlemen Am I on? Ladies and gentlemen here I am at the back of a stone wall that adjoins Mr Wilmuth’s garden. From here I get a sweep of the whole scene I’ll give you every detail as long as I can talk. As long as I can see…”

30. 30 October 1938: War of the Worlds • The War of the Worlds was broadcast over the Columbia Broadcasting system radio network in the USA. • It was directed and narrated by Orson Welles. • The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual Martian invasion was in progress.

31. Peak time listening…

32. The Press reported the ‘panic’

33. Stories were circulated about citizens arming themselves against the alien invasion: Life Magazine

34. Many reacted by changing channels or phoning a friend

35. Misleading the audience • Not reporting context • Not questioning official statements adequately and accidently (or even deliberately passing on partial accounts of events)

36. Meaningless • Live TV can update information as the news comes in • The pressures of live TV can mean that reporters have to think/speak unscripted • Kate Burley Sept 11th 2001 said ‘"If you're just joining us, the entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack’…

37. Over-dramatises • Prime Ministers Questions – the House of Commons is turned into a theatre and PMQs into performance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URWXkPDwG0g • Reporting War – bombs and flashes, but often little real information about citizens • Sky News – ‘news flash’ http://news.sky.com/skynews/

38. So of course there are many pressures on Journalistic Practice What compromises are made? What can journalists ‘live with’?

39. The Real • What really happens in the newsroom, how do journalists really work? • What values influence the way news is selected.

40. The Production of NEWS • ‘News’ is a product of the production process. • What do we need to know about journalistic processes?

41. The Real a) events are newsworthy because their news values fit into what a news organisation regards itself as standing for and the audience/readership it serves. b) events are deemed to be self evidently newsworthy because they have certain intrinsic characteristics that makes them recognisably news. c) real newsrooms have their own dynamics that accounts for news selection. What counts as news is learned by ‘doing the job’, rather than other high-minded principles.

42. News Values: The Real • In summary, events are more likely to be reported in television news programmes if they have:- (on handout). • good pictures/film (including user-generated material), • if they contain short, dramatic occurrences which can be sensationalised, • if they have novelty value, • if they are open to simple reporting, • if they occur on a grand scale, • if they are negative or contain violence, crime, confrontation or catastrophe, • if they are either highly unexpected, or contain things which one would expect to happen, • if the events have meaning and relevance to the audience, • if similar events are already in the news, • if they provide a balanced programme, if they contain elite people or nations,.