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Book Summary: The sociology of news - Schudson
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Book summary of the book: The sociology of news by Michael Schudson (2011)
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Summary News and Journalism (NaJ) in English (Schudson Chapters and add. Articles for Exam), 2022
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Samenvatting Sociology Of News, ISBN: 9780393912876 News and Journalism/ Nieuws En Journalistiek (NJ)
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The Sociology of News – Michael Schudson (2011)Introduction: making news
Journalists not only report reality but also create it.
To say that journalists construct reality in producing the news is not to say that they do so without
constraints. To say that journalists construct the world is not to say they conjure the world. They
work with real people and events. But through the process of selecting, highlighting, framing,
shading, and shaping what they report, they create an impression that real people take to be real
and to which they respond in their lives.
Journalism still helps construct reality, and no improvement in media ethics, media methods, or any
other social change will alter this basic element of storytelling.
But journalists today operate in a much more complex world of information management.
Journalists deal with a vast number of parajournalists (public relations firms; public information
officers; political spin doctors; publicity staffs of a wide variety of governmental; corporate and
nonprofit institutions).
News as something produces by working people every day is primarily the result of the interaction
between journalists and parajournalists, including especially what journalists themselves call sources.
But the other side of the story is the world the reporters come in contact with, including editors and
publishers, readers or viewers, and the complex set of institutions and presuppositions that make up
the society and culture about which they report.
Journalists manufacture the news.
To say that news report is a story is not to say that it is a fiction.
The news media cover both events that strike everyone as original, and happenings that are routine
and anticipated yet can be framed in a way to qualify as news.
News is what is publicly notable (within a framework of shared understanding that judges it to be
both public and notable).
It is also a machinery of notation, a social institution working within technological, economic, political
and even literary constraints for recording and interpreting various features of contemporary life.
News influences human action undergirds nearly all studies of news.
Just how or to what extent news affects us, however, is a matter of controversy and uncertainty.
Focus on U.S. journalism.
PART 1: JOURNALISM NOW
H1: Defining Journalism
Journalism is the business or practice of regularly producing and disseminating information about
contemporary affairs of public interest and importance.
It is a set of institutions that periodically publicizes information and commentary on contemporary
affairs, normally presented as true and sincere, to a dispersed and usually anonymous audience so as
to publicly include that audience in a discourse taken to be publicly important.
The functioning of journalism is a very broad one: communication, which is the social coordination of
individuals and groups through shared symbols and meanings.
Journalism shares with many institutions a key attribute of modernity: that it has existed for only two
or three hundred years.
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,News is the product of journalistic activity. We speculate:
- News builds expectations of a common, shared world.
- Promotes an emphasis on and a positive valuation of the new.
- Endorses a historical mentality
- Encourages a progressive rather than cyclical or recursive sense of time.
John Hartley: news as the sensemaking practice of the modernity. And as such, the most important
textual system in the world.
Too ambitious.
But: news has become a dominant force in the public construction of common experience and a
popular sense of what is real and important.
Multiple approaches to defining news:
1. News as a textual system. To take it as a rhetorical form or set of rhetorical forms, a
discursive structure, or a cultural genre within a larger literary and representational culture.
2. News as a manufactured good. The product of a set of social, economic, and political
institutions and practices.
You can’t hold news organizations accountable for news. It is convenient to locate responsibility
somewhere, and it reminds news organizations that they have a serious job to do for which they will
be judged. Still, they sometimes have to work with unyielding materials.
Schudson’s definition of Journalism: information and commentary on contemporary affairs taken to
be publicly important.
However, there is a great deal of material in the news that is interesting but not important.
The focus of this book is news that ouches directly on political affairs, for this is the part of journalism
that makes the strongest claim to public importance.
But what has count as publicly important has changed over time.
H2: Does news matter? (Media effects, part 1)
Media power is widely attacked.
- Left-wing: the mass media support corporate power, the military-industrial complex and the
interests of the wealthiest slice of the population.
- Right-wing: the media make our culture unduly liberal, promoting a pro-choice agenda,
costly environmental regulations, and acceptance of same-sex marriage across the country.
Leaders from various sectors of society agree that journalists are the most powerful, dangerous, and
irresponsible group in the country.
The media seem to have the terrifying power to create the world we live in.
The power of the media to analyze and construct reality is certainly clear when stories directly assert
that the most important thing to examine is that which is not in any way visible.
An illusion of power
But for all the media’s capacity to shape news according tot their own biases, leading news
organizations today try to describe, from empirical observation, a world that exists.
People tend to overestimate the power of the media:
1. The media are the visible tip of the iceberg of social influences on human behavior. We see
and hear them, they are readily available or actually nearly unavoidable. They are the
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, squeaky wheels of social life: loud, garish and insistent. Many nonmedia factors are simply
harder to see.
George Moss on the Vietnam war: public opinion influenced television coverage of the war more
than television influenced public opinion.
The role of the media in determining the outcome of the war was ‘peripheral minor, trivial, in fact, so
inconsequential it is unmeasurable’.
2. They do not distinguish the media’s power from the power of the people and the events the
media cover. It is often not clear whether the media exercise much choice, freedom, or
autonomy in producing news or simply relay to the general public what truly powerful forces
tell them.
Agenda setting: research demonstrates that people at large will name as important subject on the
national agenda those items they find frequently in the news.
Reasons why it is difficult to establish media effects:
1. We operate with oversimplified models of how the media affect society. We fail to separate
out the different questions that address media effects.
Many people view the model of media influences as a model of propaganda in which a dictator or
Machiavellian publisher or an elite of self-serving journalists campaign for an idea or program,
insinuate it between the lines, and repeat it ad nauseam until at last it sinks in. and then the public
follows along despite its own best instincts. Media as weapon of psychological warfare.
Hypodermic model: media inject ideas into a passive and defenseless public.
The problem with this model is not that it posits media power, but that it takes the mechanism of
power to be indoctrination. New models refine but do not discards the concept of indoctrination.
Media do not indoctrinate nearly as much as people suggest.
Media are part of culture, and culture is not itself a power, something to which social events,
behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed but rather a context, something within
which they can be intelligibly described.
A cultural model of media influence:
Two broad ways in which the news influences its audiences
1. It helps to construct a community of sentiment.
2. It helps to construct a public conversation.
In neither respect do the mass media implant a belief of behavior in individuals; instead they
establish a web of meanings, and therefore a web of presuppositions or background assumptions
within which people develop beliefs and viewpoints and in relation to which people live their lives.
News is not so much a ‘cause’ as it is a common locus for three distinct facets of a cultural message,
each of which may have some causal force.
1. Information itself, when distributed to a large audience, may be a causal factor in human
affairs.
2. Its dissemination in general public media afford it an aura of legitimacy.
3. The slant, frame or bias with which the information is presented.
Information as cause
Distributing information has visible and measurable consequences. Transmitting information has real
consequences. The value added by the way media inflect information is often just a fractional
increase of the sheer force of mass distribution of information.
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