Digital Media and Journalism
Index
Allan, S. (2010) News Culture. Chapter 3.........................................................................................................................1
Entman, R. (1993) Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm....................................................................5
Carlson, M. (2016) Sources as News Producers...............................................................................................................6
Tandoc, E. C. (2014) Journalism is twerking? How web analytics is changing the process of gatekeeping.....................8
Carlson, M. (2017) Facebook in the News: social media, journalism and public responsibility following the 2016
Trending Topics controversy..........................................................................................................................................10
Poell, T. & van Dijck, J. (2014) Social Media and Journalistic Independence..................................................................12
Welbers, K. & Opgenhaffen, M. (2019) Presenting News on Social Media....................................................................14
Costera Meijer, I. (2015) Checking, Sharing, Clicking and Linking: changing patterns of news use between 2004 and
2014.............................................................................................................................................................................. 14
Allan, S. (2016) Citizen Witnesses..................................................................................................................................15
Bruns, A. (2018) Gatewatching and News Curation. Chapter 3: Social News Curation during Acute Events.................16
Trottier, D. (2015) Digital Vigilantism as Weaponization of Visibility............................................................................20
Braun, A. J. & Eklund, L. J. (2019) Fake News, Real Money: Ad Tech Platforms, Profit-Driven Hoaxes, and the Business
of Journalism................................................................................................................................................................. 21
Wardle, C. (2018) The Need for Smarter Definitions and Practical Timely Empirical Research on Information Disorder
...................................................................................................................................................................................... 24
Tufekci, Z. (2018) How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump.......................................................25
Allan, S. (2010) News Culture. Chapter 3
The truth is the news reporter’s stock-in-trade, as well as fundamental obligation.
But what is ‘the truth’?
,In this debate, there are 2 competing perspectives:
1. Liberal pluralist position
2. Political economy position
Structuring public debate
Liberal pluralist position Political economy position
Core: the citizen’s right to freedom of speech is best Aim: to bring about a fundamental reorganization of the
protected by a market-based mass media system current dynamics of media ownership and control, a
process to be achieved primarily through the radical
restructuring of state regulatory policies.
The news media represents a fourth estate (church, The representations of a ‘dominant ideology’ are not
judiciary, commons) forced on the subordinate classes, nor are they to be
Journalism is charged with the crucial mission reduced to ‘useful fictions’. The capitalist ruling class
of ensuring that members of the public are able must work to advance its particular class-specific
to draw upon a diverse ‘marketplace of ideas’ interests by depicting its ideas, norms and values in
to both sustain and challenge the world around universal terms.
them. These ‘ruling ideas’ need to be mobilized as
Thus, journalism at the center of public life. being consistent with the beliefs of ordinary
people, as being the only correct, rational
opinions available to them.
The news media are said to make democratic control Mass media institutions, whether publicly or privately
over governing relations possible. The performance of owned, are controlled by members of the ruling class.
this democratic function is contingent upon the
realization of ‘press freedom’ as a principle safeguarded
from any possible impediment associated with power
and privilege
The news media must carry out the crucial work of
contributing to the ‘system of check and balances’ held
to be representative of democratic structures and
processes.
The capacity of a particular news organization presents
the necessary plurality of viewpoints, which is
preserved by virtue of the clash and discordancy of
interests which exist between owners, managers,
editors and journalists.
Herman and Chomsky (1988) propaganda model
Disclaimer: propaganda = dominant ideology in this model
US perspective: within the country’s commercial news media there exists an institutional bias which guarantees
the mobilization of certain ‘propaganda campaigns’ on behalf of an elite consensus.
The news media encourage spirited debate, criticism and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the
system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus.
Liberal pluralist notions of a ‘free, independent and objective’ news media are thus countered by H&C’s
contention that if the news media perform a societal purpose at all, it is to inculcate and defend the economic,
social and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state.
Propaganda campaigns may be instituted either by the state itself or by one or more of the top media
firms, but in all instances the collaboration of the mass media is a prerequisite.
Multiple filter system
The filters show the extent to which journalists reiterate uncritically official positions of the state while
simultaneously adhering to its political agenda. The filters interact with and reinforce each other:
1. Commercial basis of the dominant news organizations
2
, 2. Influence of advertising
3. The news media’s over-reliance on government and corporate ‘expert’ sources
4. The role of ‘flak’ or negative responses to media content as a means of disciplining news organizations.
5. The role of the ‘ideology of anti-communism’ as a ‘political-control mechanism’.
Only the ‘cleansed residue’, having passed through these successive filters, is pronounced ‘fit’ to call
news.
News values and frames
Journalists, as well as their editors and all of the other individuals involved in the work of processing news in a
particular news organization bring to the task of making sense of the social world a series of ‘news values’. These
news values are operationalized by each newsworker, in relation to their ‘stock of knowledge’ about what
constitutes news.
The following factors may be regarded as being significant/news values:
Conflict
Relevance
Timeliness
Simplification
Personalization
Unexpectedness
Continuity
Composition
Reference to elite nations
Reference to elite persons
Cultural specificity
Negativity
At the heart of processes of inclusion and exclusion are certain principles of organization/frames which work to
impose order on the multiple happenings of the social world so as to render them into a series of meaningful events.
Once a particular frame has been adopted for a news story, its principles of selection and rejection ensure that only
information material which is seen to be legitimate, as appropriate within the conventions of newsworthiness so
defined, is to appear in the account.
Routinizing the unexpected
Metaphor of the mirror: describes how the social world is reflected in news accounts. Journalism must hold a mirror
behind the nation and the world, the mirror must have no curves and must be held with a steady hand.
However, the mirror metaphor has been criticized:
o It is too simplistic there are ‘blind-spots’
o When journalism relies on government officials to explain events, the reflection will be a version that
the government would like to present to the public.
New metaphor: ‘news net’
News is a social resource, which through its very construction, implies a series of particular constraints or limits on
the forms of knowledge which can be generated and called ‘reality’.
The problem of defining what counts as an appropriate news story is directly tied to journalistic assumptions about
what the news audience is interested in knowing. Tuchman defined three general premises incorporated into the
news net:
1. Readers are interested in occurrences at certain localities and not others.
2. Readers are concerned with the activities of only specific organizations.
3. Readers only find particular topics to be worthy of attention.
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