Week 8
CH 8 “News Media�
This chapter began to tie together many of the themes I’ve learned in class about news media organization and production. It was interesting to read this with a little bit of background knowledge about what kind of power news organizations have in the production process. Specifically, this chapter covered how environmental news gets published or aired and how its importance has fluctuated over the past few decades depending on the importance of other events going on at the time. For example, beat reporting on environmental issues became popular in the 1970s. In 1989 when the Exxon Valdex oil spill occurred in Alaska, “total news coverage of the environment by the three major TV networks reached an all-time high of 774 combined minutes� (220). After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the media diverted its attention from the environment to a host of other issues.
Since the rise of public relations in the 1920s, journalists have counted on obtaining news from self-serving publicity materials. Why? It saves media time and money. For the majority of journalists, there is not enough funding by their employers to go out and do the research themselves while gathering news. Also from the clip we watched in class, Corbett points to the production of VNR or video news releases complete with audio and visual. These free videos (sent on tapes or downloaded by TV stations for free from satellite feeds) greatly decrease the cost of producing TV newscasts. The Columbia Journalism Review found, “75% of TV news directors used at least one VNR B-roll (video footage and sounds without narration per week� (222). Each station can then add its own voice-over narration (often from a script accompanying the VNR) onto the B-roll video. This makes it basically impossible to detect it as externally produced. Stations do resist crediting this material on-air for obvious reasons, but it is clear that although journalists make the ultimate decisions of which news tips to act up and which to ignore, they are still subject to the newsworthy information presented to them by outside sources.
Another way the media choose news is by considering dominant cultural values such as existing power and class arrangements. Examples include newspapers omitting news seen as adverse to the commercial sector – such as advertisers. Also there is a lack of news that is offense to “the values of families, religion, community, patriotism and business� (223). Just like television shows avoid downtrodden topics and portray middle to middle-upper class families without a concern for monetary issues, news in print form sometimes does the same thing.
Walter Lippmann once described media attention as “a restless spotlight,� due to its tendency to focus the glare intensely on a subject, but just as quickly to move on to another topic it finds more “sexy.� Interestingly, since environmental issues are often continuous and constant, “the media’s short attention span contributes to its on-again off-again coverage of long-term environmental issues (224). Since environmental issues are often highly scientific and technical, journalists are even more susceptible to influence when they lack the expertise to fully understand concepts such as global climate change. Some scholars have found media coverage of the environment to be “a science-oriented discourse, dominated by scientific and government officials� (224). The point is that readers are unable to evaluate where the balance of evidence lies when there is no space for dissenters and a scientific debate is promoted when there really is not one.
The dominance of social problems depend on the ideological questions determined by the political power structure, which is contrary to the conventional “watchdog� model of the media that we discussed in class.