“News does not reflect reality but obscures it” Critically discuss.doc

“News does not reflect reality but obscures it” Critically discuss1. IntroductionAlthough many journalists would say that their main ideal is the achievement of objectivity or truth, and this “remains an important aspiration, whatever the problems with stating it as an absolute standard” (Branston & Staffard 2003), the actually reality is often quite far away from such lofty aspirations. Many analysts have argued that news cannot simply reflect reality as it occurs, but must inevitably represent events and ideas in particular ways. For instance, news over-represents the social “top” and official voices in its sources. Foreign news concentrates on nearer, richer and more powerful nations. News about crime over-represents violent and personal crime and neglects many of the realities of risk in society. When we get news, it has already gone through processes of both selection and construction, and of institutional pressures and structures. Furthermore, news has been considered to have enormous social and political power. So, in “obscuring reality” it can also strongly influence future events in the real world, and can thus be used as a powerful tool by different social groups, factions or governments.This paper will attempt to show the reasons why it is difficult for news to reflect reality in an unbiased way, and it will attempt to demonstrate how news can have influences on the real world. The paper discusses these issues in first regarding the treatment of the question in theoretic literature (section 2), before giving some examples to show that news does not reflect reality because of both selection (section 3) and construction processes (section 4) and institutional pressures (section 5). 2. News and Reality “The fundamental obligation of the reporter is to the truth”, said Fergal Keane, a BBC journalist. Indeed, a lot of news makers like him try to argue that “a journalism resolutely committed to the truth must never hesitate to uncover and expose lies, deceit and misrepresentation regardless of the consequences” (Allan, 2001). However, in practice to tell the truth is often not the main aspiration of those by whom news is constructed and processed. Many analysts have already argued that news cannot simply reflect reality as it occurs, but must inevitably represent events and ideas in particular ways. In the 1920s, Lippman observed that the news media were responsible for the incomplete pictures in our minds. In the 1950, Mills and MacDonald worried that mass media anesthetized the public, leaving a society susceptible to totalitarianism (Rachlin & King 1990). The reason why they worried is that news items are not simply waiting to be discovered and gathered by these journalists. News is constructed according to the norms and routines of news production, rather than just being a flow of articles, programmes and broadcasts reflecting truthfully what is occurring every day in the real world.It might be argued that nowadays, news is reflecting the reality of the social world better and better, with the increasing development of technology and globalization. News from all over the world is available instantly to almost everyone. However, the problem that news does not reflect reality is not because people dont have access to press and television, but because news is selected and constructed by professionals who are under many different influences (e.g. the will of the editor, the need to sell their publication or institutional pressures by governments). So, inevitably, when we get the news, we face something which is the product of both selection and construction processes, and of institutional pressures and structures, which are in our opinion the essential reasons why the news of the day and the daily reality are often two very distinct things.3. Processes of selectionThere are a huge number events happening in the world everyday. So it is obviously impossible to get a picture of the world as a whole. The process of selecting specific events to report is unavoidable. In the research about the possible differences between the reality and the perception of the world created by news, a central issue is to determine by which standards news selection should be guided. This involves selecting events which are considered to be worthy of being printed as news, and excluding news which is considered to be irrelevant, insignificant or unworthy of news coverage. In the processes, news makers ask questions like What should we be looking at?, Is it newsworthy?, What kind of coverage should be given?, and How can we make this story different from other media? According to Schudson (1995), reporters often choose topics which might touch the reader and his feelings and which shows that the reader and the reporter share the same values, a pattern characteristic for most feature writing, human interest reporting, much sports reporting, and occasional hard news reporting that can trust in a “taken-for-granted human sympathy” between reporter and reader. Galtung and Ruge (1965) developed a list of news characteristics that increase the probability that an event will be reported as news. These characteristics are “frequency, threshold, proximity, negativity, predictability, continuity, composition and personalization” (Branston & Staffard 2003). However, because of these selection standards, news that is important for a profound understanding of reality might not be covered, because it seems to the reporter that it might not sufficiently touch the reader. This can have important consequences not only on the perception of reality by the reader, but it might also actually have an active influence on future events, which we will show in the example that follows.A good illustration of the above described patterns is that the more negative or conflictual an event is perceived, the higher is the probability of the event to be reported. Negative events often dominate the first pages of a daily newspaper. Nowadays, around 46 per cent of Londoners said they will not feel comfortable walking Londons streets alone after dark, whether “in deprived Hackney or affluent Chelsea” (The Independent). However, according to the British Crime Survey (BCS), all crime is down by 32 per cent over the last decade, with even bigger falls in burglary (55 per cent) and vehicle thefts (52 per cent), lowering by 24 per cent the risk of being a victim of any form of crime in a year, the lowest figure since the survey began in 1981. Nevertheless, the BCS last year found nearly two-thirds of people thought crime was increasing in Britain. But asked if they think that it was rising in their local area, the proportion fell to 41 per cent. Research from Ipsos Mori in 2005 found only 20 per cent of the public believed that crime was dropping. Why did they believe crime had risen? 57 percent of the respondents said that their opinion was influenced by watching television and 48 percent said by reading newspapers. Home Office officials frequently protest that journalists inevitably light upon the black spots in sets of crime statistics that are however broadly positive. From this example, we can easily conclude that although news in this case does not reflect reality, it still has huge influences how people perceive the real world and might thus also change peoples future behavior, e.g. if, in the case of our example, they spend huge amounts on possibly unnecessary security devices or stay at home in the evenings instead of going to the cinema.Another example given by Hackett (1989) is the attitude of Western media to the problems in developing countries. While the HIV / AIDS pandemic is a huge problem in developing countries, Hackett states that all articles on AIDS in a specific time period concerned cases of the pandemic in Western countries, probably because Western readers feel closer to suffering individuals in their countries than to abstract numbers of ill people in foreign countries. At the same time, developing country catastrophes reported in the news tended to be natural disasters, such as earthquakes. Hackett maintained that “such a finding seems to be symptomatic of a general lack of Western media attention to ongoing health problems in the Third World”, i.e. that Western selection procedures obscured the real picture of problems in the third world. 4. Processes of constructionNot only processes of selection, but also the processes of constructing and presenting news have a considerable impact on the way the reality might be distorted. News is a product of the routine practices of news organizations. It could be argued that news is a social construct dependent on what is deemed to be important by those who work in the news industry, based on certain codes of behaviour which have been learned by news workers in order to do their job. The codes of behaviour which have been learnt by news workers often depend on the particular newspaper for which they are working. Schudson (1995) argued that journalism is not “the sum of the individual subjective experiences of reporters and editors”, but “the source or structure that gives rise to them”. Thus the way a reporter sees the world depends very much on the way the newspaper he is working looks out into the world, it depends on the newspapers position (e.g. left, right or central) and probably on the person who is financing it. Both on television and newspapers, events are encoded into specific ways of presentation. Obviously, these different ways of presentation may affect the meaning of a certain piece of information. It is clear that different newspapers when they report the same news use particular narrative codes when representing the same information. Although it is the same news, the feeling that the readers get are different. For example, while the reader of one newspaper might be outraged by a workers strike because his newspaper highlights the bad effects of the strike on the national economy, another reader is outraged because his paper writes about the low salaries of the concerned workers. Another example is highlighted by Thussu & Freedoun (2003), who describe coverage of conflicts today as “infotainment”, where the lack of background information makes it impossible for readers to understand what is really going on.5. Institutional pressuresFinally, after having examined how processes of selection and construction can effect the representation of reality, we will now look how the way news is presented can be influenced and distorted by sources outside the news generating agency. Although the whole world is more globalized than before, in some countries news production comes with a characteristic angle of vision, with the government having an active influence on how the external world and events in the country are represented. News, as argued by Golding and Elliott (Hackett 1989), is ideology, which can be actively observed today for example in Russia, where the Putin presidency has effectively streamlined all television channels, which today only give information which is approved by or not critical to the government. However, it would be too easy to say that government influence on the news is limited to authoritarian or communist and former communist countries. A good example in this respect is given by Hackett (1989), who highlights the general lack of news from communist countries. He maintains that “during the period analyzed there was a distinct absence of stories from the Soviet bloc concerning human interest, social issues, economic conditions, and science, medicine and culture.” This finding is consistent with Zwickers study of the Toronto press coverage of the USSR (1983). Such coverage, he argued, risks obscuring the human face of life in the Soviet bloc in favour of a dehumanized ideological abstraction”. The findings of Hackett and Zwicker show that at least during the 1980s, a certain bias and possible government influence on news presentation was not absent in Western countries.6. ConclusionWe have thus seen above that the reality is significantly changed in the process of news creation. In the processes of selection, many important events that can reflect the reality have to be given up, because they lack interest for the general public. Moving to the processes of construction, different narratives and codes make readers have different understandings. Although the whole world is more global than before, news on global and national events is in many countries of the world still influenced, and at times even distorted by external agents who want to give news a particular direction. Thus, although some news makers really try their best to show the reality, the reader of a newspaper or the viewer of a television programme have always to read between the lines and to compare different sources to get a somewhat correct picture of reality. 7. Bibliography:l Allan, S. (2001) News Culture, London: Sagel Branston, G. & Stafford, R. (2003) The Media Students Book, London: Routledge, 3rd edition, chapter 5.l Dunn. M (1977) Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events. Contemporary Soci