MDSC01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: News Values, Socalled, Media Play
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WEEK 8
News, Discourse and Society
Stuart Hall, Chad Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts– The Social Production
of News
- Stuart Hall: Jamaican-born cultural theorist; he was a founder of the Birmingham School of
Cultural Studies;
-“the media do not simply and transparently report events which are ‘naturally’ newsworthy of
themselves; news is the end-product of a process which begins with systematic sorting of events;
-“at any given moment billions of simultaneous events occur throughout the world…all… are
potentially news… The news is the account of the event, not something intrinsic in the event
itself.”
IMPORTANT: the organizational factors behind televisions, radio stations, websites have a lot to
say in what is selected; (what news we see on TV, read on websites or listen to our radios);
-the important problem of selecting, from the many contending items, which news are to the best
interest of public – politics, external affairs, economy, social affairs, culture, sports…
-how do you get your news? Do you read them? RSS feed? Why this source?
-how did you find out about what happened last week in Montreal and Ottawa?
-to you, what is a credible source?
-This is where the professional ideology of what constitutes ‘good news’ – the newsman sense of
news values – begins to structure the process;
The social production of news includes the following components:
-the bureaucratic organisation of media which produces the news in specific types or categories;
-the structure of news values which orders the selection and ranking of particular stories within
these categories;
-the construction of the news story itself; involves the presentation of the items to the assumed
audience in terms which will make it comprehensible to that audience;
BUT: the news has to be identified (named, defined, related to other events known to the
audience) and contextualized (placed within a frame of meanings familiar to the audience);
Identification and contextualization is one of the most important processes through which events
are ‘made to mean’ by the media; an event only makes sense if it can be located within a range of
known social and cultural identifications;
-Bringing of events within the realm of meaning = referring unusual and unexpected events to
the ‘maps of meaning’ which already form the basis of our cultural knowledge into which the
social world is already ‘mapped’;
How does this function?
-the consensual nature of our society; the process of signification –giving social meanings to
events – both assumes and helps to construct society as a ‘consensus’;
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Stuart hall, chad critcher, tony jefferson, john clarke, brian roberts the social production of news. Stuart hall: jamaican-born cultural theorist; he was a founder of the birmingham school of. The media do not simply and transparently report events which are naturally" newsworthy of themselves; news is the end-product of a process which begins with systematic sorting of events; At any given moment billions of simultaneous events occur throughout the world all are potentially news the news is the account of the event, not something intrinsic in the event itself. Important: the organizational factors behind televisions, radio stations, websites have a lot to say in what is selected; (what news we see on tv, read on websites or listen to our radios); The important problem of selecting, from the many contending items, which news are to the best interest of public politics, external affairs, economy, social affairs, culture, sports .
