Page 282 - Culture Society and the Media

272 HOW THE MEDIA REPORT RACE
go without saying that such an understanding in no way equips us to say which
stories will see the light of day or reach the front page. In the most general terms,
however, we can say that news values tend to neglect background material.
Events are likely to appear as sudden and unexplained or as having only direct
and immediate causes. The underlying state of affairs which social scientists
would say helps explain or gives rise to a particular event tends to be absent or to
be taken for granted in the news reports. And of these dramatic and immediately-
caused events, those which are readily associated with conflict, tension, threat
and violence are the most likely to make news. The authors of Colour and
Citizenship allege that the tremendous publicity that race receives has less to do
with ‘actual conflict’ than with the conflict which editors think is inherent in race
(Rose et al., 1969, p. 740). The idea that conflict and violence make news may
serve as a rule of thumb whether it is applied in the popular press in the words of
a cigar-chewing editor greeting news of a murder committed in horrifying
circumstances, ‘Don’t forget we’re in the bad news business’; or whether it is
applied to the quality press in the more sober words of the Press Council: ‘Bad
news has always been a more salutory instructor than good news and its
publication is necessary to the efficient functioning of society’ (Guardian, 9 May
1977).
There may be’aspects of the way the media report race which are special to
race in so far as a large black presence in a predominantly white society may be
automatically depicted as a threat. But even if it can be justly claimed that there
is thus what amounts to a special ‘racial angle’ in news coverage it does not
follow that each omission and commission of media reporting of race should be
explained in such terms. For example, it is easy to assume that the instinctive
association of black people with threat and conflict explains why the press
devotes little attention to such background issues as the position of black people
in education, housing and employment, without stopping to consider that the
press—guided by considerations of news value—may generally devote
inadequate attention to such background areas whether or not the people
concerned are black.

NEWS FRAMEWORKS
News values not only govern what will be selected as newsworthy, but will also
help determine how a particular story is presented to the reader. Whatever
ingredients a story has to recommend it, it will be more acceptable, however
unexpected or dramatic it appears, if it can, at the same time, be readily slotted into
a framework which is reassuringly familiar to both journalist and reader.
The coverage of race relations is very likely to change in tone and scale
according to whichever views currently prevail about the state of race relations
throughout the media as a whole or within an individual newspaper. For example,
a race riot or disturbance could be portrayed as an isolated incident, the result of
a conspiracy or as part of a growing wave of racial unrest. The sort of