Page 283 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 273
considerations which might influence an editor’s decision on how to treat the
story might include: is race currently regarded as particularly newsworthy,
perhaps because we are in the middle of a ‘long hot summer’ of racial unrest?
How are other newspapers running the story? Are politicians making play of the
event or are they trying to play it down? And are there other events which either
magnify or overshadow the event in question?
Reporting is not simply a matter of collecting facts, whether about a race riot
or about anything else. Facts do not exist on their own but are located within
wide-ranging sets of assumptions, and which facts are thought to be relevant to a
story depends on which sets of assumptions are held. These sets of assumptions
are referred to as ‘news frameworks’. It stands to reason that journalists faced by
the need to meet their deadlines must have a set of preconceptions of what is related
to what, a sort of ‘ready reckoner’. If both journalists and readers associate race
relations with conflict and see black immigration as a threat, then reporters and
editors, presented with a vast number of events from which to choose, pressured
by deadlines and constrained by the limited amount of space available, may simply
treat news about race relations in a way which fits in with this definition. In other
words, what they are doing, as they must, is to present the news which is
unfamiliar by virtue of just having happened—in as familiar and easily digestible
a fashion as possible.
Of course, there may be circumstances in which a newspaper goes out of its
way to highlight an issue. For example, an editor may pursue a campaign about,
say, rising crime in order to demonstrate that ‘law and order is breaking down’
or ‘violence is on the increase’, even though crimes of violence may be
decreasing even as the campaign becomes more shrill (Davis, 1973). But there
need be no campaign or conscious decision for the media definition to begin to
distort the reporting of race relations (or any other subject). Indeed, the distortion
may be most pervasive where the media definition is not employed consciously,
where there is no campaign.
This distortion could occur in two ways. First, events which conform to this
framework might have a better chance of being reported than those which
conflict with it. For example, an announcement in 1970 that the birth-rate among
New Commonwealth immigrants was rising received a great deal more coverage
than the news that immigration from the New Commonwealth was declining.
Whereas seven out of the eight national dailies carried the birth figures (five on
the front page), only four of them carried the figures on immigration (only one
on the front page) (Hartmann and Husband, 1974, p. 167). Second, an event may
be reported not as it happened, but as it is expected to happen (Murdock, 1973,
Knopf, 1973). Combining these two possibilities, we can speculate that once a
decision is taken to give an event publicity, based on its ‘consonance’ with the
prevailing news framework, it may then be reported in such a way as to conform
to this framework.