Page 158 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

NEWS

a significant change in social and cultural patterns. Thus, in these new times culture
and society were marked by a fresh configuration of production, politics,
consumption, lifestyles, identities and everyday private life.
The ‘New Times’ approach explored a wide-ranging set of cultural, social and 135
economic issues and the connections between them. Thus it was suggested that
flexible manufacturing systems supported the customization of design and quality
for niche markets that in turn were connected to consumer lifestyles and the
cultural configurations of postmodernism. At the same time the state was involved
in the deregulation and privatization of welfare in the context of the
reconfiguration of the class structure and the emergence of new social and political
movements. Thus, within the backdrop of globalization, the old certainties that
linked economy, culture and politics together were being put into doubt.
It was argued that Western Capitalist countries were witnessing a decline in the
manual working class, a rise in service and white-collar work, and an increase in
part-time and ‘flexible’ labour all of which was contributing to new social divisions
expressed as the ‘two-thirds: one-third society’. That is, two-thirds of the population
are relatively well-off while one-third is either engaged in de-skilled part-time work
or forms a new ‘underclass’ of the unemployed and unemployable. Congruent with
these changes in the economy and class relations, the cultural identities and
political allegiances of class factions were said to be increasingly unpredictable.
Links Disorganized capitalism, post-industrial society, post-Marxism, postmodernism

News The production of news holds a strategic position in debates about the mass
media for its presumed, and often feared, influence on public life. News is not a
reflection of reality so much as ‘the putting together of reality’. That is, news is not
an unmediated ‘window-on-the world’ but a selected and constructed
representation constitutive of ‘reality’. The selection of items for inclusion as news
and the specific ways in which, once selected, a story is constructed are never
neutral. They are always a particular version of events. It follows that news selection
criteria tell us about the ‘world-view’ that is being assembled and disseminated.
The first selective process in the manufacture of news concerns the topics that
it covers, which, for most news formats in the Western media, can be grasped as
politics, the economy, foreign affairs, domestic affairs, sport and ‘occasional’ stories.
These topics define the news paradigm, the significant omission being the domain
of the personal/sexual. A second moment of selection concerns the constitution of
the topic so that politics is defined as being about government and mainstream
political parties with a stress on personalities. The economy is circumscribed as
being about the stock exchange, trade figures, government policy, inflation, money
supply and so forth. Foreign affairs means inter-governmental relations while
domestic news is sub-divided into ‘hard’ stories – conflict, violence, industrial
disputes – and ‘soft’ human interest stories. The category of ‘sport’ has traditionally
been constituted by male professional sport.
The construction of a story within a topic involves news values that guide the
selection processes. These include four prime news values of the Western world: