Page 159 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

namely, reference to elite nations, reference to elite persons, personalization and
negativity. Thus, while the unexpected is a significant news value, it is even more
so if it has negative consequences involving elite persons of an elite nation. Thus
136 a scandal about the private life of the President of the United States is more ‘news-
worthy’ than successful crop figures in Mali.
Within cultural studies a hegemonic model of news has been popular. Here the
ideological character of news is not held to be the result of direct intervention by
owners or even a conscious attempt at manipulation by journalists, but as an
outcome of the routine attitudes and working practices of staff. News journalists
learn the conventions and codes of ‘how things should be done’ reproducing
ideology as common sense. It is argued that reliance on ‘authoritative sources’ leads
to the media reproducing ‘primary definers’’ accounts as news. Primary definers are
taken to be politicians, judges, industrialists, the police and so forth, that is, official
agencies involved in the making of news events. In translating the primary
definitions of news, the media, as secondary definers, reproduce the hegemonic
ideologies associated with the powerful, translating them into popular idioms.
In the hegemonic model of news the media draw off and constitute consensual
assumptions about the world in a process of agenda setting. They define what
constitutes news and thus that which is constituted as socially and culturally
important. Though many current affairs programmes do offer balance in terms of
the time given to different political views, the very field of ‘politics’ has already been
set up as concerning established political procedures, that is, Parliament or
Congress. Consequently, a balance of ‘protagonists’ and ‘respondents’ encompasses
only those political discourses favouring the field of politics as currently structured.
News, especially in its televised form, is constituted not only by its choice of
topics and stories but by its verbal and visual idioms or modes of address.
Presentational styles have been subject to a tension between an informational-
educational purpose and the need to engage us entertainingly. While current affairs
programmes are often ‘serious’ in tone with adherence to the ‘rules’ of balance,
more popular programmes adopt a friendly, lighter, idiom in which we are invited
to consider the impact of particular news items from the perspective of the ‘average
person in the street’. Indeed, contemporary news construction has come to rely on
an increased use of faster editing tempos and ‘flashier’ presentational styles
including the use of logos, sound-bites, rapid visual cuts and the ‘star quality’ of
news readers. Popular formats can be said to enhance understanding by engaging
an audience unwilling to endure the longer verbal orientation of older news
formats. However, they arguably work to reduce understanding by failing to provide
the structural contexts for news events.
News is now one of the principal texts of the contemporary media and appears
on just about every television network across the globe. Indeed it is the subject of
entire globally distributed channels, including Cable News Network (CNN) and BBC
News 24. The production and distribution of news is a global phenomenon that
rests on the establishment of news exchange arrangements whereby subscribing
news organizations have organized a reciprocal trade in news material with a
particular emphasis on the sharing of visual footage. Indeed, the availability of