International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Between the local newspaper, radio updates, the evening television newscasts and now updates via the →  Internet , your PDA or your cell phone, →  news seems ubiquitous. But where does news come from? How does what you read and hear and view get to the point of being published or broadcast? Fundamentally, news is a construction, and the nature of that construction is important to how we shape our view of the symbolic and mediated reality of the world (→  Reality and Media Reality ; Constructivism ). So how are those symbols created and recognized, and what role do the mediators, the news producers, play in shaping how we think about the world around us? News gathering may seem a simple process. An event happens, reporters go and gather facts, they write the stories, and we read or hear the stories (→  Objectivity in Reporting ). On occasion it may happen just like that. But what remains invisible are the dozens and sometime hundreds of decisions that went on behind the scenes, invisible to news consumers, before that story was covered, reported, written, or edited. Let's take a seemingly straightforward example. Two men enter a bank, produce weapons, fire shots to frighten patrons and employees, take a large amount of cash, and escape. Is this a news story or not? The answer is: it depends. Each news organization, each news community, each news manager may differ in the determination ... log in or subscribe to read full text