| Scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the subject of information gathering and news presentation over the past twenty years, but although many studies have been written on this subject, there has been no common agreement. Four competing points of view or perspectives seem to have characterized recent scholarly inquiry into what determines what we will see in the television news: (1) The Organization/Institutional Perspective. A number of studies have been conducted suggesting that organizational constraints determine what newsmakers select and present as news (Epstein 1973, Gans 1980). (2) The Sociological Perspective. Some studies suggest that the newsmaker is a professional constrained by an industry-wide code of ethics and beliefs concerning news and newsmaking (Tuchman 1978). (3) The Economic/Political Perspective. Other studies suggest that news is an ideological construct: that in selecting and presenting news, newsmakers and news organizations reflect the biases and tendencies of the prevailing economic and political system (Schiller 1976, Gitlin 1978, the MacBride Report 1980). (4) The Technological Perspective. Still other studies suggest that something in the structure of the delivery system and/or the symbol system it employs determines what shall be selected and presented as news (Innes 1951, McLuhan 1964, Postman 1979).;The technology of the television delivery and symbol system is taken to be constant. Therefore this study compares the main evening weeknight television news on American and British public and commercial television, looking in the United States at ABC's "World News Tonight" and PBS's "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" and in Britain at BBC 1's "Nine O'Clock News" and ITN's "News at Ten.";Most scholars have tended to frame questions concerning what we see in television news in terms of which theory most explains the phenomenon we call news. This study adopts a more ecological approach and assumes that since each of these perspectives has something valuable to contribute therefore the question should be framed in terms of which aspects of which theory seem best to account for which characteristics of television news. |
