Assessing communicative practices

Every organization develops a unique organizational culture: the set(s) of norms and customs, artifacts and events, and values and assumptions that emerge as a consequence of organizational members’ communicative practices. In this section, we outline five ways to study an organization’s culture: performance, narrative, textual, management, and technology. Before examining these various lenses, however, we wish to stress that communicative practices are dynamic, contingent, and transactional, meaning that they are not static, universal, or bounded, but complex, improvisational, and continuous. To understand an organizational culture, then, one must look at its communicative practices in local, social, and historical contexts, including why, when, where, and how they occur, as well as whether or not they are ignored, legitimated, and/or challenged by organizational members.

1. Performance. Performances are expressive (i.e. productive and purposeful) displays (i.e. both process and product) that carry symbolic significance (i.e. meaning and implication) in a particular context.⁷ Four important types of organizational performance are ritual, sociality, politics, and enculturation.⁸ Ritual performances are those personal or organizational behaviors that members engage in on a regular or routine basis. One of the authors of this book, for instance, drinks coffee every morning as he reads his email. This is a personal ritual because it is not necessitated by his job. Such personal rituals are sometimes known as trademark performances because they are strongly associated with particular members. Organizational rituals, by contrast, such as attending weekly faculty meetings, involve routine behaviors that are necessitated by or expected within a specific workplace environment. Given the near “sacred” character of some organizational rituals, they can be particularly revealing of an organization’s culture. Sociality, a second type of performance, refers to the codes of etiquette that are enacted with regard to friendliness, small talk, joking, and privacy within an organization. Politics are performed differently in every organization and influence the type and degree of independence, negotiating, and coalition‐building that are acceptable. A fourth common type of organizational performance, enculturation, emphasizes those “communicative performances wherein the newcomer learns the social knowledge and skills of the culture.”⁹ Though narratives are also a type of organizational performance, we have chosen to treat them separately given their unique complexity and importance.
2. Narratives. Stories are a ubiquitous feature of organizations, and the stories members tell about their workplace experiences are another way to evaluate the endless (re)creation of an organization’s culture. Since stories are inherently selective, what does and does not get storied speaks to an organization’s values and norms, as does the frequency with and manner in which stories are told.¹⁰ Narratives can be classified as personal, collegial, or corporate. Personal stories are those that convey individual subjective experiences; collegial stories are those told about other organizational members; and corporate stories are those told about the organization itself. Each of these story types can function to affirm or discourage certain attitudes and activities within a culture. Narratives that glorify the success of an action or event invite emulation, while those that recount or accentuate failure sound a cautionary tone.¹¹
3. Textual. Another means of examining an organization’s culture is through the texts – written or electronic documents such as company bylaws, policy manuals, procedure handbooks, training manuals, office memos, newsletters, mission statements, reports, etc. – it produces. The purpose of formal texts like those just mentioned is to explicitly identify what are considered to be acceptable and unacceptable actions and activities within the organization. Given the origin and relative permanence of such documents, they tend to represent and reinforce managerial perspectives. Not all texts created within an organization are formal, however. Graffiti, personal employee notes, and “private” emails are all examples of informal, more spontaneous, texts. Whereas formal texts espouse the managerial or company “line,” informal texts communicate the views of those in the “trenches.” One way of understanding an organization’s culture, then, is by examining the differences and similarities between formal and informal texts, between espoused and enacted views. If, for example, a parody of the company newsletter were circulated widely among employees, it might suggest that the newsletter was seen as little more than managerial propaganda.
4. Management. A fourth lens through which to evaluate an organization’s culture is a managerial perspective. This approach concerns how “organizational culture is developed and directed by managers for the purpose of improving operating efficiencies, enhancing the bottom line, or creating satisfied customers.”¹² Though this perspective, which conceives of organizations principally as businesses, emerged initially as a way to assist managers in achieving success by implementing strategies that enhance productivity, performance, and profits, it can be used by critical organizational scholars to evaluate the political consequences of managerial practices. Drawing upon Marxist principles concerning the influence of economic imperatives on corporate culture, for instance, scholars might examine how specific management structures (i.e. the level and flexibility of hierarchy) and practices (i.e. hiring, assessment, promotion) influence both the character of products produced and the quality of employees’ lives (i.e. pay, benefits, respect, voice, support, working conditions, etc.) within a particular organization.
5. Technology. In the context of an increasingly post‐industrial and global economy, information technology (IT) has come to play a central role in the contemporary workplace. From networked communications to data storage and retrieval, IT is vital to the everyday operation of an ever‐expanding array of organizations. Consequently, organizational scholars need to examine the ways in which technology structures work activities, as well as “influences organizational members’ work roles and work relationships.”¹³ The quick and easy access to information on wire services, for instance, has decreased the need for news organizations, especially local affiliates, to produce their own news, thereby altering journalists’ daily routines (i.e. how they gather and package news). Today, technology is not so much a tool for doing one’s job more effectively or efficiently, as it is the very environment in which one works. In remaking the workplace environment, technology has fundamentally altered the skills required to perform some jobs. Indeed, the decreasing cost and increasing availability of IT is directly related to the rise of citizen journalism.

Studying performances, narratives, texts, management, and technology allows scholars to evaluate and assess how communicative practices mediate the tension between structure and process within an organization. The structure/process dialectic is not exclusively an internal dynamic, however. Organizations must also respond to external pressures such as the professional culture that prepares members to work in a particular profession. Organizational cultures and professional cultures are not the same thing.¹⁴ Whereas an organizational culture is always unique to a specific organization and its practices, a professional culture may extend across many organizations. A professional culture, then, refers to sets of norms and customs, artifacts and events, and values and assumptions that emerge as a consequence of formal training (i.e. education, apprenticeships, internships, etc.), membership and participation (i.e. professional associations, conferences, workshops, licenses, etc.), and recognition (i.e. industry awards and honors) within a profession. While an attorney in the United States might work at a specific law firm (or organizational culture), she or he must also earn a juris doctorate (JD degree) from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association and be licensed by the bar association where she or he practices law (or professional culture). To appreciate why workers carry out their jobs as they do, therefore, requires an understanding of both organizational and professional conventions.

Characteristics of conventions

Conventions describe the norms that govern the technical and creative choices made by workers in the execution of their duties, art, or craft. For media workers, conventions influence everything from how one dresses and with whom one eats lunch to the way a news anchor reads news copy and a cameraperson frames particular shots. As these examples suggest, conventions operate at various levels, including a unit or departmental level, a corporate level, and finally an occupational or professional level. If it were not for conventions, workers would confront a virtually infinite array of options in how to carry out their job‐related tasks. Thus, employees internalize and abide by conventions as a matter of practicality. Given the central role that conventions play in how workers work, it is worth considering the chief characteristics and consequences of conventions in greater detail. Conventions are motivated, shared, naturalized, resilient, and directive.

1. Motivated. Though conventions may appear to be arbitrary and capricious, they typically develop out of some pragmatic need, even if that need is as simple as efficiency or the desire for a sense of community, belonging, and group cohesion. In the academic department of one of the book’s authors, for example, faculty members playfully address one another as “professor,” instead of by their first names. This communicative practice heightens the sense of community among faculty by creating identification between those members of the department who have doctorate degrees. Feelings of belonging always depend, in part, upon exclusion. The term “professor” fosters this feeling by distinguishing faculty from students, staff, and administrators. Conventions, then, are motivated rather than random. There is some purpose behind them, even if that purpose is not immediately self‐evident.
2. Shared. Though most of the practices in which people engage are purposeful, not all practices – even routine practices – become conventions. For practices to function as norms, they must be internalized by other employees. Simply put, conventions are shared. Creating and maintaining a curriculum vitae (i.e. detailed academic résumé) is a professional convention that academics share. The fact that an individual professor within an academic department routinely uses Microsoft PowerPoint to lecture does not make that practice a convention, as other professors can present course material in any manner that they choose to. The use of PowerPoint is a personal practice, not something one does because one is a professor.
3. Naturalized. A third characteristic of conventions is that they are naturalized and thus largely invisible. Since conventions are “the norm,” workers tend to adopt and abide by them unconsciously and unreflectively. When persons act in accordance with the prevailing norms, their behaviors appear to be “natural” rather than “cultural.” A common professional convention among students is raising their hand to ask a question. Despite the fact that this book’s authors have never once asked students to raise their hands when they have questions, they have all blindly accepted this behavior as convention(al) and norm(al). We are willing to bet that those same students do not raise their hands when they have questions for their friends at dinner, as the conventions of friendship differ from those of education.
4. Resilient. Conventions typically endure over time, often as much out of tradition as anything else. The comment, “That’s just the way we’ve always done it,” for instance, which utilizes an appeal to tradition, is a fairly common response to the question, “Why do you perform that task in that manner?” Though conventions are relatively resilient or stable, they are neither fixed nor static. Indeed, as organizational demands change, so too do conventions. As we will see shortly, the rise of new conventions partially accounts for why today’s news media looks very different than the news media of just 40 years ago. One of the factors that should be considered by scholars who employ an Organizational approach, then, is why and under what circumstances conventions change.
5. Directive. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, conventions are directive. They sanction or authorize some practices and behaviors, and discourage or disapprove of others. In other words, conventions function not as mere suggestions for possible courses of action, but as unspoken guidelines or rules for the correct or appropriate action.

Because of their motivated, shared, naturalized, resilient, and directive character, conventions – be they organizational or professional – have a significant impact on daily workplace practices, and consequently on the services and products offered by media companies. Before illustrating this through a specific case study, we briefly reflect on the process of professionalization.

Professionalization

The existence and operation of professional conventions leads to professionalization or the socialization of workers to do their work in certain ways and to produce certain kinds of products. Simply stated, professionalization is the internalization of professional conventions as common sense. Consider the “training” of a professional film director like Martin Scorsese, for instance. Though Scorsese’s interest in film goes back to his childhood, his formal training did not begin until he was a student at New York University’s prestigious film school. We say “formal training,” as the mere act of watching films had already begun to educate and professionalize him. Upon graduating with an MFA in film directing in 1966, Scorsese had the professional credentials to begin making Hollywood films. The combination of his personal style (process) and professional training (structure) led to a career of critically acclaimed films, including Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Hugo (2011), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2014), all of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. In short, Scorsese was taught a set of filmmaking conventions, which allowed him to become a professional filmmaker and hence reproduce those conventions in his own work, for which he was recognized as outstanding in his field. None of this is to suggest that Scorsese is not a talented filmmaker, only to highlight that what counts as “excellence” in filmmaking depends to a large extent on one’s adeptness at reproducing a series of professional conventions.

The dramatic influence of professional conventions on the look of artistic products can also be seen in the field of photography, especially when one considers the very different conventions that govern journalistic photography and advertising photography. In the early 1960s, Roland Barthes published two famous studies, “The Photographic Message” and “Rhetoric of the Image,” in which he highlighted the distinctive visual codes of press and advertising photography, respectively. Barthes recognized that photojournalists are trained professionals who have been taught to take pictures in a particular manner, namely so that they evoke strong emotion, appear to be candid, and situate the viewer within the action. Figure 3.1, which depicts a vehicle striking protestors in Charlottesville, VA, is especially adept at modeling the conventions of photojournalism, and won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

In contrast to photojournalism, advertising photography creates desire and pleasure, emphasizes careful staging, and places the viewer at a distance from its subject. Figure 3.2, an advertisement for Hot Wheels, demonstrates these principles. Unlike the press photograph in Figure 3.1, the advertising image is not especially emotional or immediate; it is clever and cute, rather than terrifying and tragic. Table 3.1 summarizes the key differences between news photography and advertising photography. The noticeable difference in visual codes between photojournalism and advertising is a powerful reminder that no image is objective, and that editors select the images used in the news and in advertisements precisely because they best conform to the norms of those professions.

Martin Scorsese’s film career, along with the comparison of photojournalism and advertising photography, highlights several interconnected dimensions of professional socialization. Once professional norms harden into common sense, whether arising as a consequence of the profit‐motive or as a matter of practicality, they establish the standards by which a profession measures quality and competence. These standards, in turn, serve as guides for making hires, conducting annual evaluations, determining promotions, and dispensing awards and recognition. The more fully one has been professionally socialized through one’s education and training, the more likely one is to get a job. After all, one already possesses the skills that have been deemed valuable and necessary. Similarly, once in a position, the more one is able to conform to existing professional conventions, the more likely one is to be rewarded with money, promotions, responsibilities, recognition, and praise. Professionals, then, have many powerful incentives to adopt and follow professional conventions, even if they are consciously unaware of them. Most professions also have professional societies to which their members belong. These societies generate literature, conduct studies, and host conventions, all of which function to further reinforce professional norms. They, in effect, continue the socializing role performed early in one’s career by formal education.

News organizations and journalistic conventions

Journalism was generally regarded as a reputable and critically important enterprise in the late 20th century. The structure and processes of news organizations worked to ensure the daily output of the media product we call “news.” Ideally, the news refers to important, accurate, and reliable information that equips citizens to participate in civic life in responsible and informed ways. But, in actuality, the news often falls short of that ideal. Frequently, it is little more than what newsmakers such as politicians and other political actors promote as timely or interesting, and what news organizations, in turn, collect, narrate, and package for transmission to consumers.²⁰ In other words, the news – like any other commodity – is produced in accordance with the logic of the market. To understand the gap between the ideal of news and the actuality of what constitutes news, we must examine the specific professional conventions that govern how it is both gathered (i.e. collected) and reported (i.e. presented). Like all conventions, the conventions of news gathering and reporting did not emerge arbitrarily. They are responses to specific situational demands.

The two major situational constraints on news gathering are the news “hole” and the news “whole,” both of which are influenced heavily by the profit‐motive discussed in Chapter 2. The news hole, or the necessity to deliver the news every day at the same time (i.e. to “fill the hole”), is one of the most powerful institutional forces in journalism, and it has resulted in a series of concrete organizational practices and routines. The need to produce the news every day by a specific deadline is a heavy burden for both local and national news outlets. To meet the daily demand for news created by the news hole, journalists rely upon a series of standardized practices for collecting news that include journalistic beats, news agencies, and punditry and press releases. Journalistic beats are the places and institutions where news is expected to occur on any given day. For instance, police stations and courthouses make up the criminal/legal beat, and are reliable sources of news. According to Herbert Gans, national news in the United States is overwhelmingly dominated by five beats: incumbent presidents, presidential candidates, leading federal officials, state and local officials, and alleged and actual violators of laws and mores.²¹ The reason the news is dominated by a steady stream of stories about crime and politicians, then, is not because these topics and figures are inherently newsworthy, but because news organizations assign reporters to these beats. Mark Fishman describes how this journalistic practice influences what counts as “news” and what does not:

Some happenings in the world become public events. Others are condemned to obscurity as the personal experience of a handful of people. The mass media, and in particular news organizations, make all the difference … [A] crucial part of the newsmaking process – the routine work of beat reporters – … determines what becomes a public event and what becomes a nonevent … [R]eporters’ “sense of events,” their methods for seeing the newsworthiness of occurrences, are based on schemes of interpretation originating from and used by agency officials within the institutions beat reporters cover. Nonevents are specific happenings that are seen as “out of character” within the institutional settings in which they occur … To seriously entertain these occurrences as potential news would force journalists to question their own methods for detecting newsworthy events.²²

The events that are systematically excluded from public view (i.e. the so‐called non‐events) as a result of prevailing news‐gathering conventions, then, are really nothing more than occurrences that, if reported, would call into question the legitimacy of the beats (people and institutions) that reporters depend on for news.

News agencies can be corporations such as Reuters that produce and sell stories to other news providers, or nonprofit cooperatives like the Associated Press that work with large media companies to generate news centrally and distribute it locally. Since the major news agencies generally prepare features and news packages complete with stock images and footage, the stories they provide can generally be used by news organizations with virtually no modification. This is particularly valuable to news organizations that must meet daily print and broadcast deadlines. The use of news agencies as a central means of gathering news explains, at least partially, why the major news networks inevitably cover the same stories every day. The consistency of the news across networks does not arise because various news organizations independently “discover” the same news every day, but because they all collect news from the same beats and news agencies.

A third way that news organizations gather news is through political pundits and press releases. Punditry describes news that is pre‐packaged by politicians and their public relations managers and press advisors (i.e. communication consultants) to promote a favorable image of the politician and her or his specific policy initiatives.²³ In the interest of image management, consultants constantly seek to control both the news situation and message surrounding political actors. The strategies communication consultants employ to control the news situation are vast and sophisticated, and range from carefully staged, scripted, and acted pseudo events to scheduled press briefings where politicians set the agenda.²⁴ One of the most infamous pseudo events in recent history was US President Donald Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung‐un, in which the two signed a joint statement committing to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula (Figure 3.3).

Political consultants are not the only ones who use press releases as a strategy for getting carefully controlled messages picked up as news, however. Many major corporations, nonprofit organizations, scientific foundations, and even fanatical cults utilize press releases as a way to promote themselves, their views, and their products. In It’s Not News, It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News, Drew Curtis documents how press releases are frequently picked up, oftentimes with no changes, and run as news. Curtis calls this phenomenon the “unpaid placement masquerading as actual article,” and notes that it is surprisingly common.²⁵ Consider, for instance, annual lists such as People’s Sexiest Man Alive or Time’s 100 Most Influential People. Each year, these magazines circulate press releases about their picks, which are then reported by mainstream news organizations as news. But, is the selection and announcement of Idris Elba as 2018's sexiest man alive really news, or just an advertisement for People magazine? In a similar vein, big drug companies often release the results of “scientific studies” announcing landmark medical breakthroughs that are in actuality little more than advertisements for their latest designer drug.

Journalistic beats, news agencies, and political pundits and press releases do more than assist news organizations in filling the daily news hole, however; they also aid them in filling it completely or wholly. The news whole is our phrase to describe the specific amount of time or space allotted for reporting the news each day. Has it ever seemed strange to you that regardless of the events of the day, nightly national news broadcasts are always precisely 60 minutes long? This means that journalists must gather enough news every day to fill the entire news program, but not so much that it won’t all fit. So, how does the need to make the news “fit” daily programming schedules constrain the practices of news gathering? The chief way is by influencing the selection of stories. When journalists are sent into the field to produce news packages that will later be used locally or shared through news agencies, they know that the typical television news package is only 60–90 seconds long. Before they become professionals, young journalists are taught the basic formulas for creating news packages in school. Consequently, events and information that do not readily lend themselves to a short, simple, dramatic, and narrative format are commonly ignored or overlooked. Complex issues, even those vital to the public, are far less likely to see the light of your television screen or the front page of your daily newspaper than are matters that can easily be reported by answering the routine who, what, where, and when questions.

The strict conventions that govern news gathering are driven in large part by the profit‐motive, or the desire of news organizations to produce the news cheaply and efficiently, while simultaneously appealing to the largest audience possible. Audience share is important because it determines what can be charged for advertising time and thus affects advertising revenues.²⁶ In short, journalists are under considerable economic pressures to find audience‐grabbing stories on short deadlines with minimal resources. Consequently, the selection of news stories often has little to do with their newsworthiness: their social and informational value to the public. Rather than asking what really matters to people’s everyday lives or what it is vital for people to know in order to be able to effectively carry out their civic duties, journalists simply regard the public figures and institutions that make up their regular beats as newsworthy. Hence, the news is not something that is uncovered, explored, and reported on each day; rather, it is a product or commodity manufactured by news organizations based on palatability and profitability. This claim is further evidenced by the major news‐reporting conventions.

Not only is the gathering of the news a highly standardized process, but so too is the reporting of the news. As Lance Bennett elaborates, the stories presented in the news overwhelmingly demonstrate four information biases: personalization, dramatization, fragmentation, and authority–disorder. Let’s consider each of these in greater depth.

1. Personalization. Most news stories focus on individuals rather than institutions, and emphasize human‐interest angles and emotional impact over and often at the expense of broader social contexts and political perspectives. Simply put, news stories are people‐centered; they rely heavily upon interviews, first‐person accounts, eyewitness testimony, and expert opinions. The focus on individual people is designed to make stories feel more personal, direct, and immediate. But, by focusing on individual actors, such as the President, in a story about economic recession, for instance, news organizations encourage their audiences to view political issues individually rather than socially. Consequently, audiences are more likely to blame specific political actors for social ills and less likely to understand the underlying factors and root causes of social problems.
2. Dramatization. The news is overwhelmingly biased toward the narrative presentation of information. Regardless of the specific issues journalists are reporting on, those issues tend to be structured as stories, “as contrasted, for example, to analytical essays, political polemics, or more scientific‐style problem reports.”²⁷ Moreover, to heighten audience interest, journalists frequently focus on the most sensational, scandalous, and shocking details of a story. The insistence on narrativizing the news has at least two significant consequences. First, since some issues are difficult to pictorialize and require sustained analysis, their dramatization leads to inaccurate or misrepresentative reporting (if they get covered at all). Second, since narratives have beginnings, middles, and endings, dramatized news has the potential to impose a clean and tidy sense of closure on complex, enduring issues.
3. Fragmentation. A third informational bias in the news is the tendency to treat stories in isolation, ignoring their connection to other stories and the larger contexts in which they occur. Both newspapers and televised newscasts organize the news into brief, self‐contained capsules. This can foster the misimpression that the world is just a series of random, unrelated events. The compartmentalization of news stories can obfuscate not only the interconnections among them, but also their historical significance. Fragmented news makes the world appear chaotic and unpredictable. Indeed, the prevalence of fragmented news helps to explain why the 9/11 attacks were so utterly incomprehensible to most Americans, who had no context for understanding the connections between the economic and foreign policies of the United States and the religious zealotry of Islamic extremists. To most Americans, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon are isolated events with no prior history or context.
4. Authority–disorder. The fourth and final informational bias of the news is closely related to the first three, and in particular, the way that personalized news becomes dramatized. Since personalization leads to a focus on individuals and dramatization favors the sensational, it is common to depict the individuals and parties involved in a story as in conflict or tension. This tension is typically represented as one between authority (i.e. police, government leaders, public officials) and disorder (i.e. criminals, natural disasters, terrorism). Furthermore, since the news comprises individual capsules that require narrative closure, the authority–disorder tension is generally resolved either in the direction of authority, through the restoration of normalcy, or in the direction of disorder, with the cynical view that public officials are incompetent. Consider the news media framing of Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast and devastated New Orleans on August 28, 2005. The story was structured around a natural catastrophe (disorder) and the government’s response, as represented by Michael Brown, then Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). When the government was not able to quickly restore normalcy, Brown was fired for his incompetence.

While virtually any news story could profitably be analyzed using the four information biases just presented, one of this book’s authors witnessed a particularly apt example on his local Fox 31 affiliate one evening. As he was watching reruns of The Simpsons, Ott repeatedly saw a promo for that evening’s newscast, which in a deep announcer’s voice alarmingly said, “Ron has a nuclear bomb buried in his back yard! Missiles are buried all over Colorado. See where tonight on Fox 31 News at 9:00.” After soiling himself, Ott began to wonder, if Ron tried to plant a tree in his backyard, would it cause a nuclear holocaust? Fearing for his life, he decided to stay tuned. Despite the hysteria of the promo, this news story did not begin until a full 30 minutes into the broadcast. In a segment dramatically titled, “Nukes In Your Neighborhood” – complete with images of mushroom clouds – reporter Heidi Hemmat informed viewers of the 49 Minute Man missiles located in Colorado, “on farms, near churches and schools, throughout small towns across the eastern plain.” The mention of farms, churches, and schools heightens fear, making the story more dramatic. She then interviewed farmer Ron Bornhoff, who had a missile near his farm, to personalize the story. After scaring the audience shitless, Hemmat assured viewers the bombs were carefully guarded 24 hours a day by the US military, thereby re‐establishing authority and order to the chaotic frame of the story. This story reflects fragmentation to the extent that it stood completely independent of the other news reports that evening. In retrospect, Ott realized that there was no real news there at all, only fear packaged as news for an unsuspecting audience.

Conventions of the news magazine

The four information biases just discussed are typical of daily reporting and are pervasive in both print and televised news. Consequently, one is just as likely to find the biases of personalization, dramatization, fragmentation, and authority‐disorder on evening news programs like the NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and ABC World News Tonight as in print media like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. In contrast to news that is produced on a daily basis, some news involves in‐depth and investigative reporting and is produced over a much longer period of time (sometimes even years). Weekly news magazine programs such as 20/20, Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, and 60 Minutes are popular examples of this format, and they follow their own news‐reporting conventions. In this section, we highlight the conventions of the evening news magazine by drawing upon Richard Campbell’s landmark study, 60 Minutes and the News: A Mythology for Middle America.

60 Minutes is the most successful television show in history, having finished as the top‐rated series on television five times and ended in Nielsen’s top 10 programs a record 23 consecutive seasons (1977–2000). Created in 1968 by Don Hewitt, who remains the show’s executive producer, 60 Minutes has won more Emmy awards than any other news broadcast. The show combines investigative journalism with celebrity journalism, and typically consists of two or three separately produced segments. As Campbell has demonstrated, those segments generally follow one of four well‐worn formulas:

1. News as mystery. This type of report is what many people think of when they hear the phrase “investigative reporting,” because it often involves journalists with hidden cameras uncovering wrongdoings by playing detective and surprising or ambushing interviewees. For Campbell, stories told using this formula proceed in four stages: (1) the identification of key characters, who are framed as villains or criminals; (2) the search for clues of criminal violation; (3) the stalking and ultimate confrontation of the wrongdoer about his or her misdeeds; and (4) an assurance that the wrongdoer has been brought to justice, and safety has been restored. In August 2004, for instance, 60 Minutes aired a segment titled “Doing Business with the Enemy” that uncovered how major US companies such as Halliburton were conducting millions of dollars’ worth of business with countries that sponsor terrorism (e.g. Iran).
2. News as therapy. This formula places the reporter in the position of analyst or therapist, rather than detective. In this capacity, the journalist performs four key roles: (1) as a social commentator who endows the narrative with moral meaning by placing the interview in appropriate historical, political, or cultural context; (2) as an intimate confidant to whom the interviewee can reveal private, personal details; (3) as a champion of heroic characters or a foil to villainous ones; and (4) as an inquisitor, who asks tough, confrontational questions that probe deviations from popular values. Correspondent Ed Bradley’s interview of the famously private Neil Armstrong about his family and fame in July 2006, titled “Being the First Man on the Moon,” is exemplary of this formula.
3. News as adventure. The adventure‐story formula plays like a Western, with the reporter as tourist or well‐informed traveler in search of drama and adventure. The reporter‐tourist is portrayed in three recurring capacities: (1) as viewers’ surrogate for exploring and ultimately understanding a new, unfamiliar, or exotic locale; (2) as nostalgic traveler (in search of a simpler, uncorrupted time: a past still reflected in small‐town, Middle American values) or as seeker of the authentic, natural, or “real” America behind the fast‐paced, high‐tech modernist exterior; and (3) as protector from foreign or alien influences that somehow threaten traditional, American‐heartland values. The June 2007 story of the Moken people, who miraculously survived the tsunami in Asia, illustrates news as adventure. Correspondent Bob Bimon traveled to a remote island off the coast of Thailand to learn the secrets of these native peoples in “Sea Gypsies Saw Signs in the Waves.”
4. News as arbitration. A final formula used in news magazines is news as arbitration, which positions the reporter as referee or arbitrator. Of the four formulas, this one shares the most in common with orthodox journalism by featuring the reporter (1) as a neutral observer, (2) deferring to experts or authorities, (3) emphasizing a dialectical rather than expository structure, (4) abandoning the search for a clear, unequivocal villain, and (5) resisting narrative closure and resolution. “The Oil Sands of Alberta,” which aired in June 2006, illustrates the news‐as‐arbitration formula. The story described the vast oil reserves in Canada and reported on the dependence on fossil fuels and environmental debates that they raise, but did not take sides or suggest what the outcome of these debates will be.

Consequences of news conventions

The professionalization of the news – and, more specifically, the journalistic conventions involved in gathering and reporting the news – has four serious consequences. First, by deciding who and what gets covered (and, conversely, who and what does not get covered), the news media exercise a powerful gatekeeping function: the ability to control access to the public. Due to the pressures on journalists to meet deadlines, some issues, events, and actors are far more likely to be reported on than others. This system privileges organizations and politicians who possess the financial and structural resources to provide newsmakers (i.e. journalists) with ready‐made news, and disadvantages alternative, independent, and less well‐funded groups and citizens seeking to promote their message. In the political arena, news conventions greatly benefit the two major political parties and their candidates, while marginalizing and ostracizing third‐party or independent candidates. This bias is one of the reasons why it makes little sense to debate whether the news is liberal or conservative; the blind reproduction of the two‐party system means that news is overwhelmingly centrist.

An additional side‐effect of gatekeeping is agenda‐setting, or the belief that the news media do not influence what people think so much as what people think about. The news media, by covering some topics and not others, establish the important topics of the day; they, in effect, set the agenda for public dialog. Because so much of what is reported as news is a product of journalistic beats, news agencies, political punditry, and press releases, the news media significantly restrict the diversity of topics on the public’s mind. For the most part, if the media are not talking about it, neither is the public. Moreover, driven by profit, news outlets frequently engage in cross‐promotional efforts for their parent corporations. Just before Disney released the summer blockbuster Armageddon (1998), for instance, ABC News (a Disney subsidiary) repeatedly ran stories about the dangers of asteroids striking the Earth. In this case, the so‐called “news” functioned as little more than a film advertisement. Conversely, news outlets occasionally censor stories that could potentially hurt their corporate image, such as when the President of ABC News axed a story ABC journalists were working on regarding Disney theme parks hiring known child molesters.²⁸

A second, and closely related, consequence of news conventions is homogenization. Just as news‐gathering conventions limit the diversity of what is covered, news‐reporting conventions limit the diversity of how it is covered. According to Taylor and Willis, “Working practices contribute to the production of similar and less innovative programs across news production … The routines and working practices within news production therefore act to further the shared understanding of the form of news and hence also work to ensure a reproduction of both visual style and approach to content.”²⁹ Despite the infinite number of ways a newspaper could be structured, for instance, there is a remarkable consistency in newspaper layout. Nor are the similarities among papers purely stylistic. Since journalists have been professionalized by their education, training, and experience, different reporters at different newspapers are likely to cover the same story in the same way. The presence of multiple newspapers in one locale, then, only creates “the appearance of choice,” as both what they report on and how they report on it are likely to possess greater similarities than differences.

A dramatic increase in soft news is the third major consequence of news conventions. Soft news describes news that is high in entertainment value, but low in educational value; this type of news is sometimes referred to as “infotainment” because it is packaged so as to make it look important and informational despite the fact that it has no intrinsic social significance. In contrast to soft news, hard news is characterized by sustained reporting on issues important to people’s lives, in a manner that equips citizens to make informed decisions on public policy and social issues. Soft news appeals to viewers primarily on an emotional level by evoking fear, concern, or outrage. Common topics of soft news include crime (especially heinous crimes like child molestation), alcohol and drugs, gangs and violence, and fires and accidents. The degree to which the news is dominated by these types of stories is sometimes referred to as the mayhem index. Though the mayhem index is difficult to quantify, Bennett notes that between 1993 and 1996, the number of news stories about murder on the national news networks increased by 700 percent, while during that same time period, the actual murder rate declined by 20 percent.³⁰ No story, however, is inherently soft or hard news. Even crime stories can be reported as hard news if they focus on the social causes and consequences of violence, rather than on the sensational details of the crime or the tremendous grief of the victim’s family. Thus, the prevalence of soft news is a result of how the news is reported, namely according to the four informational biases identified earlier in this chapter, rather than what is reported as news.

The fourth consequence of news conventions concerns the attribution of responsibility for social ills. The way stories are framed by journalists influences how citizens understand social problems and, ultimately, whom they hold responsible for those problems. In his book, Is Anyone Responsible?, media scholar Shanto Iyengar argues that most news stories are framed in one of two general ways: episodically or thematically. “The episodic news frame,” according to Iyengar, “takes the form of a case study or event‐oriented report and depicts public issues in terms of concrete instance.”³¹ The thematic news frame, by contrast, is more likely to situate social issues in a broader, abstract context and involve a “‘takeout,’ or ‘backgrounder,’ report directed at general outcomes or conditions.”³² Episodic and thematic news frames strongly influence how citizens assign responsibility for social problems. Whereas the episodic frame leads to the blaming of individuals – typically politicians – for social problems, the thematic frame tends to hold all of us accountable. Based on what we have learned in this chapter, it probably comes as no surprise that the news is dominated by episodic frames. This is because, as Bennett explains, “the (four) information biases in the news add up to news that is episodic.”³³ The danger of episodic news is that it does not serve the public well as a basis for social and political action, since it frames problems as individual rather than institutional.

Political bias, pseudo news, and fake news

Despite the limitations associated with the professional conventions that govern gathering and reporting the news, throughout much of the 20th century the enterprise of journalism was respected and relatively trusted. While individual journalists during this period certainly held personal political biases, the conventions of journalism largely mitigated systemic political bias in the news. Political bias refers to the ideological slant (i.e. liberal or conservative) of a news organization. In the 21st century, political bias is a significant and dangerous reality of our news landscape. Several factors have contributed to this new reality, but chief among them is the rise of niche news sources aimed at attracting and appealing to particular audiences based on their political leanings and tastes. Writing about political bias in the news is challenging since there is no apolitical center from which to judge the bias of any given news organization. That having been said, there have been attempts to rate the political bias of news sources based on the political leanings of their audiences (see Figure 3.4). The website AllSides ranks the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and USA Today as centrist, NPR and PBS News Hour as mostly centrist, The New York Times and Washington Post as left‐leaning, Huffington Post and Mother Jones as far left‐leaning, Fox News as right‐leaning, and The Blaze and Drudge Report as far right‐leaning.

The dangers of political bias in the news are twofold. First, it fosters ideological silos, in which citizens seek out and consume news that conforms to and reinforces their pre‐existing political opinions and beliefs. Second, and relatedly, it contributes to hyper‐partisanship, in which people of differing political perspectives and viewpoints are unable to find common ground and, thus, unable to develop and implement solutions to real‐world problems. Political bias should not be confused with the development and spread of pseudo or fake news, however. Whereas political bias describes the ideological bent of a legitimate news outlet, pseudo news describes current‐events programming that features political opinion and commentary but lacks the rigorous editorial standards and processes typical of serious journalism. So, whereas Mother Jones may have a left‐leaning political bias, programs like Hannity, Justice with Judge Jeanine, and The Laura Ingraham Show on the Fox News Channel are pseudo news programs. Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and Laura Ingraham are not journalists; they are political commentators and TV personalities who advocate for specific legislative policies and judicial outcomes based upon their ideological views. Unfortunately, viewers of these and other current‐events programs rarely make this distinction, and they consume these programs like news rather than as political commentary and entertainment.

Until recently, the political opinion commentators on pseudo news programs would, when pressed, admit that they were not journalists and that they were commenting on current events rather than reporting the news. Sean Hannity, for instance, told The New York Times in August 2016 that he has “never claimed to be a journalist,” a position that he affirmed on Twitter in October 2016 when he tweeted that he’s a “talk host” and “not a journalist.” Hannity’s employer, Fox News, agreed, noting on November 15, 2017 that, “Shep [Smith] is an outstanding journalist, and Sean [Hannity] is an outstanding opinion commentator.”³⁴ But, more recently, Sean Hannity has claimed to be a journalist,³⁵ a move that is significant because it risks shifting Hannity from the terrain of pseudo news into the realm of fake news. While pseudo news is often misinterpreted by audiences as legitimate journalism, it does not attempt to pass itself off as such. Fake news, by contrast, deliberately seeks to mislead consumers; it intentionally masquerades as news for the expressed purpose of manipulating people. Thus, when Sean Hannity began claiming to be a journalist despite having no journalistic credentials, he entered the realm of fake news.

Fake news is not, as President Trump would have Americans wrongly believe, news that casts him in an unflattering or unfavorable light. Rather, fake news is a type of propaganda. While propaganda refers to strategic disinformation in any form, fake news refers to strategic disinformation that is specifically designed to resemble legitimate journalism. So, while not all propaganda is fake news, all fake news is propaganda. By definition, then, mainstream news outlets cannot meaningfully be considered fake news, and treating them as such has fascistic overtones and threatens a free and independent press. In an online environment, however, where people increasingly get their news through social media, fake news is on the rise. Though virtually anyone can create fake news, the reasons for doing so vary greatly. Fake news can be motivated by (1) money, since articles that go viral can generate significant advertising revenue when users click through to the source; (2) mischief, since some articles are posted simply as pranks or jokes; or (3) politics, since some articles are specifically intended to advance a political agenda or candidate. Table 3.2 provides an example of fake news that reflects each of these possible motivations.

“Fake news” entered the popular lexicon following the 2016 US presidential election, when it became clear that Russia had widely disseminated fake news on social media in an attempt to aid Donald Trump and influence the outcome of the election. While the production and circulation of fakes news is still a relatively recent phenomenon, its dangers are quickly becoming evident. Among other things, it can cause confusion, promote the acceptance of false or misleading information, and intensify distrust of legitimate news sources. Going forward, critical media scholars need to educate the public about the prevalence and dangers of fake news, as well as to promote media‐literacy programs that aid people in more easily detecting it.