News Reporters

Bloggers are just as legitimate as "journalists."

The following is a summary of: Gans, Herbert J. The Famine in American Mass-Communication Research: Comments on Hirsch, Tuchman, and Gecas. The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Jan., 1972), 697-705

The mass media Institutions
The mass media content
The mass media audience

1. News reporters do not have regular contact with their audience.

2. News reporters gather information based on their own value judgements.

3. News reporters need a quikly and easily applied set of methods to determine what data are to be gathered.

4. News reporters find only that which they can see and understand; that which coincides with their own beliefs.

5. News reporters work for a medium with a large heterogenous audience which they must not antagonize, offend, or confuse.

6. The same methods of gathering data continue to be used because they have traditionally withstood criticism.

Are the mass media under pressure to reflect audiences tastes in order to maintain a profitible operation? Or do the mass media simply decide the content from which the audience can choose?
A particular news medium attracts an audience who are either like-minded, or like-mided enough to tune out discordant elements through selective perception, or perhaps one uninterested and uninformed enough to leave it to the newscaster or editor to decide what is to be reported.

Most often, the news media recruit staff members whose basic values and assumptions about the world turn out to be fairly similar to the audience's, or an important part of it--which is why newsmen can so freely assume that the audience will agree with their judgments about what events are newsworthy.

Many media tend to reflect the values, or at least the wishes of their most conservative audience members who quickly protest when content becomes to controversial for them, although other media, particularly those which seek to attract younger audiences have recently begun to express the more controversial norms held my many young people.