Rethinking News Access

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Rethinking News Access Simon Cottle a

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Bath Spa University College, UK

Version of record first published: 13 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Simon Cottle (2000): Rethinking News Access, Journalism Studies, 1:3, 427-448 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616700050081768

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Journalism Studies, Volume 1, Number 3, 2000, pp. 427–448

Rethinking News Access SIMON COTTLE

Downloaded by [Cardiff University] at 00:45 15 October 2012

Bath Spa University College, UK

ABSTRACT At the heart of major theoretical approaches to the study of news and its relation to wider society are ideas about the mechanisms and meanings informing the patterns and processes of news access. This article reviews these efforts to theorize news access and notes the in�uence of two deep-seated paradigms—the sociological and the culturalist—that have helped orientate the research �eld. Sociological studies of news access approached as “strategic action and de�nitional power” help to situate historically and understand the grounded play of power informing the interactions of news producers and news sources, but these tend to under-theorize important processes of “cultural mediation” at work. Culturalist studies of news help to illuminate how cultural form—whether “narrative”, “myth” or “ritual”—condition and shape the symbolic entry of news actors onto the news stage but, in the absence of empirical work attending to the complexities and contingencies of news production, tend to over-estimate their determining role. This article reviews important theories of news access and reveals the undoubted insights and explanatory limitations of both sociological and culturalist paradigms. It identi�es productive areas for future research drawing upon both of these, and concludes by identifying three theoretical levels of “cultural mediation” that condition and shape the play of “strategic action and de�nitional power” and which therefore deserve to be pursued in future empirical research. The cultural landscape of news is fast changing, but questions of news access remain as critical as ever. Only by attending to questions of news access can we understand better the role of the news media in the wider play of social and cultural power. KEY WORDS: Culturalist paradigm, De�nitional power, Myth, Narrative, News access, Performance, Ritual, Sociological paradigm, Strategic action

Put succinctly, who gets “on” or “in” the news is important—very important indeed. Whose voices and viewpoints structure and inform news discourse goes to the heart of democratic views of, and radical concerns about, the news media. Historically, representative liberal democratic theory with its injunction that the liberty of the press be protected so that dissenting views can be aired and opinion formation facilitated, raises ideas of news access (Mill, J. 1811; Mill, J.S. 1859). In�uential variants of critical theory, for their part, are often more explicit. Here the news media, both press and broad-

casting, are said routinely to privilege the voices of the powerful and marginalize those of the powerless— whether as a result of media ownership, control and instrumental design; prohibitive costs of market entry, advertising pressures and the commodi�cation of news; or more diffuse cultural processes informing journalist socialization, news production and the ideological reproduction of consensus (Golding and Murdock, 1979; Gitlin, 1980; Hall, 1982; Herman and Chomsky, 1988). In such ways, then, the news media are thought to have ideological effects—whether helping to se-

ISSN 1461-670X print/ISSN 1469-9699 online/00/030427-22 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd


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cure ruling hegemony, legitimizing social inequality or thwarting moves to participatory democracy. Recently, more politically contingent (less theoretically absolute) studies of state, media and civil society point to the dynamic processes surrounding news access, whether the competition of news sources and their strategies of “enclosure” and “disclosure” (Ericson et al., 1989; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994), the “indexing” of news access to the changing political consensus (Hallin, 1986; Bennett, 1990; Bennett and Paletz, 1994; Butler, 1995), or the contests and con�icts informing news approached as “multi-purpose arenas” (Wolfsfeld, 1997). Yet still others, in productive critique of Habermas’ views of the media as “public sphere”, normatively propose that the news media must contribute to a more vibrant public arena in which diverse social, political and cultural interests can gain access and engage (contra Habermas) in what is often likely to be decidedly “non-consensual” displays of social difference (Curran, 1991; Fraser, 1992; Hallin, 1994; Dahlgren, 1995). Clearly, these and other major approaches (discussed below) grant considerable importance to news access, notwithstanding their evident differences of theoretical perspective, informing epistemology and political commitments. Whose voices predominate, whose vie and contend, and whose are marginalized or rendered silent on the news stage are questions of shared concern. How social groups and interests are de�ned and symbolically visualized is also part and parcel of news access. Whether social groups are representationally legitimated or symbolically positioned as “Other”, labelled deviant or rendered speechless can have far reaching consequences as shown, for example, in studies of media representation of youth subcultures (Cohen, 1972), ethnic minorities

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(Van Dijk, 1991), political dissidents and “terrorists” (Gerbner, 1992) or the victims of “risk society” (Cottle, 2000a). Much depends, then, on how we conceptualize “news access”, how we theorize the relationship between the news media and wider society, and the mechanisms and meanings that surround and inform processes and patterns of news entry. This article sets out to review some of the most in�uential and insightful approaches to the study of news access in the belief that each contributes to improved understanding of the mechanisms linking the news media to the wider play of social and cultural power. This is not to suggest that discussion of news access exhausts everything there is to say about news and its relationship to wider society, but it is to say that concerns of news access are important and suf�ciently prominent across different approaches to bene�t from comparative discussion. In this way, explanatory strengths and weaknesses can be highlighted and a more encompassing understanding of the complexities involved arrived at. At the outset, we can �rst note how two deep-seated paradigms, termed here the “sociological” and the “culturalist”, have generally helped orientate approaches to, and their conceptualizations of, news access. Researchers working within the sociological paradigm have tended to forefront and investigate news access in terms of strategic and de�nitional power , examining patterns of news access, routines of news production and processes of source intervention, and how each conditions the production of public knowledge. Researchers working within a culturalist paradigm, on the other hand, are disposed to theorize news access in terms of cultural and ritual power, are sensitized to the symbolic role of news actors and how they perform/enact within the conventions


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and textual structures of news representation— ritual, story, narrative—and thereby contribute to and sustain wider cultural myths that resonate within popular culture.1 These broad paradigmatic differences, rooted in the academic divisions of the social sciences and the humanities—a division that continues to structure much of the work undertaken in our multi-disciplinary �eld of mass communication—provide powerful optics through which to view “news access”. While the sociological paradigm encourages us to look at the role of strategic power in the public representation of politics (broadly conceived), the culturalist paradigm invites us to see how cultural forms and symbols are implicated within the politics of representation (more textually conceived). The semantic shift, and change of theoretical vision, is important here with each producing different insights into the processes and forms of news access. The argument unravelled here is that approaches developed within the sociological paradigm remain essential for the analysis of the empirical play of strategic and de�nitional power but that these have under-theorized the diverse ways in which “culture” variously conditions and shapes patterns and forms of news entry. Although ideas of “culture”, as we shall hear, do �nd some reference in major sociological theories these tend to lack a sense of the culturally mediating nature of news approached not just as a cipher of social interests and political power but in terms of its very constitution as a cultural medium of communication. Culturalist and anthropological approaches to the structures and forms of news— story, narrative, ritual, performance— help here and open up further vistas on the cultural forms embodied within news representations. For their part, however, these tend to in�ate the explanatory power of textual forms and

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present a relatively static view of news representation and news access as embodied within, and contained by, the news structures of myth, narrative and story. Following a critical review of major sociological and culturalist approaches, the essay concludes by suggesting three levels of “cultural mediation” at work in the strategic and de�nitional struggles of news access and which therefore deserve theoretical recognition and further empirical exploration.

Access as Strategic and De�nitional Power

From Labelling to Legitimation Symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969, 1971) has bequeathed ideas of inordinate in�uence upon the �eld of mass communication, including seminal ideas for the study of news access. Early studies of how “outsiders” are labelled as deviant (Becker, 1963), how “others” are stigmatized (Goffman, 1963), how “moral entrepreneurs”, “control agents” and “folk devils” feature within moral panics (Cohen, 1972) have all proved extraordinarily in�uential. Countless studies—too many to reference here—have now observed how groups labelled as deviant within the news media can be dehumanized and even demonized, leading to both the depoliticization and delegitimation of their claims for wider social acceptance or political change (Cohen and Young, 1981). The identi�cation of media labelling does not in itself explain, however, the phenomenon. Here symbolic interactionism has bequeathed further ideas, the most important of which are Goffman’s (1974) idea of “frames”, Becker’s (1963) notion of a “social hierarchy of credibility”, and Blumer’s (1971) discussion of processes of “mobilization of action” in re-


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spect to the career of “social problems”. It is useful to consider each in turn. Goffman maintains that a frame “allows its users to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly in�nite number of concrete occurrences de�ned in its terms” (Goffman, 1974, p. 21). The concept of “frame”, as with the concept of “stereotype”, however, can all to easily run foul of a general con�ation of the inherent nature of perception with its apparent need to categorize, order and discriminate, on one hand, and the clearly more socially proximate and powered views of perception which makes use of evaluative and discriminatory judgements on the other hand. Problems of origin, agency and intention thus loom and, when uncritically adopted by media researchers, imported into the �eld of media studies. Todd Gitlin de�nes frames as follows: “Media frames, largely unspoken and unacknowledged, organise the world both for journalists who report it, and in some important degree for us who rely on their reports” (Gitlin, 1980, p. 7). When pitched in such general terms the concept lacks explanatory precision. Of course, Gitlin was well aware of this and in fact provides what remains an exceptional and historically grounded analysis of the multiple determinations of media frames in his study of the making and unmaking of the American New Left (Gitlin, 1980). Less empirically thorough theorists, however, have tended to grant the idea of “media frames” (or, more recently, “media discourses”) with self-suf�cient explanatory power. When used in such ways, the concept tends to conceal or con�ate multiple levels of determination.2 Are a frame’s origins sedimented within the wider culture or does it derive from a more active promotion by institutional sources and their claims-makers? Is it carried in general

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news values and routinized journalist practices or perhaps more actively in the conscious deliberations of journalists working to a sense of a professional ideology or speci�c organizational product? Does it express the conventions of standardized news structures and formats of delivery or is it, in fact, internally fractured and open to at least some contestation from within? When simply “read off” from news representations, then, the concept of “frame” leaves too many questions unasked and unanswered and the explanatory weight attached to cultural derivation and the political play of strategic interests, and the link between the two, becomes clouded. In this context, Howard Becker’s (1967) in�uential notion of a “hierarchy of credibility” with its direct reference to both social structure and cultural mores is perhaps more promising. In any system of ranked groups, participants take it as given that members of the highest group have the right to de�ne the way things really are. And since … matters of rank and status are contained in the mores, this belief has a moral quality… Thus, credibility and the right to be heard are differently distributed through the ranks of the system (Becker, 1967, p. 241).

As it stands, however, Becker’s formulation is underdeveloped. It offers a by far too static and ahistorical view of “social hierarchy” and cultural “mores”. That said, when aligned to Blumer’s views on processes of “collective de�nition” and the career of “social problems” a more processual and strategic view on news access is opened up (Blumer, 1971, p. 301). As “social problems” proceed through Blumer’s discerned stages of “emergence”, “legitimation”, “mobilization”, “formation” and “transformation”, so the strategic activities of key players become



crucial as do the news media—one of the “key arenas of public discussion” (Blumer, 1971, p. 303). In a statement remarkably redolent of more recent theoretical positions on news source interventions (see below), Blumer usefully draws attention to the dynamics and political contingencies in mobilizing social problems. How the problem comes to be de�ned, how it is bent in response to awakened sentiment, how it is depicted to protect vested interests, and how it re�ects the play of strategic position and power—all are appropriate questions that suggest the importance of the process of mobilization for action (Blumer, 1971, p. 304).

Symbolic interactionism, then, with its seminal ideas of “labelling”, “frames”, “hierarchy of credibility” and the “play of strategic position and power” in respect to “the mobilization for action” has contributed valuable analytical tools for the interrogation of news access. As indicated, however, these remain underdeveloped in respect to the exact role played by, explanatory weight attached to, and mediating mechanism linking cultural forms and their more strategic promotion by social interests. Similar tensions surface in Stanley Cohen’s celebrated Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). Through this detailed case study of a moral panic we learn how the news media contributed to sensationalizing, exaggerating, distorting and symbolizing the events and participants involved. But again, the exact mechanisms linking the news media to a discerned wider “societal control culture” remain empirically undisclosed as do the possible motivations informing the so-called “control agents” and those “moral entrepreneurs” manning, courtesy of the news media, the moral barricades. In

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the absence of a more thorough-going analysis of the “play of strategic position and power” in this particular moral panic “culture” begins to creak under the explanatory weight that it must carry—a criticism that can also be levelled at two of the most in�uential neoMarxist accounts of news access discussed next. The early work of the Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) (1976, 1980) and Stuart Hall and his colleagues (1975, 1978) are in many respects similar.3 Both build upon the ideas of symbolic interactionism, both are informed by neo-Marxist views of society structured in dominance, and both seek to move beyond interactionist ideas of “labelling” to those of ideological “legitimation”. Importantly, each also identi�es the role of a dominant “world view” or “dominant culture” and structured hierarchical access as the key mechanisms accounting for the privileging of dominant ideas by the news media. Thus, according to the GUMG: … television news is a cultural artefact; it is a sequence of socially manufactured messages, which carry many of the culturally dominant assumptions of our society. From the accents of the newscasters to the vocabulary of camera angles; from who gets on and what questions get asked, via selection of stories to presentation of bulletins, the news is a highly mediated product (GUMG, 1976, p. 1).

These “culturally dominant assumptions” are said to inform journalist views and, in turn, inform the systematic and preferential patterns of news access: “Access is structured and hierarchical to the extent that powerful groups and individuals have privileged and routine entry into the news itself and to the manner and means of its production” (GUMG, 1980, p. 114). A slightly less

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static account of the news media and their sources is provided by Stuart Hall, who has suggested: “broadcasters and their institutions mediate—hold the pass, command the communicative channels between the elites of power (social, economic, political, cultural) and the mass audience” (Hall, 1975, p. 124). Hall and his colleagues also provide a twin-pronged approach to news access and the reproduction of the voices of the powerful. These two aspects of news production — the practical pressures of constantly working against the clock and the professional demands of impartiality and objectivity—combine to produce a systematically structured over-accessin g to the media of those in powerful and privileged institutional positions (Hall et al., 1978, p. 58).

In these ways Hall et al. maintain the news media reproduce the voices of the powerful who become the “primary de�ners” of events. Although subject to some limited opportunities for challenge in the news media, the “primary de�ners” via routine access and news legitimation command the discursive �eld and set the terms of debate there. The voices of the powerful are translated into the “public idioms” of different newspapers which thereby serve to invest them with “popular force and resonance” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 61). For both the GUMG and for Hall questions of news “mediation” ultimately boil down to the reproduction of the “culturally dominant assumptions of society” (GUMG, 1976, p. 1) and how different news outlets become “in�ected with dominant and consensual connotations” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 62). In both cases, then, ideas of news mediation are effectively reduced to a view of ideological translation and transmission that leaves little room for consideration

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of the characteristic forms, differentiated appeals and discursive possibilities and dynamics inhering within and across news forms. Notwithstanding Hall’s contribution to a more discursive and contested understanding of hegemony and cultural processes, selfdubbed elsewhere as a “Marxism without guarantees” (Hall, 1982, 1983), when it comes to news and news access his account, like that of the GUMG, reads as relatively closed and reductionist. We need to know more about the interactions within and between news sources and news producers before we can simply position the news producers as “unwittingly, unconsciously” serving “as a support for the reproduction of a dominant ideological discursive �eld” (Hall, 1982, p. 88). From the vantage point of the late 1990s, we also need to examine the fast-changing ecology of news, its changing industrialized and technological basis and its response to the changing structurations of society—a society in which audiences are said to have increasingly fragmented around multiple subject positions and the changing cultural politics of identity, and one where organized “promotional” institutions and interests vie for media attention and even yesteryear”s “folk devils” have learnt to “�ght back” via the media (McRobbie, 1994). In any case, perhaps ideas of “dominant culture”, like those of its correlate “dominant ideology”, were always too generalizing, too nebulous to substitute for an analysis of the complex of forces at play (Abercrombie et al., 1980). For our purposes probably the most serious limitation of these studies is that neither examines the complexities and interactions informing the professional and organizational worlds of news production and news sources. This is so notwithstanding the GUMG’s partial (but aborted) production study, selfdescribed as a “reconnaissance into



alien territory” (GUMG, 1976, p. 58) and Hall’s theoretical acknowledgment of the role of bureaucratic routines and the professional ideology of objectivity in accessing primary de�ners (Hall et al., 1978, pp. 53–77). For a more grounded appreciation of the role of “strategic position and play of power” in respect of these, we have to look elsewhere.

Behind the Scenes: news production Studies in the sociology of news production, many based on considerable time in the �eld and drawing upon different news outlets, have revealed something of the normally concealed internal workings of the “black box” of news production and the routine professional practices and organizational and cultural norms informing its operation (Epstein, 1973; Altheide, 1976; Tuchman, 1978; Schlesinger, 1978; Golding and Elliott, 1979; Gans, 1979; Fishman, 1980; Ericson et al., 1987; Cottle, 1993a). Collectively such ethnographies have provided rich insights and analysis. In respect of news access, three strands of analysis come to the fore: (1) bureaucratic routine and division of labour, (2) professional ideology and con�ict management, and (3) news organization culture. These will be taken in turn. Contrary to early studies of news gate-keeping, with their tendency towards decontextualized, individualist and subjectivist explanations of news selection (White, 1950), researchers have now observed how news is, in fact, a bureaucratic accomplishment organizationally geared up to “routinizing the unexpected” and “taming the news environment” (Tuchman, 1973, 1978). Processes of news manufacture must ensure that suf�cient amounts of news, comprising

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a certain mix of news subjects, are produced and packaged on time and to a pre-determined and professionally understood organizational form (Rock, 1981). This bureaucratic goal informs the characteristic “event orientation” of news (Halloran et al., 1970), which tends to displace from view wider issues of social structure and longerterm processes of change (Schlesinger, 1978). Practically, it also necessitates a newsroom division of labour and routinization of professional practices in relation to “the news net” of other news media and sources (Tuchman, 1978), the organization of journalists into “news beats” and the setting up of news bureaus (Rock, 1973; Tuchman, 1973; Fishman, 1980), as well as the development of a “vocabulary of precedents” that help journalists to “recognize”, “produce”, “source”, and “justify” their “news stories” (Ericson et al., 1987, p. 348 ). These practical responses to news work also lead to the systematic accessing of powerful, resource-rich institutions and their de�nitions of events—and to the marginalization of resource-poor social groups and interests (Goldenberg, 1975; Gitlin, 1980). Society’s major institutions—government, the courts, the police and so on—are thereby positioned to pronounce on social affairs and command both the physical resources and the authoritativeness to de�ne and ponti�cate on newsworthy events. They also have the organizational capacity to manage the �ow of news material professionally or even produce their own “pseudo-events” (Boorstein, 1964; Sigal, 1973), encouraging favourable coverage through the provision of bureaucratically useful (and commercially bene�cial) “information subsidies” (Gandy, 1982). In the terms of Harvey Molotch and Marilyn Lester (1981), such “event promoters” enjoy “habitual access” to the news media, in


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contrast to those who must resort to “disruptive access”. The latter can only “ ‘make news’, by somehow crashing through the ongoing arrangements of newsmaking, generating surprise, shock, or some more violent form of ‘trouble’ ” (p. 128). Clearly, the organization of news is not geared up to the needs of the socially powerless. Specialist news reporters and correspondents enter daily the professional worlds of key institutional sources and negotiate a long-term exchange relationship based upon trust and mutual bene�t (Tunstall, 1971), a relationship that all too often is thought to result in news compromise and newsroom dependency (Chibnall, 1977). Subtle socialization processes generating intra-group norms established in interaction with “competitor-colleagues” (Tunstall, 1971; Dunwoody, 1978; Fishman, 1981; Pedelty, 1995) as well as incremental inter-source socialization where the journalist steadily becomes immersed into the professional worldview of his/her principal source— whether, for example, the police (Chibnall, 1977) or the military (Morrison and Tumber, 1988; Morrison, 1994; Pedelty, 1995)—combine to narrow differences of news perspective from those of their sources and results in standardized news. Moreover, in an increasingly competitive (Ehrlich, 1995) and commercially driven news environment (Altschull, 1998), the “market model of news discovery” is likely to prevail over the increasingly mythical “journalist model of discovery” or in-depth and independent investigative journalism (McManus, 1997, p. 287), adding a political economic boost to the organizational dependence upon of�cial sources. In short, according to Michael Schudson, “it matters not whether the study is at the national, state or local level—the story of journalism, on a day-to-day basis, is the story of the interaction of

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reporters and of�cials” (Schudson, 1991, p. 148). As if this was not enough to ensure routine of�cial access, our second ethnographic theme also identi�es the ideology of objectivity as contributing to the profession’s subservience to elite views. As John Soloski argues, “objectivity is the most important professional norm, and from it �ows more speci�c aspects of news professionalism such as news judgment, the selection of sources and the structure of news beats” (Soloski, 1989, p. 213). Journalists socialized into the professional pursuit of (philosophically elusive) “objectivity” settle pragmatically for balance, fairness and impartiality. To achieve this end and, importantly, to be seen to be so doing by their sources, audience/readers and colleagues, journalists engage in the “strategic ritual” (Tuchman, 1972) of seeking out authoritative voices who they deem to be knowledgeable and socially accredited to pronounce on newsworthy events. This basic position, as we have heard, has become something of orthodoxy within critical media studies. The case is not entirely watertight, however, which brings us to our third ethnographic theme of “news organization culture”. A minority of production studies, particularly those researching the production of oppositional and/or populist forms of news output, point to a less organizationally or professionally closed state of affairs. Nina Eliasoph (1988), for example, in a case study of a non-mainstream, “oppositional” news outlet observes how news routines per se do not determine coverage or the �eld of news sources gaining access, and points rather to the informing political ethos of the organization and its managers. Here different sources are actively selected to represent the news interests of this particular outlet and its local community, resulting in a different



cast of accessed “of�cials” and other voices. Furthermore, given the unpredictable nature of “big scoops” and a commitment to advocacy journalism, the dependency on and the conservative in�uence of “news beats” is found to be less important than often suggested. Eliasoph also notes how orthodox �ndings on of�cial sources have underplayed the internal differences found within and between government sources, as well as other of�cial sources—a �nding granted detailed empirical support by the studies discussed below. Today’s news ecology, as already suggested, is both differentiated and fast-changing (MacGregor, 1997; Cottle, 1999, 2000b). In this context, closer attention to the different cultural forms of news, their associated professional practices and how these in�uence patterns and processes of news access also proves instructive—both for our understanding of the particular outlets concerned and the theorization of news access more generally (Cottle, 1993a, 2000c). A production study of a British regional TV programme, for example, observes how this popular news form was professionally reproduced on a daily basis and to certain editorial requirements. These included a certain mix of news subjects and features often inscribed with populist appeals and delivered through a subjectivist news epistemology. In turn, these contributed to increased accessing of ordinary voices and their experiential and subjectivist accounts—a news epistemology, in other words, often overlooked in studies of more prestigious national news forms and their “objectivist” stance of news presentation (cf. Taylor and Condit, 1988). UK local television news representations, whether concerned with “race”, the environment or the inner city, for example, have all been found to differ from national news in terms of their associ-

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ated casts of news actors and formats of news presentation (Cottle, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1994). Ethnographic study of the professional practices involved in the production of different forms of news portrayal can therefore help to illuminate how, and why, particular casts of news actors �nd their way onto different news stages and are “packaged” in different presentational formats (Cottle, 1995, 2000b). The con�ict generated by “professional norms” and “entertainment norms” (Bantz, 1985), and promoted by so-called “news informers” and “news entertainers” within the same news organization (Cottle, 1993a, pp. 63–4), have also been observed in ethnographic studies. These tensions are not far beneath the surface in most newsrooms given that “information” has always to be professionally packaged into a communicable (“entertaining”) form, and this can inform journalist choices about who the “appropriate” voices are, what questions they are asked, how an event or issue is “framed” and what prominence news actors are granted (Fishman, 1980, p. 131; Cottle, 1993a). Again, a more complex, and culturally in�ected, picture thus begins to emerge. In summary, then, in so far as news organizations and their journalists produce distinctive cultural forms—albeit aligned by market positioning and conventionalized appeals—so issues of access cannot be reduced wholesale to bureaucratic routine and/or a presumed subscription to a generalized professional ideology of “objectivity”— other cultural factors are also (literally) at work.

Behind the Producers: news sources If studies of news organization and professional practice point to the bureaucratic, professional and, to some


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extent, cultural dimensions involved in the accessing of voices on to the news stage, so others have sought to investigate the interventions of sources into the news theatre from the source point of view. Herbert Gans (1979), based on the commentary of news producers, concludes that the success of source interventions in their “tug of war” with the news media, will depend on (1) their incentives, (2) power, (3) ability to supply suitable information, and (4) geographic and social proximity to the journalists ( p. 117). Although each, in fact, could be interpreted as at least in some respects conditional upon their af�nity with media “requirements” as much as their strategic utility in winning media access, Gans is in no doubt that it is of�cial sources who have the upper hand—a conclusion also reached by others. Philip Schlesinger (1990), in an in�uential statement argues for a more “externalist”, less media-centred, approach to sources and their “strategic activities” organized within “competitive �elds”. Although recognizing the material and symbolic advantages enjoyed by the state and powerful institutions, he also acknowledges the importance of non-of�cial source activities: … it is necessary that sources be conceived as occupying �elds in which competition for access to the media takes place, but in which material and symbolic advantages are unequally distributed. But the most advantaged do not secure a primary de�nition in virtue of their position alone. Rather, if they do so, it is because of successful strategic action in an imperfectly competitive �eld (Schlesinger, 1990, p. 77).

When conceived of in this way, static views of de�nitional advantage secured by social dominance alone are found

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theoretically and empirically wanting. More precisely, Schlesinger takes the “primary de�ner” thesis to task for not taking account of: (1) the contention between of�cial sources; (2) the behind the scenes maneuverings of sources, rendered methodologically invisible by culturalist readings of texts; (3) the competitive and shifting nature of key sources within privileged elites; (4) the longer-term shifts in the structure of access; and (5) for assuming a uni-directional �ow of de�nitions from power centers to media (pp. 66–7). These more complex views on source power and strategic activity have now also informed a number of empirical studies of different “competitive �elds” and the strategies and differential resources (whether symbolic, organizational or �nancial) at play. Recent research includes studies of environmental pressure groups (Anderson, 1993), health professionals working in the �eld of HIV/AIDS (Miller and Williams, 1993), competing pressure groups and professional interests in the criminal justice �eld (Ericson et al., 1989; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994), nonof�cial sources working in the voluntary sector (Deacon, 1996), political party and pressure group contestation of a controversial government policy (Deacon & Golding, 1994), and the complex (and historically changing) interactions of state and other sources in the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland (Miller, 1993, 1994). If these predominantly British studies implicitly question earlier positions for assuming guaranteed elite access without attending to relevant contexts and strategic activities, predominantly US-based studies have highlighted the changing nature of elite political consensus and how this, too, shapes processes and patterns of news access. Lance Bennett (1990) explicitly formulates the “index” model of news access as follows:



Mass media news professionals, from the boardroom to the beat, tend to “index” the range of voices and viewpoints in both news and editorials according to the range of views expressed in mainstream government debate about a given topic (Bennett, 1990, p. 106).

The model maintains, in other words, that in times of elite political consensus, the news media will tend to support government policy and access voices that give vent to this support; in times of elite dissensus, however, the news media will also take their cue from this and be prepared to access a wider range of voices than normal and may even be emboldened to adopt a more engaged and challenging stance. In-depth, longitudinal studies of media reporting of wars in Vietnam (Hallin, 1986), El Salvador (Bennett, 1990; Hallin, 1994; Pedelty, 1995), the Gulf War (Bennett, 1994; Bennett and Paletz, 1994; Wolfsfeld, 1997) and the changing state “aperture of consensus” informing media reporting of Northern Ireland (Butler, 1995) all lend empirical support to this thesis. In sympathy with this model, Deacon and Golding (1994) also draw attention to the distinction within elite sources between professional experts or “arbiters” and “advocates”. The former are accessed by the news media to help “legislate”, that is, make informed evaluations of statements and opinions advanced by “advocates” on a particular debate or issues and can prove extremely in�uential (pp. 15–17). Stephen Reese (1994), for his part, also observes close-up the role of experts, commentators and others when accessed in US television news and how “By their selection of sources, television news gatekeepers implicitly de�ne the limits of discourse on an issue” (p. 88). A few years ago Oscar Gandy (1982) suggested that researchers need “to go

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beyond agenda-setting to determine who sets the media agenda, how and for what purpose it is set, and with what impact on the distribution of power and values in society” (p. 7). In their different ways, then, all the studies referenced above have now helped shift attention away from media-centered views of “agenda-setting” to the complex of vying interests and temporal processes involved in “agenda-building”. An important recent study by Jenny Kitzinger and Jacqui Reilly (1997) further illuminates the complexities of agenda-building when dissecting the involvement of news production processes, source activities and cultural resonances involved in the news representation of different stories about risks. The authors explicitly underline how “a time dimension allows one to explore the build up of ‘news fatigue’, and demonstrates how source strategies that work at one point in time may cease to be effective under different historical conditions” (p. 345). In summary, complexity and contingency are found where once social dominance alone was assumed suf�cient to guarantee successful news entry. To be clear, none of the authors above would theoretically seek to discount the unequal weighting of resources, social credibility or legitimacy distributed across source �elds, nor their continuing in�uence on processes of news access; none the less, together, they point to the multiple factors and political contingencies that unfold through time and that cannot, therefore, be easily predicted in advance nor better understood without recourse to empirical examination.

Access as Cultural Ritual and Performance The sociological paradigm, as we have seen, pursues questions of access in


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terms of de�nitional power and the strategic activities of news producers and news sources. This is not to say, however, that the “cultural” �nds no reference at all in such sociological horizons. As discussed, the cultural “mores” of status hierarchy have clearly informed Becker’s in�uential notion of a “hierarchy of credibility” while ideas of “societal control culture”, “dominant culture” and the shifting nature of “consensus” play a prominent part in interactionist, neo-Marxist and more recent political analyses of mediated con�icts. Professional journalist and organizational culture have also featured within some ethnographies of news production. However, these various cultural features are, for the most part, approached in terms of their determination by or impact on the wider play of social power. What they tend to lack is a sense of the culturally mediating nature of news approached not just as a cipher of social interests and political power, but in terms of its very constitution as a cultural medium of communication. Drawing upon the more textually sensitive approach of cultural studies to the structures and forms of story and narrative, as well as anthropological insights into the nature of symbols, ritual and performance, some researchers have pursued the cultural nature of news further, and in so doing have opened up further insights into the nature of news access. This shift of perspective is encapsulated in Michael Schudson’s (1991) review of approaches to news organization when he states, “Where the organizational view �nds interactional determinants of news in the relations between people, the cultural view �nds symbolic determinants of news in the relations between “facts” and symbols” (p. 151). Barbie Zelizer (1993) has also signalled the change of vision: “Rather than conceptualize power only as the in�uence of one group over an-

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other, humanistic inquiry supports a view of power as also having a ritual or communal dimension” (p. 81), a view that explicitly recognizes the heuristic insights of pursuing journalism as “performance”, “narrative”, “ritual” and “interpretative community”. As all journalists know, the “news story” is at the core of their professional activity; and basic forms of story telling help de�ne the news genre. Ronald Jacobs (1996), for example, has argued, “ ‘Narrativity’ is the central factor structuring newswork” (p. 373). Story-telling has long provided the means by which society can tell and re-tell its basic myths to itself, and in so doing reaf�rm itself as collectivity or “imagined community” (Smith, 1979; Barkin and Gurevitch, 1984; Bird and Dardenne, 1988; Anderson, 1991). Approached thus, news becomes a symbolic system in which the informational content of particular “stories” becomes less important than the rehearsal of mythic “truths” embodied within the story form itself: “News stories, like myths, do not ‘tell it like it is’, but rather, ‘tell it like it means’ ” (Bird and Dardenne, 1988, p. 337). The relevance of this for concerns of news access is clear, and shifts the focus of vision and determination away from news sources to the structures of the story form itself. Hence, according to Dan Berkowitz (1992), “… news workers develop a mental catalogue of news story themes, including how the ‘plot’ will actually unravel and who the key actors are likely to be” (p. 83). Elizabeth Bird and Robert Dardenne also point to the implications of news “story” for concerns of access, and the mythical role performed by news more generally. In news making, journalists do not merely use culturally determined de�nitions, they also have to �t new situations into old de�nitions. It is in their power to place people and events into



the existing categories of hero, villain, good and bad, and thus to invest their stories with the authority of mythological truth (Bird and Dardenne 1988, p. 345; see also Lull, 1997).

Studies of popular journalism (Campbell and Reeves, 1989; Bird, 1990; Dahlgren and Sparks, 1992; Fiske, 1992; Lutz and Collins, 1993; Cottle, 1993a; Langer, 1997) also often observe the ways in which news stories appears to structure and position different social actors and direct their news entry—a �nding complemented by recent linguistic studies of the structuring properties of “news schemata” (Van Dijk, 1988), the embedding and layering of source accounts by journalists (Bell, 1991), and opportunities for interviewee turn-taking and agenda-shifting within the conventions of television news interviews (Greatbatch, 1986; Heritage and Greatbatch, 1993). Critical linguistics and discourse analyses also point to the sometimes subtle, but important, ideological consequences that �ow from structures of news language such as passives and actives, nominalization and exnominalization and modality, all of which construct forms of news “access” and condition news entry (Trew, 1979; Fowler, 1991; Fairclough, 1995). John Langer (1997), in his study of tabloid television, argues that: “What journalists like to refer to as news sense has as much to do with the priorities of ‘form’ as it does with institutionalized sanctioned content” (p. 133), and details how a limited repertoire of news narratives position “celebrities”, “ordinary people” and “victims” symbolically to enact or perform standardized roles within the mythic structures of tabloid news stories. These symbolic roles are not con�ned to popular and populist forms of journalism however. Focusing upon “serious” news media and the broadcasting of historical

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events Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz propose that: … the corpus of events can be subdivided into Contests, Conquests and Coronations. These are story forms, or “scripts” which constitute the main narrative possibilities within the genre. They determine the distribution of roles within each type of event and the ways in which they will be enacted (Dayan and Katz, 1992, p. 25).

Collectively, then, these authors recognize the structuring power of narrative and story-telling and how these position news actors symbolically to serve wider cultural myths. They risk, however, reifying news structures and cultural myths as seemingly immutable and determining forms outside of the historical and social play of power. Story and narrative can also serve the more dynamic (and socially contingent) purposes and performances of mediated ritual. Here collective myths may well be invoked but within a staged processes that, following a form of crisis, helps to re-establish a sense of social solidarity and order. Today, most analysts of news ritual have sought to highlight the temporal processes involved and the tensions held in place by mediated “rituals” and do not, in consequence, simply see “ritual” in Durkheimian terms as the means by which social order and consensus re-establishes itself—society is often too contested, too con�icted for that (Elliott, 1980; Chaney, 1986; Wagner-Paci�ci, 1986; Bird and Dardenne, 1988; Ettema, 1990; Langer, 1997; Hunt, 1999). Here, then, a more processual view of “ritual” is opened up, one in which the script is not thought to be exclusively owned by any one party whether news producers or particular sources, and where “ritual” is mobilized and contested in an unfolding “social


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drama” (Turner, 1969). Phillip Elliott”s (1980) case study of the “press rites” of British newspapers, and how they portrayed the actions and consequences of the Irish Republican Army, helps to demonstrate the interactional quality of press performance with other powerful institutions and how ritual, in this case, could serve purposes of “af�rmation of ‘we-ness’ ”, and “cauterization of ‘social wounds’ ”. James Ettema (1990) also demonstrates the relevance of a ritual approach, as well as the tensions held within place by “press rites”, in a case study of race relations. Like Elliott, he deploys Turner’s four phases of a social drama—breach, crisis, redress, reintegration/separation—and observes how press ritual is both constituted by and contains social performances. In each phase, the press not only portrayed but participated in the struggle either to �nd rhetorical strategies and ritual forms that could meet the political need at hand or to counter the rhetoric or ritual of the moment. Thus, both the political judgment of “star groupers” and the news judgment of journalists were shaped by a “processual structure”, in Turner’s terms, that offered participants a rhetoric, a mode of emplotment, and a meaning for events as they unfolded (Ettema, 1990, p. 461).

Importantly, questions of news access here begin to escape the structural determinations of the text, sometimes approached as a prewritten script positioning news actors to play predetermined roles, and a more complex (and socially contingent) world of engaged performance is theorized through the dynamics of an unfolding social drama. True, social performances are enacted within the temporal movement of a ritualized process, but they none the less can actively mobilize and contest the script in ways

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that are not always textually pre�gured or entirely determined in advance—a �nding, in other words, that complements the theoretical position of recent sociological studies of news sources and the contingencies involved in the play of strategic power. Few studies to date, however, have pursued the sociological play of power and its cultural enactment within ritualized “media events” into the world of news decision making and news production (for an exceptional, but partial, attempt to do so, see Hunt, 1999). Other approaches to the “cultural” and its impact upon news access have moved beyond the immediate play of power and its ritualized enactment to the stuff of culture itself—the so-called “cultural givens” of society that are thought to provide the very “cultural air we breathe” (Hoggart 1976, p. x). This more “culturological” approach to news (Schudson, 1991) moves the furthest towards a historically transcendent (less socially powered) understanding of culture and the part played by this in human communication. Taking “news values”, for example, Schudson maintains that it is “too simple, though common now, to label this as ‘ideology’ or the ‘common sense’ of a hegemonic system” and suggests, “Many beliefs that ruling groups may use for their own ends are rooted much more deeply in human consciousness and are to be found much more widely in human societies, than capitalism or socialism or industrialism” (Schudson, 1991, p. 153). The forms of story-telling too, as we have already heard, may also be deeply ingrained within human consciousness and, through personalization, for example, help reader/audience “identi�cation”. Here sociologists are apt to feel professional vertigo when invited to gaze on “culture” from such transcendent heights, preferring the social terra-�rma of more historically proximate conditions and contexts



and how, in this instance, news story forms and formats, for example, have developed historically (Schudson, 1982; Winston, 1993). Perhaps there is more to be said and known about these so-called “cultural givens”, the “cultural air we breathe”, before moving outside of time and place. After all, courtesy of so-called “serious” news outlets, some cultural air is more rare�ed than others, and some, courtesy of tabloid news outlets, perhaps more suffocating (not to say “moral panic”-inducing). In other words, the cultural air that some of us rely upon is differentially oxygenated within the ecology of news—an ecology where, inter alia, the extent of personalization as well as differences of story form and news epistemology, presentational modes of address and political alignments all continue to help differentiate news output and news forms and, importantly, impact on the possibilities and patterns of news access. News forms are culturally differentiated and culturally conditioned by the forces of competition and the logics of the marketplace. David Altheide, for his part, is less convinced of the differentiated nature of the news ecology now on offer (Altheide, 1995; Altheide and Snow, 1979, 1991). Rather, a generalizing “media logic” is discerned within news formats, and this in�ltrates and changes diverse arenas of our “postmodern” age. This relevance of format in modern newswork for all news is considerable, as well as the perspective and activities of new sources that have learned the formats as a key to news access. It is the rise of format driven planning and orchestration that has helped produce our postjournalism era” (Altheide, 1995, p. 182).

In the “postjournalism era”, then, politicians and others are thought to

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have succumbed to the logic and formats of the media. These effectively deliver to the entertainment and commercially driven media what they require—the death knell of independent and investigative journalism thus rings. No wonder, perhaps, that Altheide concludes “we are in a situation beyond access” and argues, for example, that “the usual postmortem on the government and other sources in the Gulf war as cunning manipulators and propagandists misses the point—the Gulf war was perfect television” (Altheide, 1995, p. 180). In so far, however, as news ecology continues to demonstrate at least some important differences of format and political outlook, and in so far as vying social interests feel the need to enter the news domain and discursively engage the de�nitions, accounts and prescriptions of others and win some opportunity to do so, so the doomsday scenario of a “postjournalism era” may be premature. This is not to suggest that commercialism and entertainment goals do not increasingly shape “infotainment” news or “newszak” (Franklin, 1997), nor that this is injurious to democratic ideals. None the less, the sociological recovery of the complexities of news production and source dynamics reviewed earlier, as well as the discursive possibilities inhering within different news mediums and forms of news presentation (Schlesinger et al., 1983; Altheide, 1987; Bruck, 1989; Beharrell, 1993; Cottle, 1993a, 2000c), all indicate that the battle for news access has not, for the time being at least, been historically superseded. Sources continue to seek strategic and discursive advantage within and through the “media logic” of the news industries, albeit with increased media savvy and an awareness of the media’s growing appetite for “information (and video) subsidies” that capitalize upon drama, spectacle

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and human interest. Struggles for news access and enhanced forms and opportunities of “representation” are destined to continue, and our efforts to better understand these must do likewise.


Conclusion: towards “strategic action” and “cultural mediation” On the basis of this review, sociological and culturalist approaches have both won considerable insights into the nature and processes of news access. These now need to be brought closer together in future research. The sociological preoccupation with the mobilization of strategic and de�nitional power, the empirical investigation of the interactions between news producers and sources, and the political contests and contingencies informing processes of news entry, are all vital components for any attempt to understand how social issues and interests �nd news representation. The sociological paradigm has equipped researchers less well, however, in terms of its capacity to theorize news as cultural medium and the different ways in which news forms resonate with popular culture, deploys wider myths and impact on news access. Today the world of news production, news delivery systems and news representations is fast changing. News corporations seek strategic and market advantage and one way that they do this is to address their audiences/readers in distinctive cultural terms. Studies of strategic and de�nitional power, perhaps more than ever, therefore, need to attend to the culturally mediating forms of news in which such discursive struggles are conditioned, symbolized and played out. To conclude, then, I would like to suggest three ways in which questions of “cultural mediation” can usefully in-

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form sociological theorization and research concerned with news and the important question of news access. Three theoretical levels of “cultural mediation” can be identi�ed as having particular bearing on questions of news access, and each promises explanatory gains if pursued in future empirical research. Pitched at the widest theoretical level, questions of news access, as indicated at the outset, go to the heart of current debates about the media approached as “public sphere” and its contribution to processes of public dialogue and societal communion (Elliott, 1986; Garnham, 1986; Curran, 1991; Fraser, 1992; Livingstone and Lunt, 1993; Hallin, 1994; Corner, 1995; Dahlgren, 1995; Thompson, 1995; Husband, 2000; Cottle, 2000c). Contending notions of the “public sphere”, of course, demand careful deliberation, but most theorists now recognize that the media “public sphere” is not only constituted in terms of civic information and political debate (“public knowledge”), but also in and through the cultural forms of entertainment (“popular culture”) (Corner, 1991). In this respect the media remain best described as “cultural industries” (Golding and Murdock, 1996), and here we need to “explain how the economic dynamics of production structure public discourse by promoting certain cultural forms over others” (ibid., p. 25). Historically we can also usefully inquire into the media’s contribution to the “transformation of visibility” (Thompson, 1995) where the visibility of the many by the few has seemingly, courtesy of the mass media (and contra Foucault), given way to the few becoming subject to the gaze of the many. We may also wish to attend to the media’s involvement in processes of “democratic deepening” through the historical development of “democratizing” media forms of social



communication (Scannell, 1992). Clearly, questions of news access, as those of media access more generally, are bound up in wider historical, economic and political forces of change and how these are “mediated” by the cultural industries. In more institutionally proximate terms, the review has also observed how some sociological approaches to strategic source action and culturalist approaches to mediated rituals promise a further productive area for research collaboration, and points to a further (intermediate) level of “cultural mediation”. These approaches, as discussed, adopt a processual view to news access and engage in detailed empirical work on the strategic or textual interventions of news participants, and both decline forms of theoretical determinism—whether of the social or textual variety. Moreover, both also acknowledge the undoubted weighting of the news media towards centres of institutional authority and social dominance but also seek to examine the dynamics, fractures and points of opposition that can be mobilized through time. “Power” here, then, is neither the exclusive property of any particular player or discursive position, nor is it exclusively located within any particular domain or medium. Given the complexities and contingencies already alluded to, this is a reasonable and productive research stance to adopt. Studies have yet, however, to explore in detail how the strategic interventions of competing media sources and their ritual emplotment/participation through time are conditioned by the actions of news producers and news production processes. Studies of high pro�le “media events” do not exhaust, however, the productive research synergies to be gained from combining sociological and culturalist approaches to processes of news production and cultural mediation.

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News is also composed of more lowlevel or mundane ritual forms routinely built into the characteristic subject selections, presentational formats, modes of address and cultural appeals that help establish news as a recognizable “genre”—a “genre”, moreover, which permits wide variations and is internally differentiated into distinctive “subgenres” or cultural forms. These cultural forms literally “culturally mediate” the wider play of strategic power and surrounding discourses (Cottle, 1993a) and are produced by news producers who purposefully (professionally) reproduce their news forms in conformity to the requirements of their particular news form. Professionally journalists �nd it useful to de�ne their “news” in relation to other news products and do not therefore ordinarily have need of recourse to objectivist claims about news “out there” (Cottle, 1993a, p. 54). As with Bourdieu’s discussion of the literary �eld (Bourdieu, 1995), news can also be “subjectively de�ned by the system of distinctive properties by which it can be situated relative to other positions” (p. 30). Empirically research has barely begun to pursue this third level of “cultural mediation”, however. How news producers daily enact and reproduce their distinctive cultural forms of news in interaction with other news providers and news sources and how, in turn, these condition the discursive and symbolic entry of “news actors” remains largely unexplored. Given the fast-changing nature of the news landscape, aided and abetted by globalizing processes of technological development, convergence and increased competition, the time is ripe for a renewed interest in the processes and practices of news manufacture and cultural mediation (Cottle, 2000b). How the play of strategic and de�nitional power meets up with the professionally crafted and changing forms of journalism is a question that demands sus-

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tained empirical inquiry. To this end, researchers now have powerful sociological and culturalist optics at hand. If brought closer together, these can help

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improve clarity of vision on this most central of representational concerns: news access.

Notes


1

2

3

Others have, of course, remarked upon this general distinction in the �eld. My usage is particularly indebted to John Corner’s identi�cation of two “problematics” in audience research, those of “public knowledge” and “popular culture” (Corner, 1991); James Carey’s formulation of a cultural “ritual” approach in contrast to “transmission” models of communication, (Carey, 1975); Philip Schlesinger’s development of Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of “strategic action” in engaged criticism of Stuart Hall’s “primary de�ner” thesis and ideas of “de�nitional advantage” (Schlesinger, 1990); and Barbie Zelizer’s discussion of “sociological” and “humanistic” inquiry into journalism (Zelizer, 1993). Empirically, the necessity to grapple with both sociological and culturalist research orientations was also brought home to me when carrying out an ethnographic study of the production of a culturally popular news form and its representations of the inner city (Cottle, 1993a). Studies of claims-makers and claims-making reliant upon analyses of news texts frequently deploy the idea of news “frame” without attending to the possible levels of multiple determination involved—a problem which can limit the usefulness of the conclusions reached about the exact role of claims-makers within the production and circulation of these “frames”. The journal Social Problems regularly carries articles in which this problem surfaces; see, for example, Stallings (1990), Mulcahy, (1995) and Conrad, (1997). For more on “frames” see Entman (1993). This discussion focuses upon the early work of both Stuart Hall and the GUMG, since it is here that the most explicit and sustained attempts to theorize issues of news access and news source involvement are found. These studies to this day are highly in�uential and, in the absence of retrospective critique remain, so to speak, on (in) the books. Indeed, selections from the early work of the GUMG have recently been republished (Eldridge, 1995; Philo, 1995).

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