Deciding What's News

by Gans, Herbert J.

• ISBN13: 9780810122376
• ISBN10: 0810122375
• Edition: 25th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-30
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism, Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments. Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little. Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's "Visions of the American Press" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.

Author Biography

Herbert Gans is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books including The Urban Villagers (Free Press 1962), Popular Culture and High Culture (Basic Books 1999), The Levittowners (Columbia University Press 1982), and Democracy and the News (Oxford University Press 2003).

Table of Contents

List of Tables	ix
Preface to the New Edition	xi
Preface	xxi
Acknowledgments	xxvii
Part 1---The News
Introduction	3	(5)
Nation and Society in the News	8	(31)
Values in the News	39	(39)
Part 2---The Journalists
Introduction	73	(5)
The Organization of Story Selection	78	(38)
Sources and Journalists	116	(30)
Story Suitability	146	(36)
Objectivity, Values, and Ideology	182	(32)
Profits and Audiences	214	(35)
Pressures, Censorship, and Self-censorship	249	(30)
Conclusions: The News and the Journalists	279	(25)
Part 3---News Policy
Introduction	303	(1)
Multiperspectival News	304	(33)
Notes	337	(28)
Bibliography	365	(12)
Index	377