Key Concepts in Journalism Studies

Bob Franklin, Martin Hamer, Mark Hanna, Marie Kinsey, John E Richardson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781446230756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

?The five authors have drawn on their enormous range of experience in newspaper and broadcast journalism, at national and regional level, as well as their teaching expertise for this book, which will be essential reading for students in journalism, and as invaluable reference tool for their professional careers?

- www.HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk

?At long last, the undergraduate journalism A-Z. This is an excellent and much needed resource which should be on the list of every undergraduate journalism and media student? -Tim Rodgers, Kingston College

The SAGE Key Concepts series provide students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding.

Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension.

Key Concepts in Journalism offers:

- a systematic and accessible introduction to the terms, processes and effects of journalism

- a combination of practical considerations with theoretical issues

- further reading suggestions

The authors bring an enormous range of experience in newspaper and broadcast journalism, at national and regional level, as well as their teaching expertise.

This book will be essential reading for students in journalism, and an invaluable reference tool for their professional careers.

PART I

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Concepts

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Absence

For a significant period in the development of journalism and communication studies, analysts proceeded with the assumption that the only important aspects of journalism to study are the ‘who says what to whom and with what effect’ of Lasswell’s (1949) formula. In fact, textual meaning is communicated as much by absence as by presence; as much by what is ‘missing’ or excluded, as by what is remembered and present. Though it’s perhaps slightly ironic to start this glossary with such an entry, it is important (although rather difficult) to consider what/where/who is not included, as well as what/where/who is included, in reporting.

Absence can occur in two inter-related ways: first, absence of content, by which an individual, group, idea, etc. is totally excluded from a report, leaving no reference or discernible trace. Van Leeuwen (1996) refers to this as suppression and its importance to the study of journalism is clear: under current reporting practices, access to the news is a power resource in itself and the frequency of inclusion provides us with an index of social power.

Second, absence of form or expression, wherein an individual (or group, or idea, etc.) is not explicitly named or referred to, but their presence may nevertheless still be inferred. This absence in expression can occur through presupposition, through euphemism, or by a syntactic transformation (see transitivity) such as active agent deletion. The work of critical linguists (Fowler et al., 1979; Kress, 1994) argues that while certain syntactic structures play an important role in the ideological (re)construction of social reality, they are ignored by content analysis since their importance lies in textual absence.

JER

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Accessibility

Businesses and organizations in many countries are legally obliged to ensure that their services can be accessed by everybody, including disabled people. The Royal National Institute of the Blind says: ‘Producing information in such a way that all your customers can read, makes good business sense, is the law and is fair’ (Royal National Institute of the Blind, 2004, bold emphasis in original).

Providing accessible content has become increasingly important on the Internet, too. The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, insists: ‘The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect’ (World Wide Web Consortium, 2004). He says this is ‘irrespective of hardware or software platform, network infrastructure, language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental impairment’ (Schofield, 2003).

Certain design and content features can help to make websites globally available to anyone regardless of ability or disability. To be more accessible, for example, website designs can accommodate the use of tools such as screen readers, which read text to blind users, and be navigable with only a keyboard, allowing people with restricted movement to navigate via hypertext links using the tab key rather than a mouse. The degree of accessibility, which is closely related to website usability, depends on many factors including, for example, whether descriptive and meaningful alternative (alt) text tags are used for graphical elements like images and navigation buttons (Royal National Institute of the Blind, www.rnib.org.uk). The alt text appears when the cursor moves across an image, etc, allowing it to be read out by the screen reader.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which Berners-Lee is a director, has laid down universal standards in its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which has published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (World Wide Web Consortium, 2004). The WAI, working with organizations around the world, pursues web accessibility through five main areas of work: technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development. The EuroAccessibility Consortium is one such organization (EuroAccessibility Consortium, 2004).

Further reading

Schofield J. (2003), Decorators With Keyboards’, Guardian Unlimited, available at www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,999218,00.html

MGH

Accountability

In a democracy, media organizations and the journalists who work in them are accountable to their audience and to wider society in various ways.

They are accountable to the law courts, for example, if they libel someone or commit contempt of court.

In Britain, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) has responsibility for the statutory regulation of the broadcast sector. Its scope includes programme quality and ethics.

Journalists in the BBC, a public service broadcaster, are accountable to the BBC Board of Governors. The BBC itself is accountable, in some respects, to Ofcom and ultimately, despite structural safeguards to protect its day-to-day independence, to the British Government under the terms of the BBC Agreement.

The British Press (the newspaper and magazine section) is not accountable to any statutory regulator (except in the field of competition, i.e. proposed takeovers or mergers of newspaper companies). In ethical matters, the press is governed by self-regulation, administered by the Press Complaints Commission, which holds editors accountable by means of its ability to ensure critical adjudications are published.

Media organizations stress that they are also held accountable by their audiences (and advertisers). Readers, viewers or listeners can be lost if there is adverse public reaction to particular conduct or content. Various factors usually stop consumer action being effective (Gibbons, 1998: 46–54). However, in 1989 the Sun lost thousands of Merseyside readers outraged because of inaccurate coverage of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster (Chippindale and Horrie, 1992: 276–93).

In recent years some British newspapers have each appointed a senior executive to be the ‘readers’ editors’ or ‘an ombudsman’, to bolster their accountability to readers or anyone else aggrieved by particular coverage, with such executives having power to publish corrections and adjudications (Sanders 2003: 155–8). The term ‘media accountability systems’ has been coined to describe the variety of means and methods – including press councils, ombudsmen, training in ethics, readership surveys – which can encourage ethical conduct in the media (Bertrand 2000, 2003). Critics of the British media – for example, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom and MediaWise – argue that the huge expense of libel and privacy litigation, weaknesses in the regulatory and self-regulatory systems, the market dominance of a concentrated number of powerful media corporations, and the reluctance of successive governments to attempt radical reform in these fields, mean that journalists are not sufficiently accountable to the public.

With rare exceptions (e.g. the BBC, which is a purely public service broadcaster, and the Guardian and Observer newspapers, which are owned by a trust), media corporations are also accountable, structurally, to their shareholders to make good profits.

Further reading

Sanders, K. (2003) Ethics and Journalism. London: Sage.

MNH

Accuracy

Irrespective of the extent to which any piece of journalism can be held to exhibit objectivity, or otherwise pay heed to the wider contexts in which news occurs, it can be judged at a basic level on matters of accuracy.

At this level, the term accuracy means, for example, that the names of those featured in the piece are spelt correctly, that quotes are reproduced in direct form, or in précis which preserves their meaning, and that events are clearly related. The term encompasses the ethical principle that a news journalist should take all reasonable steps to corroborate any version of events likely to be disputed, if he/she has not witnessed those events, and indicate, in what is published, any such dispute. If the public interest merits it, the airing of uncorroborated facts is ethically justifiable, but the lack of corroboration must be made explicit.

The term ‘accuracy’, if used in isolation, is of limited value. Journalism usually involves summarizing events or arguments. Good journalism exhibits fairness in the summary.

British law, when conferring ‘privilege’, i.e. protection against defamation lawsuits, on certain types of media reports – for example, coverage of court cases, council meetings or Parliamentary proceedings – specifies such protection will only exist if the reports are accurate and fair (Welsh and Greenwood, 2003: 259–72).

The statutory regulation of broadcasting in Britain requires, under the terms of licences to be awarded by Ofcom, and those awarded by predecessor bodies, that news be presented ‘with due accuracy’, fairness and impartiality, and this requirement is reflected in codes of ethics, issued by those bodies, and in the BBC’s Producers’ Guidelines.

Clause 1 of the Code of Practice used by the Press Complaints Commission concerns accuracy, fairness and the need for prompt corrections. The majority of complaints ruled on by the PCC – e.g. 53 per cent of its rulings in 2003 – concern alleged breaches of Clause 1.

MNH

Adversarial journalism

The achievement which gradually uncovered the Watergate scandal led to renewed enthusiasm in American newsrooms for investigative journalism. But there was also increased soul-searching about ethics. Some commentators began to warn that reporters who were overlyhostile to and cynical about politicians, public institutions and business risked alienating the public from journalists, or could erode public faith in democracy. In 1982 Michael J. O’Neill, then editor of the New York Daily News, condemned the increase in ‘adversarial mindset’ among journalists. Despite these concerns, research suggests only a small minority of American journalists consider they have an adversarial mindset (Weaver and Wilhoit, 1996: 134–5, 139–40).

A survey in the 1990s suggested that, compared to their US counterparts, British journalists are more likely to declare an adversarial scepticism of the pronouncements of public officials and businesses. This is a reflection, perhaps, of the tougher legal environment, in terms of defamation and the culture of official secrecy, in which British journalists operate (Henningham and Delano, 1998: 153).

The terms ‘adversarial’ and ‘hyperadversarial’ have also been used, negatively, in Britain and America to describe journalistic interviewing techniques deemed aggressive and dramatic which, though they may help inflate the interviewer’s ego, are essentially ritualistic, and superficial in terms of helping the public consider social issues (Keeble 2001: 4 and 6).

Adversarial journalism is sometimes compared unfavourably with public journalism or civic journalism.

Further reading

Fallows (1997) Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. New York: Vintage Books.

Lloyd, J. (2004) What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable.

McNair, B. (2000b) ‘Journalism and Democracy: A Millennial Audit’, Journalism Studies, 1(2): 197–211.

MNH

Advertising

Revenues are crucial to newspapers, magazines and commercial broadcasting media. They provide a large part of the income of these media and, in the case of newspapers and magazines, offset the purchase cost for the consumer. Tabloid newspapers receive approximately 30 per cent of their income from advertising while for broadsheets it rises to 70 per cent (Baistow, 1985: 33). The figures for local daily (60 per cent) and weekly newspapers (80 per cent) are similarly high while local free newspapers are...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• Part I Concepts
• Part II Institutions
• Glossary of terms
• Bibliography