68 found that the mass media in both northern and south Nigeria sometimes inspired conflict
“through biased reporting, deliberate distortions, criminal partisanship and unprofessionalism confounded by influences of tribalism and exploitation of the religious divide to settle political vendetta, tribal grudges or both” (Doki, nd., p.22). The study accordingly concluded that mass media could be implicated in conflict instigation when their content becomes permeated by ethnic/religious bias, and political and economic rivalry.
69 media structure, beginning from the reporter working in the field to the editors working on the desk in the newsroom and the owners of the media. Even further than that, it includes advertisers and opinion contributors (“Gatekeeping Theory”, 2012).
The gatekeeping theory is “one of the original theories to come from mass communication research,” and “has remained important since its debut shortly after World War II” (Roberts, 2005, p.1). Its evolution has occurred through successive contributions of various scholars, beginning with Kurt Zadek Lewin (1890 – 1947), a German psychologist who coined the term
“gatekeeping” to represent how housewives act as “gatekeepers” to decide which food enters the family’s menu. This insight, according to Roberts (2012), was a product of his experiments “to entice Iowa women to eat more beef (hearts, livers, kidneys, and other secondary cuts of meat) as a patriotic duty during World War II” (p.2). Quoting Lewin, Roberts writes further that housewives are important gatekeepers who determine what food enters the “channels” that ultimately convey it from the garden or supermarket to the home and ultimately onto the dining table. Each channel is segmented into sections surrounded by gates which constitute the points at which decisions are made as to whether the food will enter the channel in the first place, or move to the next section. And along this way, certain forces exert pressure to accept or reject food.
However, even though Lewin was referring to how the choice of food is made at home, he recognises that his gatekeeping model goes far beyond food choices, observing that the theory of gates “holds not only for food channels but also for the travelling of a news item through certain communication channels in a group…” (Roberts, 2005, p.2).
David Manning White was another scholar whose research enriched the gatekeeping theory. In the summer of 1947, he was working on the editorial copy desk of The Peoria Star, where he observed “how the newspaper’s wire editor chose which of the scores of available stories would be published.” He asked the editor (now designated “Mr. Gate”) to document his news selection
70 decisions. Thus, “Mr. Gate” kept record of his decision-making process for a week in February 1949 (Roberts, 2005). Based on the records, White, in 1950, was able to conclude that news items are rejected by gatekeepers for three reasons: personal feelings of the gatekeeper, insufficient space and the fact that the story in question had appeared previously (Saravanan, 2011).
Subsequently, in 1956, Gieber cited in Roberts (2005), repeated the study by White but raised the participants to 16 wire editors. He found that the editors were “caught in a strait jacket of mechanical details” – they were operating at the mercy of the news agencies because they can only publish what these agencies fed them. Apart from influence of news agencies, Gieber discovered that the editors were equally influenced by their medium in making selection decisions – a variable overlooked by White (Roberts, 2005).
McNelly, another scholar, in 1959, however, introduced a very fundamental improvement to the gatekeeping theory by recognising the role of reporters in the process. Earlier theorists beginning from Lewin to White and Geiber had focused on editors. He criticised White’s research for focusing on the wire editor, arguing that he (the wire editor) is not the key decision maker. Thus came “the notion of multiple gatekeepers who control various functions along the news process”
(Roberts, 2005, p.8). The “double-action internal newsflow” model as introduced by Bass is a reinforcement of this perspective. The model describes “the flow from ‘raw news’ into the
‘completed product’ for news consumers,” arguing that “news gatherers” (reporters and line editors) are different from “news processors” (editors and translators), preferring that researchers focus more on “the news gathering than on news processing, since stories that are not reported will never reach a point where they can be processed” (Roberts, 2005, p.8 – 9).
71 Pamela Shoemaker is another scholar whose contribution is prominent in the development of the gatekeeping theory. Her book, published in 1996, “provided a useful history of the theory, the process, and how gatekeeping is applied at the individual, communication routine, organizational, and institutional level” (Roberts, 2005, p.9). She highlighted the role of individual gatekeepers working within a single institution, as well as the internal and external variables that operate on the channels and feedback. Similarly, alongside her associates, she recognises that “gatekeeping in mass communication can be seen as the overall process through which social reality transmitted by the news media is constructed, and is not just a series of ‘in’
and ‘out’ decisions” (Shoemaker, Eichholz, Kim, & Wrigley, 2001, as cited in Saravanan, 2011, p.11). In other words, gatekeeping explains not just the process of news selection but also the process of news framing wherein the media construct and reconstruct reality. The gatekeeper
“determines not only which information is selected, but also what the content and nature of the messages, such as news, will be” (“Gatekeeping Theory”, 2012).
In summary, the postulations of the gatekeeping theory could be outlined as follows:
i. In exercising its “surveillance” function, every news medium has a very large number of stories brought to its attention daily by reporters, wire services, and a variety of other sources.
ii. Due to a number of practical considerations, only a limited amount of time or space is available in any medium for its daily presentations of the news to its audience. The remaining space must be devoted to advertising and other content.
iii. Within any news organization there exists a news perspective, a subculture that includes a complex set of criteria for judging a particular news story - criteria based on economic needs of the medium, organizational policy, definitions of newsworthiness, conceptions
72 of the nature of relevant audience, and beliefs about fourth estate obligations of journalists.
iv. This news perspective and its complex criteria are used by editors, news directors, and other personnel who select a limited number of news stories for presentation to the public and encode them in ways such that the requirements of the medium and the tastes of the audience are met.
v. Therefore, personnel in the news organization become gatekeepers, letting some stories pass through the system but keeping others out, thus limiting, controlling, and shaping the public's knowledge of the totality of actual event occurring in reality (“Gatekeeping”, 2012).
Lasorsa (2002), cited in Roberts (2005), argues that gatekeeping has contributed to the development of other mass communication theories among which is agenda-setting. While noting that agenda-setting describes how media “help decide the saliency of information based on what they choose to emphasize,” he argues that gatekeeping is at the root of this process as the very action of deciding “what to emphasize and neglect” is itself “gatekeeping” (p.12 – 13).
This centrality of gatekeeping theory in mass communication is summarised as follows:
Gatekeeping is the vanilla ice cream of mass communication theory. It may not be everyone’s favourite, but nearly everyone can tolerate it. And while it may have an unremarkable flavour, it serves as a building block for other theory and methodological approaches (Roberts, 2005, p.3).
However, the arrival of the Internet with the attendant modifications in the dynamics of mass communication has introduced a new dimension in the whole discourse about gatekeeping. Some scholars have wondered whether gatekeeping still retains any relevance in the face of the
“gateless media”. Following her study of how the Internet was changing the gatekeeping process for newspapers in the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections, Singer (as cited in “Gatekeeping Theory”, 2012), argues that, “the power of gatekeepers seems to diminish in a modern
73 information society. The Internet defies the whole notion of a ‘gate’ and challenges the idea that journalists (or anyone else) can or should limit what passes through it” (p.2).
However, for Shoemaker (as cited in Roberts, 2005), gatekeeping remains alive irrespective of whatever innovative role the Internet may be playing. While responding to the comment by former Entertatinment Weekly magazine editor Jeff Jarvis that “We (in mainstream media) used to be gatekeepers”, she argues, “This is not an original thought...but each time we come across a new media, we ask new questions that are really old questions” (p.13).
From the perspective of the gatekeeping theory, the decision of Nigerian media houses to select or not to select for publication or broadcast any news event regarding the ethnic interest groups as well as how to frame such news could be placed in perspective. As rightly observed by Johnson and Johnson (2013), the “gatekeepers’ choices are a complex web of influences, preferences, motives and common values” (p.101). Therefore, the choices of gatekeepers are better understood when they are not isolated but conceived within the larger framework of the society’s meaning making process as implicated in the language-ideology-power dynamics in a social sphere like Nigeria.