La guerra de los mundos (2005)

In a rapidly-changing modern world, news does not necessarily contain ‘new’

information as it has usually been seen before. News can be about animals, places or weather, and often about people doing things, people saying things or somebody set to say something (Harcup 2004: 31-32). However, because there has been an interest among academics in determining what exactly has become news, many have attempted to study the ‘values’ that contribute to news selection and publication. This attempt is “regarded as an important area of exploration within journalism studies scholarship because it is a way of making more transparent a set of practices and judgments which are…shrouded in opacity” (O’Neill and Harcup 2009:

163).

It is because of the lack of transparency that many academics have attempted to study news, and one of these perspectives, to see what becomes news, is related to the nature of events or the strength of news itself. The earliest and major work on news values is of course the well-known, well-cited and the most influential study on news values carried out by two Norwegian scholars, Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge in 1965 (McQuail 1994: 270). This study has also been republished in many edited books (for example, Tunstall 1970, Cohen and Young 1973, 1981, and Tumber 1999). Because of its status in news values studies, I emphasise this discussion based on Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) work as the cornerstone study and also the most well-known object-driven news values study. However, within the discussion, other related and recent news values studies are considered.

Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) research is based on content analysis of international news stories in four Norwegian newspapers, examining the common factors and news placement

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factors during the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises. They suggested 12 newsworthiness criteria with the basic assumption that the more a story satisfies the factors or news values, the more likely it is to be selected as news. The criteria in the scoring system are based on the criteria of the nature of event that becomes news:

1. Frequency – the time-span for events unfolding and becoming meaningful. For example, the murder of a soldier takes a much shorter time than the progress of a nation.

The closer the event to the news/media time-span, the easier it will be to select as news.

2. Threshold – the amplitude of an event. For example, the more violent a murder, the bigger the headline it will receive.

3. Unambiguity – when an event is less ambiguous, it is more accessible.

4. Meaningfulness – this could be divided into (a) cultural proximity and (b) relevance.

The more an event is close to one’s culture, the more it is noticeable. However, at the same time, when an event is relevant it can be news from a distance-cultural proximity.

The relevance makes the event noticeable.

5. Consonance – if an event suits one’s mental pre-image as “expected” or similar to what an editor “wants”, it has more potential to be selected as news.

6. Unexpectedness – unexpected or rare events are most likely to become news, but they must still be meaningful and consonant to the readers/listeners.

7. Continuity – once an event is selected as news, there is possibility of it being selected again.

8. Composition – an editor usually tries to present the page with a “balanced” whole. For example, when there is a surplus of foreign news, the least important stories will be replaced with local news. This suggests that the stories competing for space in media do not solely depend on news values.

9. Reference to elite nations – elite nations are influential. Stories about an elite nation like the United States will probably be selected as news because generally it is viewed to have more impact on other countries.

10. Reference to elite persons – politicians and celebrities will more likely become news than ordinary people.

11. Reference to people – stories containing personification or related to people more easily become news than stories that are not related to people. This is influenced by the fact that human interest stories are attractive to most people.

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12. Reference to something negative – negative stories are more easily selected as news (Galtung and Ruge 1965: 65-71).

From the criteria listed above three hypotheses were formulated: (1) the more an event fulfils the criteria, the more likely is it to be selected as news (selection); (2) after the event is selected as news, it is then distorted to emphasise factors that will make the story newsworthy (distortion);

and (3) the selection and distortion process happens within the string from the event to the reader (Galtung and Ruge 1965: 71). Overall, the scoring system and the hypotheses assume that when news construction is subsumed to certain criteria, what will become news is “predictable”

(Schwarz 2006).

The predictability of news is supported by recent research across countries conducted by Shoemaker and Cohen (2006). They studied news from 10 countries with various political and economic orientation (Australia, Chile, China, Germany, India, Israel, Jordan, Russia, South Africa and the United States. Although this study is not based on Galtung and Ruge’s theory of news values, the conclusion supports the argument that news around the world contains more similarities than differences, and is hence predicted. The content analysis of various media in these countries identified certain events that are usually found newsworthy in these countries, which are sports, international or national politics, cultural events, business, internal order and human interest. Furthermore, they found a significant level of agreement on newsworthiness among journalists, public relations and practitioners about what makes news. The findings demonstrate that, when news is examined in its final form (published news), it yields several predictable patterns of news values, when compared with highly different countries in the world.

This might also lead some academics to conclude that “journalists evaluate news in very similar ways…and that the consensus has increased somewhat over the years” (Ghersetti 2009: 10).

News is predictable because not only the story selection is based on news values, but, in some situations, the news angle is also predictably based on its newsworthiness value. Since the news angle is the essence of newsworthiness construction (Tiffen 1989), how it is performed is pertinent and thus defines what becomes news. Zelizer and Allan (2010: 6) defined ‘angle’ in journalism as the chosen perspective, emphasis, bias or focus from which a news item is told.

They added that, “news angle can be determined either from news values and newsworthiness

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criteria, that then emerged in the news leads, headlines or even captions of the picture accompanying the story”. This suggests that the usage of news values extends to the level of news angle construction, hence its popularity in explaining news especially in Western countries.

It is also because news values are invented in the West, that it defines newsworthiness in the Western context.

Yet, Andreas Schwarz (2006) extends the applicability of Galtung and Ruge’s theory of news values by examining the three hypotheses in the context of Mexican newspapers. The findings demonstrate that the news values theory postulated by Galtung and Ruge (1965) is able to predict news coverage in Mexican quality newspapers based on the analysis of foreign news.

However, news values are found to have more impact on space allocated for a particular story than in influencing the overall process of news decisions. This suggests the limited usage of news values in terms of their applicability, because news values alone do not tell ‘everything’

about newsworthiness construction. Nevertheless, it contributes to a significant knowledge about some parts of the complex process of newsworthiness construction.

In this study, among the news values identified, ‘controversy’ is found to be the most influential news value followed by stories already published (reference to established topics), and stories that imply success and usefulness in the future. However, news values such as

‘impact’, ‘personalisation’ and cultural negativity are found less useful in predicting news space.

This study is an example of Galtung and Ruge’s theory on the “predictive power, a quality which is hard to find among approaches to journalism” (Schwarz 2006: 60). This is a significant contribution of the theory, mainly because when the general news around the world appears

‘similar’, or there are certain days that newspapers share a similar front page, that suggests the existence of certain shared values among the journalists that assist in news judgment.

News values theory is also applicable to the study of international news flow, rather than simply to a particular country. Weber (2010), for instance, deployed Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) news values theory – instead of a world system theory as deployed by many others in similar types of research – because of the strength of assumption that larger nations are more likely to become news than smaller nations. This theory examines how the world system is affected by changes of ethnic groups and social classes within the system, and how it affects international

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news flow, but it does not theorise on the size of the country and its relationship with newsworthiness. It is by using Galtung and Ruge’s assumption that Weber can highlight that unconsidered determinant of newsworthiness such as issue-bound interest of some countries must be taken into consideration in establishing newsworthiness. Thus, this study expands Galtung and Ruge’s news values as regards ‘the elite nation’ and its relationship with what becomes news with the general view of the usefulness of news values theory.

Additionally, Maier and Ruhrmann (2008) extended Galtung and Ruge’s theory to television news in Germany, instead of newspapers. Study of newsworthiness in Germany has been heavily influenced by the work of Schulz (1976), who conceptualised ‘news factors’ that include time, proximity, status, dynamism, valence and identification (quoted in Maier and Ruhrmann 2008: 200) as determining newsworthiness. Following Schulz, Maier and Ruhrmann (2008) conducted a content analysis of 3,042 news items to demonstrate the higher order of news factors, in order to further explain the formal news factors suggested by Galtung and Ruge (1965). This study considers the usefulness of news factors theories “to add to the validity of the concept” (Maier and Ruhrmann 2008: 201) and show the combination of both formal news factors theories and the higher order news factors able to explain a wide range of news including television news. They found that proximity, celebrities and visualisation are the three most important higher order dimensions of journalistic selectivity in German news construction, and these factors influenced what became news between 1992 until 2004.

There is suggestion of the status of news values itself in understanding newsworthiness.

News values can assist in determining generally why certain news get published. This is why in many content analysis studies, we find similarities of news values rather than differences, mainly because the general reasons for news publication are similar worldwide. Thus, the news values theory is actually meant to answer this question: “What is news?” By using a set of news values that we know in advance, we can explain the reasons for news publication. This ‘prior sense of newsworthiness’ (Braun 2009: 24) is helpful in identifying the criteria that make news in a simplified way. News can, therefore, be explained in this way: “News usually contains… and the list of the news values are…”. Thus, from this point of view, news is predictable.

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However, listing several or even a long list of (news) values is criticised as a too-simplified move to explain the complexity when we speak of newsworthiness construction. As a result, it is an inaccurate indicator to understand ‘how exactly an event becomes news’, and this is discussed further in the next section.