TESIS DOCTORALES DIRIGIDAS EN RELACIÓN CON EL MÁSTER

News media have significant influence on the representation of diverse realities of climate change in modern societies. The power of global media leads to fragmentation of climate change definitions, which are not rigidly anchored to specific national contexts, yet are consistent enough over time to reveal characteristics worthy of analysis. Accordingly, this thesis’s research attends to the operation of news accounts in constructing the realities of climate change in one particular society, Thailand. News embeds dominant meanings of

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what constitutes “common sense” about natural and environmental realities, thereby shaping public perceptions, sometimes in decisive ways. Therefore, particular insights from the sociology of journalism are brought into this literature review in order to further our understanding of the diverse factors shaping this process of construction, since news is the

“codification of reality” (Allan 2011) rather than its simple reflection.

2.6.1 Newswork in capitalisation

Scholars have investigated news media organisational structures in order to better understand how the day-to-day activities of newswork shape news reporting. Manning (2001), for example, contends that news media structures are symbolic resources and capital resources that benefit the power of elite people in accessing and controlling media’s content to maintain their power in political debate. The competitiveness of the news media market induces news organisations to develop production procedures that minimise cost and increase productivity. Therefore, news discourse is not an entire reflection of the truth. On the contrary, it is the result of strategic processes in defining facts of occurrence within specific social settings. This process is influenced by the way that particular sources are selected and prioritised in news narratives. Arguably, the news making process is determined by its structure and bureaucratic routine. Tuchman (1980) illustrates that “the news net”, the practice of either placing reporters or news desks at potential locations in accessing information, accommodates journalists to obtain the facts of the occurrences quickly. Three criteria which determine the working of the news net are geographic territory, organizational specialization and topical specialization.

In consequence of the news net, the making of news concerns tacit knowledge of newsworkers rather than precise procedures in newsgathering. To emphasise, newsworkers use their experience to generalise the methods of obtaining facts from news sources. It is mentioned by Tuchman (1980) that

On this basis of the experience, identified as arcane knowledge implicit in news judgement, news workers make three generalisaitons: 1) Individuals must prove their reliability as news sources 2) Some individuals, such as committee heads, are in a position to know more than other people in an organisation 3) The significance of either statement or no comment must be assessed according to the newsworker’s knowledge of institutional procedure (ibid., p.93)

Accordingly, news production is a bureaucratic process. The news net reflects a social order which is imposed into news content. Journalists accept the authority of official

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sources as a fact because of their positions in organisations. This presupposition reduced the investigative process. In addition, journalists may quote the oppositional sources in news stories to maintain a balance of facts (Allan 2011). In relation to this, Cottle (2000) and Manning (2001) point out that news sources can influence news content by both structural pressure and the limitation of routine production, as well as the instrumental pressure or the editorial commentary by sponsoring pressure.

Furthermore, the dispersal of the news net accommodates routinisation in newswork.

Allan (2011) indicates that newspapers need to ensure sufficient stories on news pages. The routine of news production thus reduces the procedure of fact verification, especially in hard news that depends on timely quality. In relation to the necessity to chase the deadline and efficiency in news production, the tendency is that news content is produced from

“information subsidies” (Gandy 1982) that are supplied by the powerful institutions. The tendency of newsrooms to rely on the information subsidies has been criticised by scholars, who have argued that the phenomenon correlates with less investigative reporting, for example, in the UK press (Manning 2001; Lewis et al. 2008; Williams 2015). On the contrary, the newsrooms “cut and paste” content from press releases of institutions to incorporate into their news stories. This is what has been called “churnalism” by Davies (2008). Moreover, research (Forde 2013) shows that wire news agencies have become the “primary source” from which online newsrooms copy news stories disseminated by wire news agencies to publish on their own sites. Importantly, Forde (2013) evidences that news stories published by wire news agencies are in fact subsidised by particular public relations departments of the institutions. Therefore, the impact of institutional sources on the news production process is far more than merely direct public relations activities, for example, releasing press kits and organising press conferences. This mutual relationship between institution sources and the newsworkers seems to increasingly enhance the bureaucratic workflow in newsrooms, and is criticised because “news changes very little when the individuals who make it are changed” (Golding 1979, p.127).

Although these notions reflect that newsworkers have a little room for interpretation, there are some situations where journalists can utilize interpretative skills such as when new technology arrives (Manning 2001). Researchers need to acknowledge journalists as social actors who are able to interact with their social environments distinctively (ibid., 2001). The key issue is to what extent that news organisation structure allows them to negotiate with

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particular barriers and act creatively. In relation to this, it is vital to investigate the reasons behind the existence of this rigid news organisation structure.

2.6.2 Typification of news

Newswork further represents the reality in society with arranging facts into particular structures of news narratives. The structure of facts in the news story is attributed to the emergence of occurrences. This “typification of news” (Tuchman 1980) is constituted in practical problems of newswork. Newsworkers impose order of facts, information, and

sources gained from the newsgathering process. By doing this, the complexity of occurrences is reduced to be manageable for news reporting. It is mentioned that

typifications of kinds of news draw upon the way occurrences happen, not upon what is happening. The typifications are only relatively content free, because some sorts of occurrences are likely to happen one way while others have a different temporal rhythm (ibid., p.39).

Despite the fact that typification of news responds to efficiency in newswork, journalists are supposedly inclined to a tacit knowledge in separating two distinct types of news story, so called hard news and soft news. While journalists assign “hard news”

to important matters in society, soft news is presumed to consist of lighter stories about human life. Therefore, the typification of news influences the way that journalists decide the newsworthiness of occurrences by using their experience in news organisations (Allan 2011). In other words, journalists learn the language of news by accumulating experiences in the discipline until newswork becomes “common sense” to them. Accordingly, newswork is the discipline that is involved with using journalistic norms to evaluate and reflect the truth in society. At the same time, however, news content does not entirely reflect absolute truth in society. The facts portrayed in news stories are the products of journalistic norms, namely the structure of newswork and news narrative, combined with reality in society. It is stated that “you cannot learn, through ‘common sense’, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things” [original italic] (Hall 1977, p.325).

In terms of climate change news, research indicates that misleading representations may become embedded in news production conventions. Environmental journalists operate under several constraints that accrue from journalistic norms and values. Ordinarily, those events with perceived high impact on the current situation will likely ensure newsworthiness, which is more attractive to news editors than hard, scientific stories (often regarded as too

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complex for audiences, who may find them boring). Climate change, in particular, does not lend itself to straightforward news narratives, not least because its cumulative consequences are unforeseen and complicated. By this rationale, climate change issues frequently fail the test of newsworthiness, thereby having limited opportunity to appear in the prime coverage, compared to other environmental topics, such as natural disasters where dramatic conflict occurs (Cottle 2000). Not surprisingly, the number of investigative news reports in climate change correlates with the experience of journalists in covering the issue. While climate change issues are framed with scientific aspects widely, Carvalho (2007) suggests that the experience of reporters and their familiarity to news sources in climate change issues can help them frame climate change issues in the politics of climate change aspects.