Visit the Los Angeles Police Department Newsroom website at the link below and select a news release on an officer-involved shooting that took place within the last six months. (Hint: You may have to go to the second or third page to find an appropriate news release.) : Los Angeles Police Department news releases
Links to an external site.Then answer each question below with the files and readings provided.
- A brief description of the incident – date, location, and what the person was doing when he or she was shot.
- A potential source of information – a person, an agency – that is NOT included in the news release.
- An explanation, based only on News Production Theory as defined is in the readings and file below, as to whether news media outlets would seek out sources of information about the event beyond what the LAPD is reporting. Explain, using the concepts in the readings and file below, why you believe additional information would be sought or would not be sought.
News Production Theory
Cornerstone: Stories are like any other industrial product – the cheaper they are to make, the greater the profit margin. Making stories cheaply creates a bias toward the points of view of the political, cultural and social elite.
Creating Stories Cheaply
Todd Gitlin once wrote, “Simply by doing their jobs, journalists tend to serve the political and economic elite definitions of reality.” This statement has two key ideas.
The first is the idea of what it is that a journalist actually does.
From an economic standpoint, a journalist creates items, much as a blacksmith produces horseshoes. Obviously, the lower the cost, in terms of both time and money, it takes to make an item – whether it is a horseshoe or a story – the greater the potential profit margin.
So whether the item is a horseshoe or a story, the goal is to make it as inexpensively as possible.
One of the best ways of making stories cheaply is to rely on certain people or entities as sources of information. We will call these “primary definers.” Our definition of the primary definer will be, “The person or entity relied on to tell the story, often to the exclusion of others.” What this means is that this is the person, agency or other source that the journalist reaches out to for information on any given story.
If a reporter is doing a story on a crime, for example, the first phone call they will make typically is to the local law enforcement agency. It is typically also the last phone call they will make to seek out information. The local law enforcement agency is prepared to help the reporter create the story cheaply. The agency is immediately accessible; its representatives speak the mainstream language; it has trained public relations staff members who tell the story that the target audience wants to hear; and it is credible and believable to the audience that the reporter’s story is aimed at.
These combine to allow the reporter to get all of her or his information from one place, thus dramatically reducing the cost of obtaining the information needed to produce the story.
In relying on these sources, reporters find themselves relying on a narrow socioeconomic category to tell the stories. Reporters’ sources tend to be in people in positions of social, political and economic authority, people who are upper-middle-class professionals, entities that are well-funded, and people who reflect a value system that the target audience can relate to.
To connect the dots:
- Reporters rely on certain sources of information so they can create the story, the product, as cheaply as possible.
- Those sources tend to come from a narrow socioeconomic category.
- So the stories that reporters produce tend to reflect the interests and values of that socioeconomic group, which tend to be affluent and traditional.
The voices that are more expensive to gather tend to be ignored. Less-affluent people do not have trained public relations departments to handle requests for information from reporters.
They do not have “experts guides” to help reporters reach them. And they are not trained in what to say to reporters who call them.
So reporters learn to avoid them – they are simply more expensive, in terms of time and effort, to reach than the professional or dedicated public relations spokesperson.
Buy Low, Sell High.
Relying on traditional “primary definers” to gather information on stories keeps the cost of creating those stories, those products, low. The other side of the equation is that the same process tends to create stories that gather the broadest possible audience.
The professional class of spokespersons and well-funded entities to whom reporters reach out understands the economic benefits of reaching out to a mass audience. They are willing to provide information to the audience that privileges that audience.
So police tell stories to the general population that are black- and-white exercises in good and bad, with the general population (and the police!) on the good side. Companies tell stories to the general public about how their products will make the lives of the public better, how the people who purchase those products will be happier. And reporters repeat the information they get from those sources because it is cheap and convenient to obtain.
The meaning of Hall’s comment becomes clear in this context. Because reporters are merely the conduits of information from the economic, political and cultural elite, with relatively little analysis or investigation, the process of reporting becomes the process by which the mass commercial media is merely amplifying the messages of those sources.
This is where the bias comes in. If law enforcement is the only source of information about crime, then stories reflect only law enforcement’s side of the story. If stories about consumer goods reflect only the information received from the manufacturer and manufacturer-supported sources, such as industry associations, then the stories reflect only their sides of the story. And criticizing sources means that reporters and news agencies put at risk the sources of the data that they use to create the stories that gather audiences.
In conclusion:
- Reporters tend to rely on primary definers as sources of information for economic reasons.
- Primary definers tend to provide information that reflects upper-middle-class, mainstream authority standards, beliefs and values.
Requirements: minimum: 150 words | .doc file
