Sociology Mass Media Essay

Assess the views that news is a social construct (33 marks)

It is argued the process of news selection and presentation is inevitably partial and biased because it is dependent upon the power of those who work in the media, the culture of the society as well as the day to day organisation routine of the media companies. This belief is supported by Marxists and Neo-Marxists such as McQuail and Bagdikian. There has been an ongoing debate regarding the reliability of the news and whether the process of selection and presentation of news is objective and unbiased. Alternative sociological perspectives have suggested that the news is not socially constructed and instead it is a process of supply and demand.

A reason why news selection and presentation is biased and partial is because of gatekeepers. Kurt Lewin was the first person to use the word gatekeepers and this means editors and journalists weigh up which stories are more newsworthy and will gain more viewers. They decide what is newsworthy based on news values and organisational routine of a certain event (something that took place last 24hours). A problem with gatekeepers is that they can abuse power by deciding what information to discard and what to let pass. White agrees with this view as he also argues that particular individuals play a significant role in determining which items make the news. This is further reinforced by McQuail (1992) who argues that the news is socially manufactured, because gatekeepers such as editors and journalists make choices and judgements about how much coverage they will give to certain events. As a result, this supports the capitalists and it often goes against the less powerful groups in society. Therefore it is made clear that the selection and presentation of the news is inevitably partial and biased because news is selected by the journalists/ gatekeepers therefore it can be argued that it is a social construct because they make a paradigm in order to gain people’s...