SCOM 2050 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Investigative Journalism, Herbert J. Gans, Individualism
11 Feb 2019
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Document Summary
Journalism is the only media enterprise that democracy absolutely requires : only media practice specifically protected by the constitution, democracy requires plentiful, diverse, high quality journalism. Journalism : gathering, assessing, and presenting information in news stories. News: gathering information and making narrative reports, news organizations edit information filter information through select frames of reference, help the public make sense of the world. Newsworthiness: a quality making certain story ideas the most important to be transformed into news. Human interest (unusual happenings to ordinary people) Consequence or usefulness (directly affects or helps readers) Norm: prizing journalistic neutrality (objectivity, neutrality arose in 1880s, both a reaction to abuses of yellow journalism and, a marketing technique, neutral -> credible -> mass appeal, kept journalists politically moderate. Negative effects from lost neutrality: less fact-checking, less expertise among journalists and sources, blurred line between hard news and opinion, replacing investigative journalism with partisanship. Balance: idea that widely replaced journalistic neutrality.
