LEWIN'S CONCEPT OF GATEKEEPERS

Transcription

1 NEWSPAPER GATEKEEPERS AND FORGES IN THE NEWS CHANNEL* BY LEWIS DONOHEW What factors are related to the decisions by newspaper gatekeepers to run certain pieces of information and not others, or to feature certain items and "bury" others? This study involves an integrated approach to this news decision-making process, including analysis of content, administration of a questionnaire, and gathering of demographic data. The study covers three kinds of "forces" and their relationships to news decisions. Lewis Donohew is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Kentucky. LEWIN'S CONCEPT OF GATEKEEPERS provides a framework for testing a number of hypotheses about forces affecting newspaper coverage. Two of the more popular hypotheses concern ^the relationships of publisher attitude and perceived community opinion 8 to behavior of newspaper gatekeepers, as indicated by news coverage of given topics. A third hypothesis is that community conditions are related to coverage. This study was an effort to examine these hypotheses through an integrated research design combining content analysis with measurement of publisher attitudes and perceptions of community opinion and with objective data on community conditions. In this project, the Medicare issue was used as a stimulus subject, and gatekeepers' news-coverage responses to this stimulus were recorded through content analysis. These responses were then correlated with the indicators of attitudes, perceptions, and conditions, which might be considered part of the "environment" in which the gatekeeper worked. It was hypothesized that if any of these environmental * This study was supported in part by the University of Kentucky Computing Center. The writer is especially indebted to Professor Arthur M. Barnes of the University of Iowa for encouragement and counsel. Kurt Lewin, "Frontiers in Group Dynamics. II. Channels of Group Life: Social Planning and Action Research," Human Relations, Vol. i. No., 947, pp * Warren Breed, "Social Control in the News Room: A Functional Analysis," Social Forces, Vol. 33, No. 4, 955, pp. 3S6S7. * Bernard BeTelson, "Communication and Public Opinion," in Wilbur Schramm, ed., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 954, p For additional comments along this line, see also the section entitled "Mass Media: Cause or Effect?" in Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Kalian, Collective Behavior, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 957, P- '75- Downloaded from on 3 March 8

2 6 LEWIS DONOHEW variables successfully exerted a "force" upon the gatekeepers, a consistent relationship would be found between that "force" and the variables representing news coverage. For example, if the "community feedback" hypothesis was true, one might expect gatekeepers to tend to give more favorable coverage to the issue in communities where the public was perceived to be favorable to Medicare than in communities where it was perceived to be opposed. For the purposes of this study, the investigator was not concerned with any one gatekeeping position, but rather with a selected set of gatekeeping activities reflecting news coverage. These activities could have been carried out by one person or by several, although in actual practice they involved tasks which are frequently performed by wire editors alone. METHOD Following are details of the project. Population studied. In order to ensure that all gatekeepers were exposed to approximately the same stimulus, the population of afternoon newspapers in a single state (Kentucky) subscribing to the Associated Press (N = 7) was selected for this study. Predictor variables. Environmental "forces" studied included publisher's attitude toward Medicare, publisher's estimate of community opinion on the issue, editorial activity of the paper, circulation of the paper (an indication of the amount of space or "news hole" available), and political, cultural, and economic data from the home county of each newspaper. Criterion variables. Indicators of gatekeeper behavior were the ratio of favorable to unfavorable paragraphs on Medicare carried by each paper, the gross number of paragraphs on the issue, and display of Medicare stories. Scores were recorded for page only and for the entire newspaper. Selection of issue. Medical care for the aged was chosen as the stimulus issue in the belief that it would be complicated by fewer "forces" operating on the gatekeeper than would some other issue, such as Federal aid to schools which contains a religious element or a political campaign. 4 Coverage of the Medicare issue was examined during a period (January, May, June, and July 96) in which it was a subject of considerable debate, both on and off the floor of Congress. * On political campaigns, Robert D. Murphy has observed: "Some editors have been so intimidated by... criticism that their political coverage seem! to be governed chiefly by the ruler" ("Measuring Press Bias on Politics," The Syracuse Journalist, VoL, July 956, p. ). Downloaded from on 3 March 8

3 NEWSPAPER GATEKEEPERS 63 Measurement of attitudes and perceptions. Publishers' attitudes and their perceptions of community opinion on the issue were measured by their performance on a questionnaire in which they were asked to indicate their attitude toward Medicare (on a 7-point scale) in 96 and to list the percentage of people in their home county they thought would have voted for it at the time. Measurement of community conditions. Using indicators developed by Jonassen" in his study of Ohio counties, political, cultural, and economic statistics on die counties selected for this study were gathered from census materials, state records, and other sources. Measurement of gatekeeping activities. The investigator examined all newspapers in the population for the four-mondi period of this study, except for Saturday and Sunday issues. Gatekeeper behavior was measured through content-analysis procedures involving directional analysis and a display index.. For the directional analysis, a set of categories, each consisting of a kind of statement about Medicare, 6 was developed after a review of the sample material. Each category was classified according to whether the kinds of actions or statements it covered were favorable, unfavorable, or neutral to the administration's bill for medical care for the aged under social security. It was the task of the coder to assign each paragraph in the sample to one of the categories. Paragraphs coded in favorable categories were scored -\-i; those in unfavorable categories were scored ; and those in neutral categories (or those which contained conflicting statements) were scored o. Using this index, scores were obtained for the ratio of favorable to unfavorable paragraphs and the gross number of paragraphs carried on the issue, including those counted as neutral or balanced. A sample of die material was submitted to a panel of judges using the same instructions followed by the original coder, and the degree of agreement was computed. 7 s. The display index, based on Budd's "attention score," 8 was Christen T. Jonassen, "Community Typology," in Marvin B. Sussman, ed.. Community Structure and Analysis, New York, Crowell, 959, pp. 84. «For example, one of the categories was: "Statements supporting opponents of Medicare," while another was the more general: "Expressions of opposition to Medicare." Even though it was possible for each coder to code an item in any one of three ways (favorable, unfavorable, or neutral), the percentage of agreements between panelists and the original coder was high, averaging 84 per cent. Almost all disagreements involved coding by one of the judges in a directional category and by the other in a neutral category. Had the neutral category been omitted from the above, the degree of agreement probably would have been somewhat higher.» Richard W. Budd, "Attention Score: A Device for Measuring News 'Play,' " Journalism Quarterly, VoL 4, No. a, 964, pp Downloaded from on 3 March 8

4 TABLE PREDICTOR (ENVIRONMENTAL) VARIABLES FOR ALL NEWSPAPERS Newspaper A B C D E F G H I J K L M N P Q Pub. Attitude Est. CO A- Index Editorial Activity Urban we OAS $3, or Less or Over for Kennedy No. of Docs, per, Unemployed Education Circulation 7,6,974 5, 4,4 6,93 5,986 5,973 9,89 6,94 7,86 7,934 7,93 5,436 8,576 4,863 5,6 4,55 KEY TO ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABLES: Pub. Attitude (publisher's attitude) 6 is most favorable to Medicare, is most against it. Est. CO (estimated community opinion) figures are estimated per cent for Medicare. A- Index (attitude-opinion index) = publisher opposed, perceives community opposed; = publisher opposed, perceives community for; 3 = publisher for, perceives community opposed; 4 = publisher for, perceives community for. Editorial Activity Measured by the number of editorials and cartoons run on the issue during the time period studied (+ = favorable to Medicare, = unfavorable). Such activity was considered as an environmental "force" because it provided news gatekeepers with what may have been their only direct sources of information on how their publishers felt about Medicare. WC per cent white collar; OAS per cent receiving Old Age Assistance. o z o a Downloaded from on 3 March 8

5 NEWSPAPER GATEKEEPERS 65 aimed at showing the intent of the gatekeeper by providing scores on the variables that give one item prominence over another. Criteria used for assigning scores on the display given each story about Medicare were the number of columns occupied by the headline, position on the page, and length of story. Direction of the score on this index was determined by the net direction of the paragraphs contained in the story. The data. Tables and show data collected under methods described here and used as indicators of gatekeeper behavior and of environmental "forces." TABLE CRITERION (GATEKEEPER BEHAVIOR) VARIABLES FOR ALL NEWSPAPERS Newspaper A B C D E F G H I J K L M N P Q Direction* Gross Contend Display, AU Pages P.I Display P.I Ratio of paragraphs coded "favorable" to those coded "unfavorable." b Total paragraphs favorable, unfavorable, or neutral carried on the Medicare issue. Hypotheses. The hypotheses for this study were that each of the indicators of publisher attitude, publisher's perception of community opinion, and community conditions would be found to be systematically related to each of the measurements of gatekeeper behavior (i.e. news coverage). Manipulation of data. Relationship of each of the environmental "forces" to each of the indicators of news coverage was calculated through use of a computer program, which provided a matrix of simple correlations between each of the predictor (environmental) variables and each of the criterion (gatekeeper behavior) variables. An effort also was made to develop a prediction equation through use of a canonical correlation procedure in which a weight was Downloaded from on 3 March 8

6 66 LEWIS DONOHEW computed for each of the variables, but this part of the procedure was not successful because of the small N. Since it seems reasonably certain that all the gatekeepers had been exposed to largely the same items on the approach side of the gate, 9 and yet measurements of what appeared on the other side showed there was considerable variation for the population, it appears reasonable to ask: Was this variation in what came through the "gate" systematically related to the "forces" on the approach side of the gate? FINDINGS In this study, the null hypothesis for the publisher-attitude variable might have been stated in the form of the journalist's credo that the publisher's opinion should be contained on the editorial page and not in the news columns. If this had been true, we would have expected only random correlations between scores on coverage and position of the publisher. Instead, it was found that these two variables were strongly related at a level well beyond that which could have occurred by chance. Table 3 shows that publisher attitude correlated.73 with content scores and.7 with scores on display when the total newspaper was considered. This one predictor variable, then, accounts for about 5 per cent of the variance (r ) in each of these criterion variables, leaving the remainder of the variance in gatekeeping behavior to be explained by other "forces." That publisher attitude is a significant force in the news channel was further indicated by a Mann-Whitney U Test which showed that the difference in coverage scores (derived by the content analysis indexes) between newspapers whose publishers favored Medicare and those whose publishers opposed it was significant at the.6 level.» In this study, it was not known what all the items looked like as they approached the gatekeeper because the investigator did not take original wire copy and measure it against the copy that appeared in each newspaper. Instead, the study population was limited to newspapers exposed to the same wire service and only the completed products were measured. As noted earlier, the Medicare issue was the stimulus for this project, not just wire stories on Medicare. Thus, copy from all sources was included in the content variable. However, the few piece* of non-wire copy carried were "svamped" by the wire copy, and intercorrelation between scores on wire copy only and scores on wire copy plus copy from other sources was very strong (r.9). The content variable measuring all news coverage of Medicare was used in this study.» For example, see Canon V, American Society of Newspapor Bottom, "Canons of Journalism," in Wilbur Schramm, ed.. Mass Communications, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, i96, pp. 6x4-6x5. Downloaded from on 3 March 8

7 NEWSPAPER GATEKEEPERS TABLE 3 CORRELATIONS OF GATEKEEPER BEHAVIOR (NEWS COVERAGE) AND INDICATORS OF ENVIRONMENTAL "FORCES"* 67 Environmental Forces Publisher attitude Estimated community opinion Attitude-opinion index Editorial activity Per cent: Urban White collar On Old Age Assistance $3, or less income Age 65 and over Voting for Kennedy Unemployed Education level Doctors per, population Circulation Direction Gross Gatekeeper Behavior Display All Pages P.I Display P.I Correlations of.47 or greater are significant at the.5 level, using a two-tailed test. Page I correlations between publisher attitude and news coverage were lower (.47 on content;.5s on display) than those involving all pages. Since differences in coverage were lessened when the measurement included only that page on which all papers were approximately equal, it seemed worth determining if the observed differences when all pages were considered were a function of size and therefore of available space. This notion was contradicted by the results of a U Test. When the population was broken down into abovemedian and below-median circulation groups, no significant differences were found either on content (p =.6) or on display (p =.5). Thus, publisher attitude appeared to hold up as the greatest single "force" operating within the news channel. Considering the other hypotheses, there is little to indicate that either perceived community opinion or community conditions are significant forces in the news channel. Table 3 shows that the publishers' estimates of how the community would have voted on the issue were not significantly related to any of the coverage scores. It also reveals that among other variables indicating community conditions, relationships with news coverage for the most part were small or not significant and some even tended in a negative direction. Briefly, Table 3 indicates that newspapers that had coverage more.9.8 Downloaded from on 3 March 8

8 68 LEWIS DONOHEW favorable to Medicare in most instances had publishers who favored Medicare and usually supported it editorially. These newspapers tended to have greater circulation and to be located in urban communities, which had more white-collar workers, fewer people receiving old age assistance, fewer persons with $3, or less income, and more doctors per, population. The reverse is true of papers that had coverage less favorable to Medicare. There was little or no relationship between the coverage of the papers and the publishers' estimates of community opinion on the issue, percentage age sixty-five and over, percentage of the vote for John F. Kennedy, unemployment, or education. Since a canonical correlation (R c ), involving both multiple predictors (environmental variables) and multiple criteria (news coverage variables), was not developed, it is not known how much of the total variance in the coverage remained unaccounted for. Thus, it is possible that there are important uninvestigated forces in the news channel. Such variables as educational background of the gatekeepers or face-to-face meetings with representatives of "pressure" groups in the communities might be worth studying, for example. CONCLUSION In summary, the findings in this study () provide further evidence, from a different direction than Breed's, that publisher attitude is an important force in the news channel; () are not consistent with the Berelson statement indicating that perceived public opinion alters gatekeeping behavior; and (3) generally do not support the hypothesis that community conditions are related to coverage, although some significant negative correlations were found. Downloaded from on 3 March 8