Hard News Is Novel, Deviant, Out of the Ordinary
Hard news reports what happened today, not what happens every day. Although novel events are more likely to be covered Breitling Replica Watches if they are part of a current theme in the news, hard news is the opposite of the routine and accepted. The syndicated column “News of the Weird” is a flagrant example of this norm.
One study concluded that all mass media content is entertainment in that it is con-duct “outside the expected limits of routine behavior.”12 Even news stories are entertainment designed to attract and hold a mass audience. For example, during the times that surveys are conducted by television rating services, local television news programs air “lurid and titillating news features, most often those with a sex or violence angle that can be heavily promoted, ideally as a weeklong series.”13
The problems with this entertainment requirement–related to the criterion of novelty that we describe–are suggested by Tom Wicker: “The dull, the routine, the unexciting, is seldom seen as news, although . . . the dull, routine, unexciting management of rates and routes for the railroads, truckers, and airlines may affect far more Americans in their daily lives than some relatively more glamorous presidential directive or congressional action.”
Reporters, chosen partly for their nose for what is new and unusual, have a low tolerance for the long haul of a complex story that may take years to develop. This well-known media emphasis on novelty also tempts protesters to invent ever more extreme ways to dramatize their cause in order to obtain coverage.
Those protesting the development and use of nuclear power illustrate this problem. Their concerns were dramatized in 1978 with the accident at Three Mile Island, and they received substantial press coverage. Since that time, however, press interest has been low, although protesters believe that their concerns continue to be legitimate, and work on nuclear plants continues. Even the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 did not help them, once it was established that the Soviet plant had few similarities to plants in the United States. As a result, U.S. protesters become more desperate to attract journalistic attention. For example, one antinuclear protester, participating in a demonstration marking the thirty-sixth anniversary of the first nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site, knelt in front of a bus carrying workers to the test site and poured red fluid from a baby’s bottle. As sheriff’s deputies lifted her from the road, she screamed: “This is the blood of the future! This is the blood of our children!”
Resource-poor groups often have to depend on deviance and disruption to receive media coverage. In her study of newspaper access, Edie Goldenberg concluded that “the more a group’s political goals deviate from prevailing Cartier Replica Watches social norms, the more likely the group is to gain access to the press, other things being equal.” Elsewhere she writes that “the intensity of a conflict is a good predictor of coverage, ‘unruly groups,’ those who initiate violence or strikes, are relatively successful as compared with those that do not.” As these comments indicate, the emphasis on novelty in hard news is closely related to its focus on drama, conflict, and violence; the novelty of a large demonstration is likely to be overshadowed by the violent acts of a few.
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