Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 22
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Popular Culture Review
advantages for news workers in terms of quickly processing quantities
of facts into easily recognizable categories (Gitlin 264). For example,
when a journalist decides that a fact is newsworthy because it is
unusual, that decision implies that the journalist has also decided
what is usual or normal. When such decisions are made wholesale
about a class of facts, such as the assumption most journalists make
that fads from California are usually bizarre, such decisions become
stereotypes, standardized explanations that defeat the spirit of
objectivity, because they apply value judgments to new facts without
analyzing them independently (Cans 201).
The rhythms and conventions developed by journalistic
organizations construct a "web of facticity" out of the events in the
external world, a process which relies on the form and style of news
stories to eliminate much idiosyncrasy from the facts and which
encourages official sources to create the facts that satisfy the
conventions of news construction (Tuchman, Making News 86). Thus, in
this view, the meaning of facts, which the concept of objectivity
assumes to be present and obvious in the external world, is itself a
creation of the journalistic process.
The work of other scholars who have focused on the systems
approach to studying the news media suggests that journalists'
relationships with their sources interfere with those journalists'
attempts to be objective. The systems approach to the study of
fx)litical communications establishes a framework for examining the
various components at work in the process of political communication
in liberal-democratic societies (Gurevich and Blumler, Tracey). The
importance of that research for this study is the finding that the
relationships that develop between journalists and politicians often
become more important to the journalists than dedication to
objectivity.
Blumler and Gurevich, who studied the relationships between
p>oliticians and journalists during election campaigns, suggested that a
"shared culture" emerges between politicians and the press (481). In
this culture, the relationships between journalists and politicians
become regulated by a number of norms, only one of which is
objectivity. Other norms, including a privileged position for those in
power and established methods for resolving conflicts, are seen as
very significant components of this culture. In fact, even "the needs of
the audience may be relegated to a back seat" by both politicians and