Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 22

20 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