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News Values
By Joshua A. Braun, Cornell
1. frequency—Events that unfold conveniently within the production cycle of a news outlet are more likely to be reported.
2. threshold—The larger the event, the more people it affects, the more likely it is to be reported. Events can meet the threshold criterion either by being large in absolute terms, or by marking an increase in the intensity of an ongoing issue.
3. unambiguity—The fewer ways there are of interpreting an event, the more likely it is to be reported.
4. meaningfulness—The more culturally proximate and/or relevant an event is, the more likely it is to be reported.
5. consonance—If a journalist has a mental pre-image of an event, if it’s expected to happen, then it is more likely to be reported. This is even more true if the event is something the journalist desires to happen.
6. unexpectedness—If an event is unexpected, it is more likely to be considered newsworthy and to be reported.
7. continuity—Once an issue has made the news once, future events related to it are more likely to be reported.
8. compositional balance—News editors will attempt to present their audience with a “balanced diet” of news. An event that contributes to the diversity of topics reported is more likely to be covered than one that adds to a pile of similar news items.
9. elite nations/regions—Events that involve elite nations or regions are more likely to be reported than those that do not.
10. elite people—Events that involve elite people are more likely to be reported than those that do not.
11. personification—Events that can be discussed in terms of the actions of individual actors are more likely to be reported than those that are the outcome of abstract social forces. By the same token, social forces are more likely to be discussed in the news if they can be illustrated by way of reference to individuals.
12. negativity—An event with a negative outcome is more likely to be reported than one with a positive outcome.
Galtung and Ruge (1965) originally conceived of this list as a way of describing why the press of a given nation might choose to include coverage of some foreign events and not others. However, their list of news criteria has since been applied in a broad variety of contexts (Tumber, 1999), from general domestic reporting (Bell, 1991) to science journalism (Gregory & Miller, 1998). News values are commonly held to be active at several stages in the gatekeeping process. First, as mentioned above, they supposedly make a story or event more likely to be chosen as news (the “selection” hypothesis). Second, they're said to be underscored, or even exaggerated when a news story is written (the “distortion” hypothesis), and finally, they are purportedly further emphasized as a news item passes through each stage of the production process (the “replication” hypothesis; Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Sande, 1971; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001; Zelizer, 2004). Moreover, it is commonly suggested that the more news values a given event possesses, the more likely it is to become news (the “additivity” hypothesis), and that an event that is lacking in one news value must make up for this absence by being particularly strong in one or more others (the “complementarity” hypothesis; Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Sande, 1971).
As mentioned previously, Galtung and Ruge’s set of news values is far from the only extant list (see for instance Warner, 1970; Ruehlmann, 1979; O’Sullivan et al., 1983; Hetherington, 1985; Bell, 1991; Ryan, 1991; Gregory & Miller, 1998; Herbert, 2000; McQuail, 2000; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001; Allern, 2002; and Eilders, 2006. Some of these derive from Galtung and Ruge’s original 1965 list, while others are entirely distinct from it). Many sets of news factors have been generated, and those that exist have been applied in very different ways. While the extent to which scholars explicitly acknowledge the differences in their applications of the news values framework varies widely, it is useful here to roughly divide their usage into different academic traditions.
Psychological vs. Cultural Perspectives. While Galtung and Ruge (1965) underscored the ways in which news values interact with culture, they based many of their original news factors in principles from the psychology of perception. In short, they expected that journalists use the same logic in tuning into and reporting events that people more generally apply to filtering and making sense of information about their world. Some scholars, particularly those in the German news values tradition, have retained this psychological framework—applying news factors not only to journalists’ selection of news items, but also in studies aimed at gauging laypeople’s attention to and retention of information in the news (Eilders, 2006). However, these assumptions about the psychological roots of news values are not universally recognized and this has led to a schism in their application in the academy. Many scholars have taken news values—whether those of Galtung and Ruge or other scholars—to be an accurate representation of the news media’s selection practices, but have simultaneously denied that these selection mechanisms are at all universal in nature. Rather, researchers taking this perspective frequently suggest that news values describe a unique form of framing within the Western press. John Hartley (1982), for instance, while citing Galtung and Ruge’s original 1965 study of news values, contends that “news values are neither natural nor neutral. They form a code which sees the world in a very particular (even peculiar) way” (p. 80). Scholars from both the psychological and cultural perspectives have nonetheless adopted similar normative claims, suggesting that news values constitute some sort of filter, of which journalists should be cognizant and which they should seek to overcome.
Research vs. Educational Perspectives. Scholars also differ frequently as to whether news values, as a conceptual framework, should be regarded as a research perspective, a pedagogical tool, or a heuristic model. Many scholars, particularly in the German and other European traditions, continue to develop news values as a research perspective (Eilders, 2006; Harcup & O’Neill, 2009). At the same time, much of the contemporary discussion surrounding news values has moved from academic journals to textbooks, where news factors are frequently employed as a mechanism for teaching journalism students a shorthand for the types of events that tend to be newsworthy. There is, of course, also a middle ground in which scholars tackling a broad range of research questions within journalism studies will themselves use news values as a heuristic for discussing newsworthiness. This variance in the type and extent of the utility extended to news values as a conceptual framework is not so much a subject of debate as it is a simple difference in their application across research and educational contexts.
The diversity of perspectives surrounding news values and their utility is partly the source and partly the result of a range of critiques surrounding news values as a way of understanding the news and newsworthiness. Below is a sampling of these critiques.
An Overabundance of Lists. Galtung and Ruge’s 1965 list of news values has been added to by over 40 years’ worth of additional literature (Ryan, 1991). Landmark or not, the popularity of their original paper has not stopped scholars and journalists from generating list upon list of alternative and additional criteria. Some of these additional lists, such as Herbert Gans’ (1979) have been informed by and incorporated into substantial bodies of research, theory, and scholarship. Others are far more prosaic, terse, and off-the-cuff—a few even stand alone without explanation. All are reasonably well-informed by one source or another, whether that be fieldwork, survey research, content analysis, professional expertise, or some combination of these. As such, there is often little to recommend one list over another, or to suggest whether a given list is “complete”—a difficulty chronicled by O’Sullivan et al. as early as 1983. Unsurprisingly, problems with coherence among and between this multitude of lists have arisen and become points of contention among both researchers and educators.
Reliance on Simple, Discreet Events. McQuail (2000) points out that real-world events are generally complex and are likely to score high or low, not simply on one or two news values, but a whole host of them. As such, it becomes particularly difficult to isolate any given news value well enough to determine its validity or predictive value, especially when one considers that such stories are competing with, and often eclipsed by, a constantly changing flow of equally complicated news items (p. 341). Moreover, Hartley (1982) notes that events and issues often become news without scoring highly on any news value (p. 79). Harcup and O’Neill (2001, 2009) further critique Galtung and Ruge’s list of news criteria for focusing strictly on events in the news, when many news items are not, in fact, about discreet events but about trends, speculation, issues, and so forth.
Values vs. Value Judgments. Some claim that news values in fact disguise important aspects of journalism as an enterprise—namely, the ideological assumptions under which news workers labor. According to Hall (1973), “News values appear as a set of neutral, routine practices, but we need, also to see formal news values as an ideological structure—to examine these rules as the formalization and operationalization of an ideology of news” (p. 182).
The lists often assume that the event-qualities journalists favor or exaggerate in their stories exist independently of the judgment of the reporter or news organization (McQuail, 2000, p. 279; Harcup & O’Neill, 2009). In a review of the German news values tradition, Eilders (2006) asserts that a consensus has arisen among researchers to treat news values as qualities of the news, not the events behind it. But this important distinction, while recognized in some circles, has nonetheless often proven difficult to operationalize from a research standpoint (Harcup & O’Neill, 2001, 2009).
(How) Do Journalists Use News Values? McQuail (1992) points out content analysis is incapable of determining “what journalists and editors really think about relevance” (p. 216). This complicates attempts to examine the decisions of news workers from the perspective of finished texts, and as such, researchers have attempted to triangulate using other methods. Unfortunately, while a number of non-content analysis studies, such as those conducted by Peterson (1979, 1981; see Zelizer, 2004, p. 55 for a list of others), provide at least mixed support for Galtung and Ruge’s list of factors, these results fall amid a larger disagreement among newsroom ethnographers as to whether news values are used by journalists at all, and if so, consciously or unconsciously, and in what capacity.
Hetherington (1985) says “most journalists, in my experience, will resist formalised ‘news values,’ lest these cramp their freedom of decision. … Obviously journalists working at speed against edition times or programme ‘on-air’ times do not go through any mental checklist of factors such as Galtung and Ruge have listed” (p. 7). That said, he does leave open the possibility that news values may describe in broad terms the trends in journalists’ output, if not their decision-making process.
The Future of News Values
References
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Suggested citation
Braun, J.A. News Values. International Collaborative Dictionary of Communications (accessed DATE). R.K. Nielsen et al (Eds.), URL:http://mediaresearchhub.ssrc.org/icdc-content-folder/news-values/