Cottle on News Access
Cottle, Simon 2000, Rethinking news access, Journalism Studies, 1(3),pp. 427-448.
Cottle begins this detailed discussion of the theories of news access by defining three different approaches which are each in thier own way to do with power relations.
1. Power and Ideology
Here the news media, both press and broadcasting, are said routinely to privilege the voices of the powerful and marginalize those of the powerless— whether as a result of media ownership, control and instrumental design; prohibitive costs of market entry, advertising pressures and the commodification of news; or more diffuse cultural processes informing journalist socialization, news production and the ideological reproduction of consensus (Golding and Murdock, 1979; Gitlin, 1980; Hall, 1982; Herman and Chomsky, 1988). (p.427)
2. Power as Competition and Negotiation
More politically contingent (less theoretically absolute) studies of state, media and civil society point to the dynamic processes surrounding news access, whether the competition of news sources and their strategies of “enclosure” and “disclosure” (Ericson et al., 1989; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994), the “indexing” of news access to the changing political consensus (Hallin, 1986; Bennett, 1990; Bennett and Paletz, 1994; Butler, 1995), or the contests and conè icts informing news approached as “multi-purpose arenas” (Wolfsfeld, 1997). (p.428)
3. Power and social difference
Yet still others, in productive critique of Habermas’ views of the media as “public sphere”, normatively propose that the news media must contribute to a more vibrant public arena in which diverse social, political and cultural interests can gain access and engage (contra Habermas) in what is often likely to be decidedly “non-consensual” displays of social difference (Curran, 1991; Fraser, 1992; Hallin, 1994; Dahlgren, 1995). (p.428)
4. Power and representation
How social groups and interests are defined and symbolically visualized is also part and parcel of news access. Whether social groups are representationally legitimated or symbolically positioned as “Other”, labelled deviant or rendered speechless can have far reaching consequences as shown, for example, in studies of media representation of youth subcultures (Cohen, 1972), ethnic minorities (Van Dijk, 1991), political dissidents and “terrorists” (Gerbner, 1992) or the victims of “risk society” (Cottle, 2000a). Much depends, then, on how we conceptualize “news access”, how we theorize the relationship between the news media and wider society, and the mechanisms and meanings that surround and inform processes and patterns of news entry. (p.428)
Two paradigms
He then goes on to decsribe two broad paradigms that operate in journalism studies. The sociological and the culturalist.
The sociological paradigm
- tends to forefront and investigate news access in terms of strategic and definitional power,
- examines patterns of news access, routines of news production and processes of source intervention,
- how each of these conditions the production of public knowledge.
The culturalist paradigm
- disposed to theorize news access in terms of cultural and ritual power
- are sensitized to the symbolic role of news actors and how they perform/enact within the conventions
- focus on textual structures of news representation— ritual, story, narrative
- contribute to and sustain wider cultural myths that resonate within popular culture…..
The sociological paradigm encourages us to:
- look at the role of strategic power in the public representation of politics (broadly concieved)
The culturalist paradigm invites us to:
- see how cultural forms and symbols are implicated within the politics of representation (more textually conceived).
