The relevance of Galtung and Ruge

We are studying International Journalism currently in Semester One.

One of the topics is what governs the news values that drive the International Agenda.

Most criteria refer back to Galtung and Ruge's 1965 study which lists 12 values including

1.Frequency
2.Threshold
3.Unambiguity
4.Meaningfulness
5.Consonance
6.Unexpectedness
7.Continuity
8.Reference to unique nations
9.Reference to elite people
10.Composition
11.Personalisation
12.Negativity

How relevant a 40 year old study in an age when the multiplicity of media is so much greater is hard to ascertain

In 2003,Ethan Zuckerman looked at the coverage across the internet when Ethnic violence flared up in Congo and over 1000 people were killed in a single incident in a conflict that was estimated to have cost the lives of over 3 million people.

The events went almost unreported.Getting a brief mention in the New York Times.On the same day its front page was reporting Iraq and across the Web this topic had 550,000 mentions as opposed to the Congo which had 1200 in the month.

Gultang and Rouge could have predicted the results Zucherman argues saying that the event fit a number of criteria,that DRC is a non elite nation,its people are non elite,its culture is different from the West,and had little meaning for American readers and it was ongoing so more casualties could be expected.

The internet gives so much more opportunity to gather news data but other factors can come into play.In this situation,communication difficulties in an area of the world decimated by years of war have to come into play.

And perhaps another major factor was that the Iraq war was about to start and was using many available journalistic sources.

Zuchermann comes up with economic factors as being a major driver of news values.

When studying not only news sites but also weblogs where you may expect the proliferation of sources to involve wider topics,this was simply not the case.

In a telling part of the report,the author asks the question "does it matter".In the case of the Congolese it does because greater publicity means that Western governments become more aware and public outcry can force governments to intervene

Machin and Niblock last year questioned the values in today's media world

Machin and Niblock ask working journalists to reflect on their choices and find that the selection and presentation of news stories is increasingly influenced not by values inherent to the story but by the fast-paced nature of the newsroom and target audience

Others have suggested other criteria that drive those values.Gans suggests that as far as domestic stories are concerned,they can be valued by their

1.rank in government or other hierarchies
2.their impact on the nation and national interests.
3.Their impact on people
4.their significance for the past and the future

Other criteria have been identified as having a bearing have been,significance,drama surprise,sex,scandal and crime.

It was five years previously that Tony Harcup and Deirdre O'Neill tested the news values of the British press.The paper points out the shortcomings of the study,that it ignored day to day coverage of lesser events,and that their list of factors excluded those of the visual variety.More importantly certain stories get a lot of coverage without fitting any of their categories.

Harcup and O'Neill looked at 1276 articles that appeared in the British national press in March 1999 using the Telegraph,the Sun and the Mail.They claimed that unlike Galtung and Ruge thy tackled the assignment from the opposite perspective,that it had already been published so how was it chosen.They then attempted to fit the stories into the twelve categories.

It was interesting that since 1965,other criteria had appeared,being entertainment(,reference to picture opportunities,sex,animals,showbiz and TV and humour)and more tellingly campaigns promotions and agendas.

They concluded that the Galtung and Ruge factors no longer covered the majority of stories and came up with their 10 criteria

1.The power elite
2.Celebrity
3.Entertainment
4.Surprise
5.Bad news
6.Good news
7.Magnitude
8.Relevance
9.Follow up
10.The agenda of the newspaper