"Journalists each day make countless selective news judgments that determine what kinds of stories get reported, what elements of those stories are emphasized, and how those stories are presented. Although the U.S. Constitution and a robust professional ethos help construct an environment in which American journalists express and defend extensive autonomy to make such judgments, they also hold themselves and their peers to an array of unwritten standards for what constitutes valid or essential news. In this dissertation, I examine one discursive means of constructing the conditions under which journalists define the types of people and events that they must cover, and can't ignore: the news values implicitly and explicitly introduced in journalism textbooks. Such texts, often taught in introductory journalism classes, embody an interpretive synthesis that offers a window into prevailing journalism values and practices in a given era. Textbooks are many journalists' first encounter with the criteria that reporters and editors use to rationalize what is and is not newsworthy, including key concepts such as timeliness, proximity, prominence, unusualness, impact, conflict, and human interest. Textbooks also introduce journalism students both to a culture of explicitly celebrated professional autonomy to define the news, and to a system of explicit and implied constraints on that autonomy under written law, institutional norms, and varyingly viscous socio-cultural conditions. Through close reading of 75 textbooks published from 1894-2016, I highlight the enumeration of key news judgment criteria and map both consistency and change in the treatment of such criteria over nearly 125 years of journalism instruction. Analysis focuses on several areas of interest: identification and definition of key news values, with special attention to the affective elements of human interest and contradictory rationalizations for emphasizing conflict; an exploration of rhetoric that veers paradoxically between defenses of autonomy and justifications for disciplinary restraint; and application of the discipline-autonomy paradox to the special case of presidential news coverage. I present the analysis through the lens of social theorists Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, who both studied how individuals are implicated in power relations influencing behavioral patterns that cannot be explained solely by rational or self-interested choice, even when these individuals are not directed to act in a particular way. Specifically, I draw on Foucault's concepts of discipline and governmentality and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and professional fields to explore how naturalizing patterns of thought and action artificially limit journalists' perceived choices in reporting and presenting news, even when no formal constraints intervene. This study provides a rare long-range view of news values, which are more frequently studied in contemporary snapshots to inform content or framing analyses. By bringing Foucault and Bourdieu to bear on the interaction of news values and the more commonly studied concept of "objectivity," this analysis offers new insights into the discursive conditions favoring news decisions that influence the course of U.S. representative democracy. The dissertation concludes with a review of three non-traditional frameworks for news, with an emphasis on nonrepresentational approaches that might help expand possibilities for conceiving and presenting news in the future."--Pages ii-iii.
Read
