THEORIES OF MEDIA ORGANIZATION AND MEDIA WORK

Williams Chapter 4

• What we see, read and hear in the media is the end product of a complex process.

• Consumers are encouraged to see the output of the media as simple, straightforward and natural but in real sense the makers of the media products are engaged in highly organized multi-layered system of production.

LEVELS OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS

• Study of media organization and media work has its roots in the early observations of journalist by Weber(2001)(1918)and park (1923).

• The first research on media workers was by Leo Rosten (1937) Who studied the Washington press corps.

• Four years later, Rosten examined the Hollywood media industry workers.

• Empirical media research has been conducted at three levels;– First level focusing on individual media

worker and his or her preferences, social background that shape this preferences, their professional ideologies and the practices that are adopted in their daily work.

– Organizational structures and routines and their influence on media practitioners and their work

– Interaction between media organizations and the wider social, political and cultural environment within which they operate

• There are overlaps between these levels but each one of them, empirical research has wrestled with one overriding concern, who has the power to influence the power by which media messages are produced and how is this power exercised?

• In attempting to analyze media production, social science has primarily focused on one kind of media organization and media practitioner, the newsroom and the journalist. Most of the early work on media work concentrated on news.

• Theoretically, discussions at each of this levels is couched in terms of structures and theories.

• Structure refers to limitations and constraints placed on human action.

• Agency claims that suggests human action is independent.

• Functionalism which dominates research into media organizations and media work focused on the impersonal processes through which organizations work rather than on the motivations of the participants.

• The failure of the functionalist approach to examine the relationship of the organization to the broader social structure, to explore the possibility of conflict within organizations, to consider the aims and goals of individuals inside organizations and to account for the ways in which organizational goals are decided and how they can change resulted into a very narrow conceptualization of media production.

• The criticism is also leveled at Marxist approaches which see media organizations as inextricably tied to the dominant social institutions (Gallagher, 1982:153)

• As such, those working in the media are simply serving the interests of the capitalist or owning class and acting as mouthpieces or megaphones for their views, opinions and interpretations

• Neo Marxist approaches sometimes stress the day-to-day relative autonomy of journalist and news producers (Ferguson,1990:117).

• Pluralist see media practitioners as autonomous individuals whose creative and interpretive skills are encouraged and valued by the organizations for which they work.

• Another approach, which draws on Webers work on bureaucracy presents a dynamic picture of media organizations. This approach is labeled ‘the social action’ model.

INDIVIDUAL MEDIA WORKERS• Arguing that media content is

determined by the decisions of the individual media worker accords with the assumption of media audiences and the self image of those working in the media.

• An assumption made for all media is that the personality, work and talent of the individual is made is primarily responsible for what they produce.

GATEKEEPERS • A concept introduced by David

Manning White in 1950.• He drew from the works of

psychologist Kurt Lewin who in work identified certain places as gates where information is filtered.

• Gate keeping means a story is transmitted from one gate keeper after another in the chain of communication.

• Each gate keeper opens some gates to let some stories through and closes them to others.

• White identified his news wire editor as one key decision maker and he used him as the basis of his research.

• The result of his work was that public information was seen to be determined by editorial gatekeepers who chose the news to use.

• Whites model is today seen as naïve and simplistic , dismissed as of being of little utility (O’sullivan et al.,1994). The focus of a single gatekeeper watching over a single gate ignores the complexity of modern media organizations as well as minimizes the complexity of News making (Schudson,2000:177).

• Chinball (1977:6) argues that the reporter does not go around picking out news as if they were fallen apples but rather creates news stories by selecting fragments of information from the mass of raw data.

SOCIAL ATTITUDES AND VALUES• Studies of social background of media occupations

show in one way or another, the industry is unrepresentative of broader society.

• Media are seen as shaped by the social characteristics of those who work in them

• Feminist critics draw attention to the gendered structure of media production. They argue male bias in the media reflects the pattern of male dominance of the media industries.

• The under representation of ethnic minorities in the media workplace is another example of social bias.

• While there are numerous studies of the social background and political studies of media workers, no clear patterns emerges

• What all these studies of the social background of those working in the assumption that group attitudes and values explain the pattern of coverage in the media.

• Bringing in people from different social backgrounds and with different attitudes will lead to new reforms of representation.

• Drawing an empirical test to build a theoretical position on social attitudes shows no clear pattern has emerged.

• Murdock 1980 argues that the backgrounds, lifestyles and commitments of those working in TV drama make up an essential component in the process of drama production.

• Since 1980’s the number of women in the media industry has increased considerably.

• There is debate over whether sufficient women have attained positions of power in the industry to influence the selection of news or the rest of the media output.

PROFFESIONAL ROLES AND CONCEPTIONS

• Media workers understanding what their job entails could determine choice made in production process.

• Peoples view of their job can be separated from their own personal views and attitudes as well as their social backgrounds and experience.

• By examining the role of media professionals, some scholars argue that we can understand media content.

• While most consider journalism as a profession, the criteria used to define professionalism do not apply very well to journalism (Shoemaker and Reese 1991:73-74).

• There is no mechanism to enforce an agreed set of standards governing the behavior of journalist, nor is there any prescribed body of knowledge and formal training practitioners must acquire before entering the field.

• Common sense presents the role of journalist as being one of neutral observer of the events unfolding in front of him or her.

• Not all journalist, however, define their professionalism in terms of neutrality.

• Cohen (1963) distinguishes between two different role conceptions from journalist from his examination of American journalist and the foreign policy process.

• Kocher (1986) British and German journalist differ in their perception of their roles, their professionalism, motivation and evaluation of the norms connected with work in journalism. German journalist place more value on opinion while British journalist see their role as transmitters of facts.

• The perception that personal values or professional roles explain media content is rejected by scholars such as Epstein.

• Epstein (1974:Xiv) believes that individuals modify their behavior in accordance with the requisites of the organizations.

• Hood (1972) argues individuals work is determined by what they believe to be possible, tolerated and approved by the organization.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND CONTROL

• Media organizations like all other organizations develop techniques to transform the unpredictability of the world into a set of routines. Universities for example transform the process of higher education and learning into subjects, courses or modules, timetables, lectures, seminars, essays and examinations.

• News organizations similarly have a number of routines and conventions to transform their raw material into essays.

• Millions of events happening everyday all over the world are the raw material.

• The chaotic and varied nature of these events is packaged into a number of routines for the gathering, selection and processing of news. To be news worthy, events must be compatible with these routines.

• Warren breed (1995) Examined how news policy is enforced amongst news papers journalism. He singled out three problems on why conformity is not automatic.-there are ethical norms about how journalist should do their job-newspaper staffs are more liberal than their publishers-In a professional setting, publishers should not directly intervene to tell their journalist what stories to cover and how.

• Breed emphasizes on the socialization of reporters and news workers with regard to the norms of the jobs.

• News reporters on newspapers are never told what policy is or how they should do the job. They learn it through the process of Osmosis.

• The need to enforce policy is see in the hierarchical nature of newsroom which limits and shapes the discretion that reporters have in their news gathering and news reporting activities.

• News stories take the form of the inverted pyramid that can be easily out.

• News is the result of methods news workers employ which have been developed in cooperation’s between reporters and their employers (Fishman, 1981:14).

• Understanding media content in terms of the goals and needs of the organization is has limitations.

• Turnstall (1970:8) asks; when is a media organization is an organization?

• Much of research into media organization has concentrated on the editorial or creative departments employing people to make a product of their audience.

• The focus on the creative side of the media production ignores a range of other factors as important, if not more so, in shaping the media content.

• The media contents are not monolithic raises a second problem. Can we talk with any certainty about what are the needs or goals of media organizations?

• Much organizational theory content particularly Marxist and functionalist present the goals of the media organization as self-evident and given.

• The focus of what happens inside media organizations is also seen as obscuring the broader cultural and social context within which media production happens.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ENVIROMENT

• The relationship between media and the outside world has been conceptualized in a number of ways.

• On one hand, media workers and organization have the power to shape the media content.

• On the other hand, external forces particularly other social institutions and the audience determine what is reported and represented in the media.

• Sources are central to news production as most events are not witnessed by reporters.

• Pluralist and Marxist have both come to see official sources as dominating the news agenda. Preference is given to the opinions of those in authority as news privileges the privileged (Ward, 1985:114)

• Pluralists see this domination as a breakdown of the normal operation of media organizations.

• Marxists argue it is a natural outcome of the structured relationship between the media and the powerful, the ruling or the dominant class (Hall, 1978).

• Both approaches stress the power of official sources comes from their ability to exploit the organizational routines of the news media.

• Cultural accounts of media organization see what the media practitioners do as structured by cultural influences that are inscribed in their work routines including their relationship with their sources rather than dictated by hierarchical supervision and control (Curran, 1992)

• Another external force influencing media production is Technology. Rapid change in information and communication technology is fundamentally changing the production process.

• New technology is also seen as increasing the ability of the government and other social entities to strengthen their hold over the media