***** D'ANGELO ************* EJC/REC Vol. 2, No. 1, 1991 ***


INFORMATION, IDEOLOGICAL DILEMMAS AND PERSIAN GULF WAR NEWS


Paul D'Angelo
Temple University


        Abstract.  This critical analysis of Persian
     Gulf war news in Time and Newsweek examines an
     operational definition of information manifested
     in reflexive news coverage and characterized as
     the "information front" in this reportage.  The
     "information front" is analyzed along two lines:
     (1) audiences and news media are best understood
     in terms of the information processes of each
     other, and (2) audiences and news media are
     engaged in social relations that are ideological.
     It is argued that (1) the hegemonic potential of
     this news was mitigated by reflexive coverage, and
     (2) cognitive schemas for information processing
     need to be recast as ideological processes.
     Finally, the dilemmas that members of audiences
     and news media faced in the context of Persian
     Gulf War news are examined.


     In the early evening of January 16, 1991 (EST), less
than 48 hours after a UN ultimatum authorized the use of
military force against Iraq, hostilities began.  "It was a
war that television spent five months preparing to cover,"
wrote Senior Writer Richard Zoglin for Time (Jan. 28, 1991,
p. 69), "and the start of hostilities was almost bizarrely
well timed: smack in the middle of the networks' evening
newscasts."  Viewership had begun to build days before the
January 15 UN deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait.  By
January 15, Nielsen ratings for ABC, CBS and NBC evening
newscasts were collectively up 19 percent from levels a week
earlier in the top 25 overnight TV markets (Electronic
Media, Jan. 21, 1991, p. 49).  Thus, when the initial
bombing assaults started, over 45% of all US households with
televisions (of a total of 93.1 million) were tuned in.
Viewership peaked at 75% between 9 and 9:30 p.m.  (EST) when
President Bush addressed the nation.  "[These] 71.5 million
households constituted the largest TV audience in history,
beating out 65.5 million households tuned in for the 1983
episodic finale of 'M*A*S*H'..."  (Electronic Media, Jan.
21, 1991, p. 49).

     The trade journal Editor and Publisher reported (March
30, 1991, pp. 11, 39) on a Times-Mirror audience survey
conducted at the end of January that introduces a conundrum
to this situation.  The report's author, Debra Gersh, noted
that "Since 1985, Times- Mirror has periodically asked the
American people to judge the relative importance of
censorship for the sake of national security vs. the news
media's ability to report stories [they feel are] in the
national interest."  She said this survey showed that for
the first time the American public did not side with the
media.  Moreover, the survey showed that 83% of respondents
rated coverage of the war as "excellent or good," and yet
83% also favored military censorship of war news coverage.
The survey showed that television was the favored medium for
getting news of the war.  Gersh also pointed out that
"nearly half of those surveyed said they have become
generally more interested in news since the war, with
traditional light users of news -- less educated and young
people -- showing the highest gains."

     Profiles drawn of other media also indicated increased
readership and listenership during the war, again, from
audiences who favored censorship of the news.  While
television news seems to have sparked initial interest and
motivation to monitor the war, editors of the over 1600
daily newspapers in the US noted that readers showed an
increased tendency to augment television coverage with the
context and perspective that print news offers (Editor and
Publisher, Jan. 26, 1991, p. 43).  An Associated Press
report (Editor and Publisher, Feb. 9, 1991, p. 10) noted
that some editors devoted as much as 70% of their news space
to the war, especially during the initial days, because
readers showed "an almost insatiable appetite for news."[1]

     Radio news also captured audiences during the war.
Although many network affiliates initially used television
audio to present war news, Mary Collins, writing in the
Washington Journalism Review (March 1991, p. 29), pointed
out that these stations soon switched to all-radio formats.
Radio news "has enjoyed a renaissance during the Persian
Gulf War by capitalizing on its role as the portable source
for a nation obsessed with a story.  There's news in the
car, in the mall, at the supermarket.  It's update heaven."

     Clearly, then, during the war, American audiences could
accurately be characterized as galvanized viewers, readers,
and listeners of news.  Audiences clamored for news.  Yet,
news organizations' abilities to gather information in their
accustomed ways was hampered by a military strategy that
denied access to journalists to war areas and that censored
outgoing reports.  And, as the poll cited above indicates,
audiences generally approved of this.

     This poll (and others; see footnote 9) is not cited to
demonstrate evidence of an oppositional attitude of
audiences toward Persian Gulf War news.  After all,
audiences were evidently quite _willing_ not to know the
censored or undivulged information if that could usefully
keep it from (1) Saddam Hussein, and from (2) shifting
popular opinion against the war.  Rather, the implications
of this curious mix of intense interest in the news, general
approval of media performance, and tolerance of censorship
will be explored here.

     In this study, I will examine Persian Gulf War news in
the context of popular weekly news magazines.  Looking at
Time and Newsweek specifically, I will argue that their
reportage of this war operationally opened up a rift between
news coverage and an institutionally purer form of
"information" -- a rift that itself became newsworthy.  The
rift between coverage and information -- characterized as
the "information front" by these magazines -- was cast in
_reflexive_ news: news organizations' epistemological
frameworks, procedures, and audiences were all subjects of
news.

     My aims in this analysis are twofold.  First, I will
elucidate the "information front" and try to show how
information was operationally defined by these newsmagazines
in the Persian Gulf War context.  With this operational
definition, I will show how reflexive news shed light on the
criteria that normally, if not normatively, constitute
information as defined by the press.  These criteria will
highlight the notion that the "information front" was as
much a perceived battle of new organizations' getting access
to war areas and constructing proper information for their
audiences as it was their trying to maintain a seamless
impression to audiences that they, the audiences, were
getting informed.

     The second aim will be to use the Persian Gulf War
context to cast a closer, and critical, look at theories of
information in mass mediated contexts.  The "critical"
aspect of this analysis will re-situate both functionalist
and critical theory perspectives of information processes
and processing.  This revised critical analysis will show
that information in mass mediated contexts cannot be a
postulated, empirical construct that inheres, in varying
amounts, in messages.  Rather, definitions of what
information is are bound to how it is constructed and used
by senders and receivers in specific and varied social
interactions.  Information is not a streamlined and
autonomous concept; it is discernible in social contexts
that include senders and receivers engaged in an often
uneasy, but mutually necessary, relationship.

     In sum, the historical accident of a war fought on an
"information front" as well as military ones is the basis of
this critical analysis.

     Two methodological points are crucial to this analysis.
The first seeks to understand news and audiences in
dialectical relationships to each other.  Called the
"embeddedness thesis," it says that audiences are best
understood in terms of the social texts, like news, which
they both use to "get" information, and from which they
construct their own reality.  Likewise, media institutions,
such as news media, are best understood as discourses which
both "transmit" information, and which are situated in the
experiences and social cognitions of audiences.

     The second point involves the way both media and people
think about, or "situate," each other.  The fundamental
assumption is that audiences and news media are engaged in
social relations that are ideological: informing, or being
informed, in mass mediated social contexts, involves a
relationship between audiences and news media based on the
exercise of social power to interpret events.  I am
interested in examining how both audiences and news media
wield this power.  Thus, the analysis is concerned with the
ideological character of this relationship, and suggests
that this ideological relationship was particularly evident
in the news reportage and audience handling of news during
the Persian Gulf War.  To reiterate, I will closely examine
news reports written during the six weeks of the Persian
Gulf War in order to explore the "information front" as
presented by Time and Newsweek; the goal is to reformulate a
critical approach to information as it is sent by news media
and received by audiences so as to more accurately explain
the ideological components of information production and
information processing.  The trajectory of this critical
analysis is toward the dilemmas that news audiences and news
organizations faced when informing or being informed in the
Persian Gulf War context.

                  Weak and Strong Effects

Weak Effects: The Indelible Mark

     If, as we shall see, news reportage of the Persian Gulf
War described an intransigent audience, this is an audience
well-known to mass communications theorists and researchers.
Bauer's (1964) "obstinate audience" was active and
goal-oriented; it selectively fashioned media to suit its
interests.  Occupying a central place in a linear flow of
mediated communication was an audience whose selectivity and
instrumental activity rendered it relatively impervious to
influence by the media.  In his survey of paradigm research
in mass communication, Hans Kepplinger (1979) said: "A great
number of actual investigations have led to the development
of models in which the media users are actively standing the
center, or at the beginning, and no longer passively on the
periphery or at the ends of the process.  In these models,
the media users select individual parts of the practically
unlimited supply of information for its instrumental
usefulness, thereby selectively avoiding other parts" (p.
168).  This research agenda, as Gitlin (1981) points out,
became the "dominant paradigm" of mass communication
research, associated with Paul Lazarsfeld and his many (and
diverse) followers.  It focused on "the search for specific,
measurable, short-term individual, attitudinal and
behavioral 'effects' of media content, [with] the conclusion
that the media are not very important in the formation of
public opinion" (Gitlin, 1981, p. 75).

     The arguments for and against the weak effects
tradition are by now well articulated and do not need to be
repeated here.  Nevertheless, the weak effects tradition has
left its indelible mark.  This mark is embedded in the
"functionalist" approach to mass communications.  The
functional approach, as Klapper (1960) said, "shifted away
from the tendency to regard mass communication as a
necessary and sufficient cause of audience effects, toward a
view of the media as influences, working amid other
influences, in a total situation" (p. 5).  Thus, the
theorist, with feet planted in this tradition, can cast
opposing glances to the terrains characterized by Lazarsfeld
(1941) as "administrative" and "critical" research.  "The
idea of critical research," claimed Lazarsfeld, "is posed
against the practice of administrative research, requiring
that ... the general role of our media of communication in
the present social system should be studied" (pp. 159-160).
Specifically, as Slack and Allor (1984) aver, "Critical mass
communication research ... is a range of developing
alternative approaches to the study of communication in the
exercise of social power" (p. 208).  Unlike Lazarsfeld,
however, they admonished against dichotomizing empirical and
critical research.  They stressed that communication is not
a contextless process that can be studied in isolation; they
emphasized the "vital link between epistemology and power"
in communication contexts.  The critical theorists' agenda,
then, is to explore the ways in which "the control of
knowledge is fundamental to the exercise of social power"
(p. 215).  Although I will recapitulate the well-known
thesis that news is an ideological social discourse, the
"control of knowledge" in this critical analysis will be
extended to information processing by news audiences.
Before I get to this, however, the "critical" nature of this
analysis needs to be situated, for it is itself implicated
in some of the obstacles encountered when drawing the lines
of the ideological uses of information.

Strong Effects: Neglecting the Dialectic

     One of the essential lessons of Berger and Luckman
(1966) was that the social construction of reality is
likewise the social construction of individuals.  Not unlike
Marx's argument with the Hegelian idealists of his day,
Berger and Luckman called for a redefinition of the science
of sociology in theirs.  This redefinition is still timely.
To Berger and Luckman, the amalgamation of theoretical
perspectives that is the sociology of knowledge "must first
of all concern itself with what people 'know' as 'reality'
in their everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives" (p. 15).
They hold that the objective facticity of everyday life is
maintained by people in their social relations.  To them,
"common-sense 'knowledge' rather than 'ideas' must be
central... [for] it is precisely this 'knowledge' that
constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society
could exist" (p. 15).

     The social constructionism of Berger and Luckman is in
some ways a theoretical relative of the functionalist
approach in mass communication research.  Both call for
studying communication-related behavior in social contexts.
The indelible mark -- that of looking for and investigating
inter-related patterns of effects -- is mirrored in the
sociology of knowledge in the endeavor to grasp the "total
social fact".[2] And yet, the sociology of knowledge
redirects the investigation of effects.  It does so in a way
that highlights the foundations of my analysis insofar as it
is "critical".

     The redirection of effects Berger and Luckman propose
for sociology is an argument that calls for a dialectical
character of the role of knowledge in social contexts.  This
is the dialectic of individual and society, and of personal
identity and social structure.  "What people know as
reality" is the domain of a science that sees "information"
as both a cognitive process and an objectified (that is,
made objective through language and behavior) reality.  The
call for sociology here is to describe processes of social
cognition and objectified, institutional and
external-to-cognition instances of "information".  This call
underscores what I have called the "embeddedness thesis" as
an approach to understanding audiences and news media.  I
will return to this later.  For the present, a
re-interpretation of the "critical" perspective is
necessary.

     While it is not possible here to separate the myriad
strands of critical communications research that Slack and
Allor (cited earlier) allude to, two points are germane to
how this research can address ideological uses and dilemmas
of information.

     The first concerns the situating of audiences.  It is
important not to theorize audience "reception" out of media
messages when considering social processes (Fejes, 1984).
Audiences are the manifest link between media and wider
social processes.  The negative implications of uncritically
examining reception, as Alexander (1986) warns, concern
distorting news media and audience activity in information
contexts.  The distortions are encapsulated in the idea that
"rather than performing an integrative function, the news
media produces atomism and inhibits rather than facilitates
the exercise of independent, self-conscious action" (p. 23).
This, of course, was the germ of the argument against which
weak effects paradigms militated.

     The second point concerns the received meaning of the
concept "ideology" in critical communications research, and
also relates to Gramcsi's notion of "hegemony."  Expounded
in The Prison Notebooks, this concept has been appropriated
in communications research.  Hall's (1979) elucidation of
the "ideological effects" of the media is a classic precis
of this appropriation.  Hall stresses that Gramsci "enlarges
the concept of domination"; this enlargement accounts for
the fact that social orders and structures can dominate
individuals without being overtly coercive.  He points out
that hegemony is achieved on the terrain of social
structures:

     Hegemony is achieved [in part] by the containment
     of the subordinate classes within the "super-
     structures." . . . These structures of hegemony
     work by ideology.  This means that the
     "definitions of reality," favorable to the
     dominant class fractions, and institutionalized in
     the spheres of civil life and the state, come to
     constitute the primary "lived" reality as such for
     the subordinate classes (p. 332).

     Placed thus "in the relations of state and
superstructure," the hegemonizing effects of the mass media
are illuminated.  Hall says that the production and
consumption of "social knowledge" -- including news --
depends upon the mediation of the modern means of
communication (p. 340).  Thus, mass media perform
ideological functions.  They selectively represent the
meanings that constitute social knowledge.  Media perform
ideological labor by selectively ordering social life,
thereby giving individuals explanations and rationales for
what is useful knowledge.  Finally, the media bring together
what they have selectively represented and ordered in the
production of consensus.

     Thus, news performs ideological functions.  News is
ideological because it distorts in selecting what to present
(Altheide, 1976).  News is ideological because the values of
journalists (Gans, 1979, pp. 29-30) or of the organizations
in which they work are encoded in it.  News is ideological
because it patently frames social relations in terms of
dominant economic and political orders (Jensen, 1987;
Knight, 1982).  Finally, the exigencies of routine
production procedures support beliefs and conventions that
betray ideological processes (Tuchman, 1972; Golding, 1981).
"Simply by doing their jobs," Gitlin (1980) states,
"journalists tend to serve the political and economic elite
definitions of reality" (p. 12).  "Every day, directly or
indirectly, by statement or omission, in pictures and words,
in entertainment and news and advertisement, the mass media
produce fields of definition and association, symbol and
rhetoric, through which ideology becomes manifest and
complete" (Gitlin, 1980, p.2).

     One of the "ideological effects" of news is to distance
individuals from having or constructing their own knowledge
about the world.  (Dahlgren, 1980, argues this when he says
that news tends to suppress the reflexivity of individuals.)
Knowledge is power, as Tuchman (1978, p. 215) observes, and
news is a socially powerful force in the guise of being a
window on the world.  And yet, as Berger and Luckman argue,
to participate in the social world is to be engaged in a
dialectical relationship with it.  They claim that "since
society exists as both objective and subjective reality, any
adequate theoretical understanding of it must comprehend
both these aspects" (p. 128).  Only then, they argue, will
the sociologist be protected against "the distorted
reifications of both sociologism and psychologism" (p. 187).
This is a criticism with which I concur.

     Although this re-instatement of the dialectical
relationship of social cognition and social structure may
undermine the bold Durkheimian strokes of the critical
perspective, several seminal aspects of this perspective can
be maintained.

     The critical perspective, as a social critique, offers
the hope that people will "throw off their blinders and come
to understand their true nature and their true needs and
capacities" (Fay, 1987, p. 11).  In short, it offers the
hope of emancipation from the shackles of ideology (to put
it as perhaps Marx would have).  Explanations of the
ideological dilemmas of "information" as they relate to
audiences of Persian Gulf War news may have, albeit in a
mitigated way, this effect.

     However, another seminal aspect of the critical
approach is even more important here.  The germ of the
critical perspective -- that people in audiences are
positioned by information -- entails the notion that to be
informed is to be engaged in a power relationship (and, as
some would say, an underdog position) with those who would
inform.  However, if we restore the "reception" aspect to
this model, it can be inferred that the exercise of social
power is a process of thinking as well, and the processes of
everyday thinking can themselves be processes of ideology
(Billig, 1991).  It is the dialectic of individual and
social structure that allows ideological thinking to emerge.
It is an audience receiving information and being positioned
by information that opens the way for a critical analysis of
the uses and dilemmas of information in an ideological age.

                   The Information Front

     War is news.  An interesting and revealing sort of
reflexive prose permeated press coverage of the Persian Gulf
War.[3] Senior Writer for Time Lance Morrow illustrated this
phenomenon when he wrote: "Truth and elaborate lies, hard
fact and hallucination, have become central motives in the
gulf.  A war of words and images has taken up a life of its
own, parallel to the one in the sand" (Feb. 4, 1991, p. 26).
In the same issue, Richard Zoglin characterized the
"information front" as an emerging theater in the gulf
conflict:

     Reporters acknowledge, and always have, that
     restrictions are necessary in war-time.  They
     voluntarily adhered to security guidelines for
     press coverage during the Vietnam War.  Yet they
     are now feeling the heavy hand of the Pentagon in
     a more direct fashion.  (p. 44)

Elsewhere, Zoglin says:

     Despite the deluge of words and pictures, analysis
     and speculation, pouring forth on TV and in print,
     the supply of reliable objective information about
     the war's progress has been scant.  (p. 44)

     Zoglin thus claims that the paucity of information
(i.e., "facts" as normally assembled and constructed by
reporters) about the war did not diminish the deluge of
coverage (i.e., sheer attention) in the news media.  Being
denied access to gathering news in accustomed ways seems to
have put news organizations in the nether-world of producing
news that is robbed of essential components that transform
this coverage into "information."  This is the rift between
coverage and information that I alluded to earlier.  This
rift, both public and newsworthy, was manifested in much
reflexive prose.  News organizations, their procedures, and
their epistemological foundations for what "information" is
themselves became objects of news.

     Three distinct, and inter-related, dimensions of this
"information front" can be identified.  These are: 1) prior
restraint by the Defense Department; 2) communication
technologies that allowed for immediate (read: "live")
transmission from war zones, and 3) historical precedent of
news coverage of the Vietnam War that has entered the social
store of knowledge as contributing to negative public
opinion about that war.

     Regarding prior restraint, Debra Gersh, writing in
Editor and Publisher, said that as the January 12, 1991
issue went to press, the Pentagon had finalized its
restrictions for combat coverage of the war.  These
restrictions included copy guidelines for security purposes
as well as a strict system of pooling journalists and their
crews.  These "press pools" would severely limit access to
war zones and scenes of warfare; moreover, "combat pool
reports would be subject to security reviews by public
affairs officers at the scene prior to transmission" (p. 9).
Sidney Schanberg, writing in the Washington Press Review,
said that "of the two controls -- the pool system and the
review of stories for possible security violations -- it is
the former that is more odious, for it is tantamount to
prior restraint."  He bitterly complained that "the security
review at the end of the pool process merely applies the
final, harassing, delaying, cosmetizing touches to the
information and completes the subjugation of the press
corps, and, by extension, the public" (March, 1991, p. 24).

     This cosmetically altered information was, of course,
news.  It was reflexively covered in both Time and Newsweek.
For example, Newsweek on Feb. 25, 1991 ran a story whose
subtitle decried: "Amid the bombs, words and pictures carry
a payload on the battlefield of public opinion" (p. 38).
This story said, among other things, that the US press may
"unwittingly" have been aiding disinformation tactics by the
Pentagon.  This story implied that the line between
misinformation (read: mistakes) and disinformation (read:
intentional mistakes designed to confuse the enemy) has been
manipulated by the Pentagon.[4] The report made clear that
it was the role of the US press to expose Saddam Hussein's
disinformation, not participate in it.  Another Newsweek
headline, "Showdown at the Fact Gap" (Feb. 14, 1991, p. 61),
was mirrored in Time both in headline (e.g., "Volleys at the
Information Front"), and news (e.g., "All press reports from
the gulf must be passed by military censors... but
complaints are growing about the arbitrary and dilatory way
in which the censors are operating"; Feb. 4, 1991, p. 45).

     In light of the embeddedness thesis, which stresses the
theoretical importance of understanding audiences and news
media in terms of the information processes of each other,
it is crucial to investigate how Time and Newsweek situated
the audience in the coverage-information rift.  A report in
Time (Feb. 14, 1991, p. 44) stated that "despite the
saturation news coverage, Americans remain ignorant of the
countless details about the gulf operation."  Furthermore:
"As the press chafed under wartime censorship last week,
polls showed that Americans sided overwhelmingly with the
military.  Before long, however, more viewers may come to
realize that for all the spooky network music, theatrical
correspondents and Nintendo military briefings, they have
little real information about the progress of the war"
(Newsweek, Feb. 4, 1991, p. 61).

     Audiences in these reports are characterized as being
deprived of information but saturated with coverage.  The
reflexivity is two-fold here.  There is news that
journalists "clamor for news" while Americans "complain that
the press is trying to give [them] too much" information
(Time, Feb. 25, 1991, p. 52).[5] Also, the news is that
although "the news confronts viewers bent on exercising
their right not to know... they keep on watching anyway"
(Newsweek, Feb. 25, 1991, p. 38).  In the news, news
organizations must cleverly, but not threateningly,
characterize audiences as voracious consumers of coverage
without proper regard for the information that would help
them assess the war.  In short, the news is that audiences
are subverting the supposed public service rationale of the
press, which, as journalist William Kovach (1989) has said,
"is to give people the information they need to base the
decisions they make in governing themselves."

     The coverage-information rift was also reflexively
reported vis-a-vis issues of technology and historical
precedent.  Certainly one of the most important foci of this
coverage was CNN.[6] The three major networks as well as CNN
had, of course, been preparing for war for months.  They all
had correspondents in Baghdad when the fighting commenced on
January 16.  However, as reported in Time, "only CNN was
able to keep its line open and broadcast continuously
throughout the attack" (Jan. 28, 1991, p. 69).  Covering
this war, indeed, was news.  Time ran a headline, "Live from
the Middle East!" and reported: "Across the nation, in homes
and offices and bars, people stopped in their tracks,
gathered around the TV set and held their collective breath"
(p. 69).  And CNN scored a reporting coup in "the first
major war in the era of instant worldwide communication"
(Time, p. 69, subhead).  A Newsweek article declared, "CNN's
historic scoop on the first night of the war was the most
stunning sign yet of how that 24-hour network, the only one
with true global reach, is changing the news business
forever" (Jan. 28, 1991, p. 41).

     However, both Time and Newsweek were quick to qualify
their coverage with the news that the benefits of satellite
technology did not necessarily translate into "hard" news.
Newsweek argued that "Live, unedited coverage not only
generates mistakes, it lacks a sense of context" (Feb. 4,
1991, p. 62).  The theme that CNN "lags behind its broadcast
rivals in providing seasoned analysis and thoughtful
perspective" (Time, Jan. 28, 1991, p. 70) added to the
coverage-information rift in the news.  What is connoted in
reports such as these is that "information" arises out of
the contextualizing process; coverage is raw data and
journalism is the finished product.  Indeed, an ironic
meta-text in the reportage of Time and Newsweek is that
despite their weekly distribution, they still suffered from
a self-admitted dearth of information.  Even though
"satellite technology had done nothing to speed the flow of
real information" (Newsweek, Jan. 28, 1991, p. 41), this
fact was covered reflexively.  The global village had
finally become "hard" news.

     The final dimension of reflexive coverage during the
Persian Gulf War involved the social knowledge surrounding
America's "Vietnam memories" in an age of "real-time
journalism" (Time, Feb. 28, 1991, p. 32).  "Doing away with
independent reporting has been the Pentagon's goal ever
since Vietnam," wrote Lance Morrow (Time, Feb. 4, 1991, p.
18).  It is commonplace social knowledge that this goal
hinged on the "fact" that pessimistic reporting and grisly
news footage tipped public opinion and cost America the war
(Washington Journalism Review, March, 1991, p. 23).

     It is at this juncture that the three dimensions of
reflexive news coverage converge to form a coherent picture
of why information was lacking in this coverage.  Historical
precedent ("with the sort of gripping combat footage that
brought the Vietnam War so painfully into America's living
rooms")[7] coupled with immediacy of transmission ("The
saturation coverage of the gulf war is something entirely
new... [for] Vietnam, the last TV war, was reported mostly
after the fact on film or videotape")[8] seemed to conspire
during the Persian Gulf War.  The Pentagon had a public
mandate to censor, or otherwise inhibit, the flow of
information.[9]

     Moreover, the equation of social historical knowledge
plus technology figured greatly in the attempted positioning
of audiences in reflexive news.  On a surface level, the
news encoded a kind of public chastisement.  The line was
that the audience will soon regret that "real information"
is missing from the steady diet of coverage.  On a deeper
level, reflexive news coverage laid bare its epistemological
framework: coverage is not information.  "Information" in
this view inheres in the autonomy of journalists, in the
institutional independence of the press and in the ethos of
objectivity associated with this independence.  The message
was that these principles define how news gathering and
reporting typically occur.

     Why would news magazines lay bare their epistemological
frameworks?  Doing this seems to run counter to what is
essentially the goal of a news organization -- to fulfill a
market need for information in such a way that people will
continue to consume news.  Reflexive news could reveal the
ideological functions of this news with the effect of
chipping away its credibility as marketable information.
Yet, if the coverage-information rift operationalized in
this news is posed in terms of audiences, then it is clear
that the news organizations saw the situation in the Persian
Gulf as a threat to their "normal" ideological functions.
These, of course, include the public service rationale of
the press, the ideal of institutional autonomy to gather and
frame events, and the ethos of objectivity in presenting
events as news.  The embeddedness thesis suggests, however,
that these ideological functions are processed as
information precisely because people receive information
ideologically.

     Before drawing any conclusive lines around the
ideological dilemmas engendered by Persian Gulf War news,
then, we need to look at the issue of information
processing.  Next, I will situate cognitive theories of
information processing in this social context with the aim
of addressing their ideological implications.

               Who Needs Information Anyway?

Embeddedness and Information Theory

     In the mathematical sense, information has two meanings
(see Weaver, 1966).  It is, first of all, a measure of the
degree of uncertainty (or entropy) a source has from which
to select a message; the greater the uncertainty, the more
possibility that the message selected will not be any
particular one.  Hence, the greater the amount of
information in that message.  On the other hand, if
receivers cannot in some way reduce this uncertainty, then
they cannot receive the information.  Thus, in this case,
the amount of mental energy it takes to decode -- reduce
uncertainty -- is also a measure of information.

     Information, then, is both an organized stimulus and a
rearranged stimulus, and information processing involves
organizing and rearranging.  This processing is significant,
as the mathematical model implies, insofar as these
processes are between senders and receivers.  Information
is, by nature, a compromise, because it inheres in the
relationship between senders and receivers, not only or
entirely in the message itself.

     Selecting and ordering are the two seminal processes
that need to be taken into account when describing
information processing.  And while the mathematical model
posits that information can be measured as a by-product of
these processes, it does so by positing a linear flow of
communication as the "social" context.  In fact, these
processes co-occur within audiences (receivers) and media
(senders), such that audiences are both senders and
receivers, and media are both senders and receivers.  This
is the social context, one which the mathematical model can
only dimly reveal.  Therefore, while we do not want to
disregard information processes, we do want to regard social
contexts.

     The purpose of the transactional model briefly sketched
above is to re-introduce the embeddedness thesis, which,
reformulated, says that in social contexts of mediated
communication, audiences and news media are best explained
in terms of the information processes of each other.  This
embeddedness thesis stresses the dialectical relation of
individuals and social structures as they "situate" each
other and thereby know each other.  Ideological functions of
the media and ideological processes of thinking are only
recognizable in social contexts; this is why audiences and
the news media are seen to be embedded in each other.

Cognitive Schemas and Ideology

     The functionalist tradition in mass communications
research, has, as I have said, left an indelible mark.
"Active" audiences were viewed from a theoretical perch.
So-called functionalist inquiries into audience behavior
rest on the observation that messages are used by their
audience and not simply experienced by them.  The indelible
mark -- looking for patterns of effects -- has manifested
itself in two ways.  Researchers have produced elaborate
typologies of the social needs of the audience and their
relationship to media use (see Wright, 1974; McQuail, et
al., 1972).  Also, researchers have appropriated the
"active" audience concept to produce elaborate psychological
explanations of media use based on concepts such as needs,
gratifications, expectations and dependencies.

     It is not surprising that these typologies and
explanations have often centered around the "surveillance"
function, and likewise "surveillance" needs, of audiences.
In presenting a dependency model of mass media effects, for
example, Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur state, "It can be assumed
that as societies grow more complex, and as the quality of
media technology improves, the media continuously take on
more and more unique information functions.  These include
information gathering, processing and delivery" (1976, p.
6).  These authors see "dependency" as a relationship in
which the satisfaction of needs or the attainment of goals
by one party is contingent upon the resources of another
party.  They point out that dependency on media information
is ubiquitous and especially heightened in times of social
crisis.  They seek to trace the flow of media effects on
audiences (the indelible mark) in a tripartite
audience-media-society model and they elaborate cognitive,
affective and behavioral effects.

     Dependency is a way to consider effects of mass media
by building into the effects process valences of existing
needs for particular media messages.  Dependency theory, as
an example of a functionalist approach in mass
communications research, can itself yield useful information
about how, when and why people use information.  However,
the search for interrelated patterns of effects takes for
granted cognitive information processes.  If cognitive
information process are implicated in ideological thinking,
which is seen here to have greater explanatory power than
uses and effects, then it is necessary to investigate them
more closely.

     A brief review of cognitive research on information
processing underscores the notion that humans cannot _not_
process information, and this happens in ways that
fundamentally rearrange incoming information in order to
remember, comprehend, and make it meaningful (see McCain &
Ross, 1979; Woodall, et al., 1983; Findahl and Hoijer,
1981).  As Fiske and Taylor (1984) point out, the schema
concept arose out of work in person perception, non-social
memory, and categorizing, all of which "made the common
point that perceivers actively construct their own reality"
(p. 139).  The most fundamental principle suggested by
schema research, they say, is that "people simplify reality,
[and] do so in part by interpreting specific instances in
light of the general case" (p. 141).  Taylor and Crocker
(1981) assert that selecting and simplifying are absolutely
fundamental to processing, indeed recognizing, information.
They say that "hypothesis driven processing" is processing
that is guided by expectations and preconceptions (p. 91).
Furthermore, "the hypotheses... tell the perceiver what to
look for and how to interpret the data" (p. 90).

     Graber (1984) has utilized the schema concept to
address the socially learned ways that audiences filter
through the overload of information presented in the form of
news.  She sees schemas as a functional imperative; they
"help further reduce the amount of information needed to be
stored."  They do this in several ways.  Cognitive schemas
allow individuals to "extract only those limited amounts of
information from news stories that they consider important
for incorporation into their thinking."  They "facilitate
integration of news information into existing knowledge...
[and] allow receivers to incorporate the news into a
meaningful context."  Moreover, Graber says that "the
information extracted from a news story may be integrated
into a single schema, or it may be segmented and the
segments incorporated into several schemas."  Finally, she
says that if new information is not needed or is redundant,
"the schema process allows the unwanted information to slip
from readily available memory" (all quotes p. 202).

     The schema concept is revealing in terms of how
individuals rearrange and decode information in order to
situate themselves in relation to information they receive.
If information processes are inextricably bound to social
contexts, then by taking into consideration these processes
of social cognition, it ought to be possible to make
inferences about ideological thinking in relation to Persian
Gulf War news.

     One inference is that people have different schemas for
forms of information and contents of news messages.  News is
recognized as a social expositor of information.  Because
people cannot _not_ process information, news has become a
necessary social extension of their senses.  Simply put,
news is information, and the operational distinction made
between coverage and information by newsmagazines during the
Persian Gulf War was irrelevant insofar as it did not
interfere with a steady flow of news about the war.

     Another inference is that news production and news
reception are both ideologically motivated.  However, with
the "embeddedness theses," matters of the intentionality of
this motivation are subsumed in the ideological relationship
between senders and receivers of information.  The
deleterious connotations of both news as ideology or
reception as ideological thinking are redirected from moral
grounds toward conventionalist grounds.  Here news media and
audiences are engaged in social relationships where the
definition of information is bound to how it is used and
constructed in varied and specific social interactions.  On
conventionalist grounds, a critical analysis is divested of
some of its moral force but charged with drawing the
ideological lines of a social relationship between senders
and receivers where power lies in interpreting and making
meaning out of events with constructions of information.  A
critical analysis on such constructivist grounds would seek
to understand the interests these constructions serve.

     In sum, this situation confounds a streamlined notion
of what exactly information is.  The total social fact goes
beyond a functionalist (read: interrelated patterns of
effects) or a critical (read: ideology as indicative of the
dominant social structures reproducing themselves at the
expense of hegemonizing people) perspective and should
involve a framework for news and audiences as embedded in
the information processes of each other.  The historical
accident of a war that could be broadcast live -- in a
social environment awash with memories of the news media's
potential for influence during war -- leads toward examining
the ideological potential and dilemmas of information in
mass mediated contexts, and of the Persian Gulf War context
in particular.

                   Ideological Dilemmas

     Writing about his approach to news, Gans (1979) says:

     I view news as information which is transmitted
     from sources to audiences, with journalists -- who
     are both employees of bureaucratic commercial
     organizations and members of a profession --
     summarizing, refining, and altering what becomes
     available to them from sources in order to make
     the information suitable for their audiences (p.
     80).

Furthermore:

     Although the notion that journalists transmit
     information from sources to audiences suggests a
     linear process, in reality the process is
     circular, complicated by a large number of
     feedback loops.  (p. 80)

In effect, "journalists and audiences coexist in a system,
although it is closer to being a tug of war than a
functionally interrelated organism" (p. 81).  These tugs of
war are "resolved by power, and news is, among other things,
'the exercise of power over the interpretation of reality'"
(p. 80).

     The Persian Gulf War was a historical accident in that
its news coverage demonstrated, and made news out of, the
fact that information was lacking from this coverage.
Audiences were framed as exerting their right to not want to
know all of the information that the news services could
potentially offer.  Again, news, as a social discourse,
became a kind of public chastisement of audiences.

     Insofar as I have tried to follow Berger and Luckman's
admonition to avoid the distorting reifications of both
sociologism and psychologism, this analysis has been an
argument against these trends in the critical and
functionalist approaches in mass communications research.
It has been an attempt to preserve the dialectic of the
social aspects of individual and institutional information
processes, to see each as being embedded in the other.  Time
and Newsweek posed a rift between information and coverage
in their reportage of the Persian Gulf War.  Herein there is
an ideological dilemma.

     This dilemma has its roots in the "structuralist/
culturalist" split that Hall (1980) elucidated in light of
Althusser's theory of ideology.  Particularly, the dilemma
can be viewed by examining the "culturalist" position.
Althusser (1969) suggested that

     ideology is indeed a system of representations,
     but in the majority of cases these representations
     have nothing to do with "consciousness." ...  It
     is above all as structures that they impose on the
     vast majority of men, not via their
     "consciousness." ...  It is within this
     ideological consciousness that men succeed in
     altering the "lived" relation between them and the
     world and acquiring that new form of specific
     unconsciousness called "consciousness" (p. 233).

Hall says that, in the culturalist position, ideology does
provide images and representations of social structures, and
of the place of individuals within them.  Allor (1987)
explains Hall's position by pointing out that ideology in
the culturalist position is not simply false consciousness.
It is rather "a particular structure of representations of
the real world: not a content, but a work of proscribing a
place" (Allor, 1987, p. 19).  Hegemony, in this view, is "a
leaky system" (p. 19).

     Is it possible that, as purveyors of ideology during
the Persian Gulf War, Time and Newsweek sought to prescribe
a place for the audience within the coverage-information
rift?  The reflexive reportage does indicate this.  And yet,
this reportage must also have the effect of diminishing the
hegemonic potential of the press to select and order reality
within its reportage.  To put it another way, news that
reveals its normal ideological functions "de-naturalizes"
these functions.  If the hallmark of hegemony is the idea
that institutions control people through subtle ways of
engineering consent and integration, then making the subtle
obvious would undermine the mechanism.  The rift between
coverage and information, insofar as it was operationalized
in Persian Gulf War news, seems to have identified a leak in
the hegemonic functioning of the press.

     Moreover, when seen as being embedded in the cognitive
processes of audiences, this leak could be exacerbated
because of the nature of information processing.  Many
theorists would quarrel with this idea.  Indeed, news is
quite possibly one of the systems of representations that in
Althusser's view would be a "specific form of
unconsciousness" which, in effect, would preclude
information processing in the efficient terms described by
schema theorists.  In a variation of this, Stamm (1983) has
said that television news offers a privileged position to
audiences by encouraging repressive and narcissistic
attitudes.  Its ideological effect here is to make itself
the fulfillment of what is desired or absent in the status
quo.  The net effect of both of these views is that even a
"more awakened" information-processing audience does not
rule out a hegemonic process.

     However, the Persian Gulf War context seems to show
that the overarching ability of news organizations to create
subjectivities of audience members with the information they
send is a negotiable process.  The "tug of war" that Gans
described re-invigorates the point made throughout this
analysis that information is a social compromise: whether
information is viewed as a product of news organizations, as
a commodity, or as an objective construct, it always inheres
in the social relationship between senders and receivers.
This is evident in the reflexive Persian Gulf War news.
Here was news that, in part, was about the construction of
information.  Information was constructed with the values of
news organizations in mind.  And what was most revealing
about these news reports was the light shed on audiences.
For here, the news was that the construction of reality does
depend upon the cognitive schemas that audience members have
for what information is, and indeed for what is even
acceptable as information.

     Audiences too were involved in ideological dilemmas.  I
have said that information processing is itself implicated
in ideological thinking because, in social contexts,
audiences situate news in ways that are relevant and
meaningful to them.  This is part of the "tug of war" that
Gans spoke of.  I have developed the notion of schemas to
show precisely their potential ideological functions.
Interestingly, these functions were hinted at long before
television itself.  Walter Lippman (1922, p. 16) wrote:

     The real environment is altogether too big,
     complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.
     We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety,
     so much variety, so many permutations and
     combinations.  And although we have to act in that
     environment, we have to reconstruct it on a
     simpler model before we can manage it.

     Thus, the notion of schemas, set in social contexts,
gives rise to Schramm's (1949) statement that "news exists
in the minds of men.  It is not an event; it is something
perceived after the event; it is an attempt to reconstruct
the essential framework of the event -- essential being
defined as a frame of reference which is calculated to make
the event meaningful to the reader" (p. 259).  These
perceptions do not have to correspond with reality.  In
fact, Boorstin (1961) argued precisely that news does not
correspond to reality.  What audiences see and hear is a
"kind of synthetic novelty" which constitute what he called
"pseudo-events."  The audience demands illusions from an
industry energetically geared to engineer them.

     The dilemma then, regarding reflexive news coverage of
the Persian Gulf War, centers around the salience of the
connection of audience members to events of the war.  If
people manifest a great need to be connected closely to the
events, then their need for information ought to be great.
However, people by design selectively alter information,
transmuting messages they receive into personally meaningful
knowledge.  Despite the unprecedented capacity for news
organizations to provide information in the discursive space
that is "news," Persian Gulf war audiences exhibited a
tendency to favor not knowing some kinds of information, as
gathered by the press, while greatly desiring coverage.

     On the one hand, it would seem that more information
would equate with more social power for people to interpret
their lives in ways beneficial to making decisions and
participating in a democratic society.  The rationalist
strains in this sentiment underscore and uphold the public
service rationale of the press that has become deeply rooted
in our culture, particularly in Cold War vigilance in which
the press certainly participated.  And yet more information
-- if by information we mean the news that is the product of
the full complement of normally hidden ideological processes
of the press -- also equals a greater potential for news
informers to ideologically situate audiences with that
information.  In this scenario, information assumes a
Protean character.  Information in the hegemonic sense
restricts the natural cognitive processes of audiences to
construct themselves and their realities; information in the
constructivist sense provides the grist for interpretive
processes that individuals use to socially construct
themselves.

     It is difficult at this time to assess accurately which
(or how both) of these senses of information apply to the
vast numbers of people attuned to news during the Persian
Gulf War.  There are conceptual problems to work out because
the cognitive importance of having information to process
seems at odds with the epistemological status of the
information as having hegemonic potential.  It is difficult
to retroactively gauge the salience of audience members'
need to be connected to Persian Gulf War events with "real"
information, or how much this matters.  I am tempted to
point out (facilely) that we won't be able to tell because
"not all the news is in yet" on the Persian Gulf War.  Yet,
I do feel safe in saying that when the news does come in,
there will be an audience for it.

     In sum, it seems that ideological thinking performs
both cognitive and evaluative functions.  When placed in
social contexts, the notion of "getting informed" involves
both cognitive and socially situated processes of
negotiation -- where "power" can be understood as a kind of
projecting out onto behavior the process of selecting,
ordering, and interpreting the news.  Whereas information
may be the product of ideological mechanisms (i.e., as the
product of news organizations), it cannot be reduced to this
product.

     Audience members may watch, listen to, or read news,
but may not process all of this news as information.
Information is not a streamlined entity in social contexts.
This notion, of course, confounds some functionalist
research agendas in mass communication that seek to measure
or assess dependencies on and needs for information.  The
notion also confounds hegemonic processes that do not
incorporate the idea that information reception itself may
have ideological aspects.  In the discursive space wherein
"information" is transmitted, received, and used to
construct reality, Gulf War news "leaked" the hegemonic
underpinnings of the press.  And the way audiences engaged
it ideologically was to keep on watching, reading and
listening.


                            Notes

[1]  For the first time since the Vietnam War, the general
     news wire services, notably the Associated Press,
     United Press International and Reuters, put their "war
     desks" into operation.

[2]  From Berger and Luckman (1966, p. 187), quoting Marcel
     Mauss.

[3]  In what follows, I will look at Time and Newsweek, as
     well as several press review journals.  Among them:
     Editor & Publisher, Columbia Journalism Review,
     Washington Journalism Review, Quill and Electronic
     Broadcasting.

[4]  Howard Rosenberg (Quill, March, 1991, p. 117) gave
     another twist to this scenario in a piece subtitled:
     "TV became a minefield of misinformation as reporters
     shot from the lip."  In this article, he wrote: "On CNN
     these days, something is always incoming -- whether gas
     masks, streaking scuds, unedited pictures that no one
     can figure out -- even if it isn't always news."

[5]  Despite clamoring for news, both January 28 issues of
     Time and Newsweek were full of coverage.  In addition
     to a 37- page advertising supplement for Chevrolet
     appearing in many regional editions of both magazines,
     Time devoted 39 pages out of 100 to the war, while
     Newsweek devoted 50 out of 102.

[6]  This was so especially in light of the fact that CNN
     seemed to have scored a veritable coup the first and
     second nights of the war.  On January 16 during early
     prime time, CNN scored a 11.7 Nielsen rating, which was
     13 times greater than its normal share for that time
     slot.  CNN almost overtook CBS, which had a 12.4
     rating.  (One point = 931,000 homes with televisions.)
     On the second day of the war, the ratings lined up like
     this: ABC -- 14.1, NBC -- 12.8, CBS -- 11.6, CNN --
     10.0.

[7]  Time, Jan. 28, 1991, p. 69.

[8]  Time, Jan. 28, 1991, p. 71.

[9]  The polls indicated that this public mandate was, of
     course, news.  For example, Time reported on two polls:
     the Times/Mirror poll and a Time/CNN poll (Feb. 25,
     1991, p. 53).  Both showed, among other things, an
     audience that was getting enough about the war, that
     was pleased with the coverage, and that approved of
     censorship of information as reported elsewhere in the
     press.


                        References

Alexander, J. (1981).  The mass news media in systemic,
     historical and comparative perspective.  In E. Katz &
     T. Szecsko (eds.), Mass Media and Social Change (pp.
     17-51).  Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Allor, M. (1977).  Information, institution, and ideology:
     On the discursive control of communication systems.  In
     J.D.  Slack & F. Fejes (eds.), The Ideology of the
     Information Age (pp. 15-23).  Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Altheide, D. (1976).  Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts
     Events.  Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Althusser, L. (1969).  For Marx.  Tr: Ben Brewster.  London:
     Allen Lane.

Ball-Rokeach, S.J. & DeFleur, M. (1976).  A dependency model
     of mass media effects.  Communication Research, 3(1),
     3- 21.

Bauer, R. (1971).  The obstinate audience: The influence
     process from the point of view of social communication.
     In W. Schramm (ed.), The Process and Effects of Mass
     Communication (pp. 326-345).  Urbana, IL: University of
     Chicago Press.

Berger, P. & Luckman, T. (1966).  The Social Construction of
     Reality.  Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Billig, M. (1991, in press).  Ideology, rhetoric and
     opinions.  From Ideology and Opinions.  Newbury Park:
     Sage

Boorstin, D. (1961).  The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
     America.  New York: Harper and Row.

Dahlgren, P. (1980).  TV news and the suppression of
     reflexivity.  Urban Life, 9(2), 201-216.

Fay, B. (1987).  Critical Social Science.  Ithaca, NY:
     Cornell University Press.

Fejes, F. (1984).  Critical mass communication research and
     media effects: The problem of the disappearing
     audience.  Media, Culture and Society, 6, 219-232.

Findahl, O. & Hoijer, B. (1981).  Studies of news from the
     perspective of human comprehension.  In G.C.  Wilhoit &
     H. deBock (eds.), Mass Communication Review Yearbook
     (Vol.2) (pp. 393-403).  Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Fiske, S. & Taylor, S. (1984).  Social Cognition.  Reading,
     MA: Addison-Wesley.

Gans, H. (1979).  Deciding What's News.  New York: Random
     House.

Gitlin, T. (1980).  The Whole World is Watching.  Berkeley,
     CA: University of California Press.

Gitlin, T. (1981).  Media sociology: The dominant paradigm.
     In G. C. Wilhoit & H. deBock (eds.), Mass Communication
     Review Yearbook (Vol.2) (pp. 73-121).  Beverly Hills,
     CA: Sage.

Golding, P. (1981).  The missing dimensions: News media and
     the management of social change.  In E. Katz & T.
     Szecsko (eds.), Mass Media and Social Change (pp.
     63-81).  Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Graber, D. (1984).  Processing the News: How People Tame the
     Information Tide.  New York: Longman.

Hall, S. (1979).  Culture, media and the 'ideological
     effect'.  In J. Curran, et al.  (eds.), Mass
     Communication and Society (pp. 315-348).  Beverly
     Hills, CA: Sage.

Hall, S. (1980).  Culture studies: Two paradigms.  Media,
     Culture and Society, 2, 57-72.

Jensen, K. (1987).  News as ideology: Economic statistics
     and political ritual in television network news.
     Journal of Communication, 37(1), 8-25.

Kepplinger, H. (1979).  Paradigm change in communications
     research.  Communication, 4, 163-182.

Klapper, J. (1960).  The Effects of Mass Communication.  New
     York: Free Press.

Knight, G. (1982).  News and ideology.  Canadian Journal of
     Communication, 8(4), 15-41.

Kovach, W. (1989).  Interview in "The public mind: Image and
     reality in America", Part 1: Illusions of News.  Bill
     Moyers documentary, aired on the Public Broadcasting
     System.

Lazarsfeld, P. (1941).  Administrative and critical
     research.  Reprinted in Qualitative Analysis (Boston,
     1972), 155-167.

Lippman, W. (1922).  Public Opinion.  New York: Harcourt,
     Brace & Co.

McQuail, D., Blumler, J.G. & Brown, J.R.  (1972).  The
     television audience: A revised perspective.  In D.
     McQuail (ed.), Sociology of Mass Communication (pp.
     135-165).  Harmindsworth: Penguin.

McCain, T. & Ross, M. (1981).  Cognitive switching: A
     behavioral trace for human information processing for
     television research.  In G.C.  Wilhoit & H. deBock
     (eds.), Mass Communication Review Yearbook (Vol.2) (pp.
     419-427).  Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Schramm, W. (1949).  The nature of news.  Journalism
     Quarterly, September, 259-269.

Stamm, R. (1983).  Television news and its spectator.  In E.
     Kaplan (ed.), Regarding Television: Critical
     Approaches.  Los Angeles, CA: The American Film
     Institute.

Slack, J.D. & Allor, M. (1983).  The political and
     epistemological constraints of critical communication
     research.  Journal of Communication, 33(3), 208-218.

Taylor, S. & Crocker, J. (1981).  Schematic bases of social
     information processing.  In T. Higgins, et al.  (eds.)
     Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium (Vol. 1)
     (89-134).  Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Tuchman, G. (1972).  Objectivity as strategic ritual.
     American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 660-679.

Tuchman, G. (1978).  Making News.  New York: Free Press.

Weaver, W. (1966).  The mathematics of communication.  In
     A.G.  Smith (ed.), Communication and Culture (pp.
     15-24).  New York: Free Press.

Woodall, W., Davis, D. & Sahin, H. (1983).  From the boob
     tube to the black box: TV news comprehension from an
     information processing perspective.  In E. Wartella &
     D.C.  Whitney (eds.), Mass Communication Review
     Yearbook (Vol.3) (pp. 173- 194).  Beverly Hills, CA:
     Sage.

Wright, C. (1974).  Functional analysis and mass
     communication revisited.  In J. Blumler & E. Katz
     (eds.), The Uses of Mass Communications (pp. 197-212).
     Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

------------------------------------------------------------
                  Copyright 1991
Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, Inc.