TV News Flow Studies Revisited
***** HJARVARD ********* EJC/REC Vol. 5, No. 2&3, 1995 *****
TV NEWS FLOW STUDIES REVISITED
Stig Hjarvard, Ph.D.
University of Copenhagen
Abstract: The article provides an overview of
existing research on television news flow. The
different theoretical approaches to the study of
international news are compared using a matrix of
four conceptualizations of the news process. Most
of the news flow research consists of comparative
studies of the foreign news output of national
broadcasters and few studies have analyzed the
actual flow of television news between actors at
the wholesale level and the flow between wholesale
and retail level. Our knowledge of international
television news flows is still very limited.
Finally, a new theoretical approach is suggested
in order to provide a better framework for the
interpretation of news flow data. The framework
calls for middle range analysis and a perspective
of interaction that stresses the inter-relatedness
between social actors and between different
factors in the news process.
News flow research has been a part of academic
scholarship for about 40 years now, and the study of
_television news_ flow, which is the main topic of this
article, has been a sub-discipline of news flow research for
about 30 years. The field of news flow research has reached
an age where a mid-life crisis normally appears -- and
indeed there has been some confusion and general stagnation
during the last decade. The aim of this article is to
provide a brief mid-life status, an overview of the TV news
flow research within the overall research field of
international news. I do not go into detail with any
particular study, but try to specify some key
characteristics -- and shortcomings -- of previous research.
On the basis of this overview I suggest some new directions
for future research. The argument is deliberately expressed
in a straightforward manner without much academic
reservation in order to provoke a more thorough discussion
of the underlying assumptions of news flow research.
The Conceptualization of the News Process
In order to provide an understanding of the place of
news flow studies within the overall field of international
news research it is useful to distinguish between the level
of analysis, i.e., micro or macro analysis, and between the
kind of perspective that is applied on the news process,
i.e. how is the social process of international news
conceptualized. Research on international news has been
dominated by two perspectives on the news process: the
perspective of selection and the perspective of
construction. Research using a perspective of selection
traditionally focuses on the news 'event'. The events of
the world are the independent variable that determines the
structure of foreign news. The social institutions
(journalism, press, etc.) play a secondary, intermediate
role as 'selector' or gatekeeper; they perform functions
like selection, rejection, re-editing etc. Closely related
to the concept of selection is the idea of transportation.
The social process of making international news is about the
distribution, i.e., physical transportation, of news items.
The perspective of construction looks at the news
process from the opposite direction: news is a social
artifact. Social conventions and practices, specific
values, and the specific allocation of material resources
work together to produce a specific outcome: news. The
social institution is the primary variable; the form,
content and volume of news are all a product of the social
practices of the news institutions. In _table 1_ these two
perspectives have been paired with the micro-macro
distinction, thus providing a matrix of four approaches to
the analysis of international news.
In the _first_ approach, micro level and construction
perspective, we find empirical studies of news content,
often comparative case studies like "US and Arab press
coverage of UN negotiations". We also find a few detailed
studies of the organizations of news agencies, e.g. Boyd-
Barrett (1980). In both cases the underlying assumption is
that social institutions (ideological discursive structures
or organizational structures) heavily influence the form,
content and volume of news.
==========================================================
Table 1
Four approaches to the study of international news
| Perspective Perspective
| of construction of selection
--------------------------------------------------------
Micro | Ideology critique of
level | news content Gatekeeper
| Analysis of organizations analysis
|
Macro | Media imperialism
level | Political economy of News flow
| news media analysis
--------------------------------------------------------
==========================================================
In the _second_ approach, macro level and construction
perspective, we generally find more theoretical
contributions concerned with the question of media
imperialism (for example the theory of structural
imperialism by Galtung (1971) that discusses the role of
international news within such a general framework). The
school on the political economy of communication has also
provided some insights to the field of international news
research.
In the _third_ approach, micro level and selection
perspective, we find the oldest tradition, the gatekeeper
analysis, that began with the seminal study of White (1950).
Although severe criticism has been raised against the
gatekeeper approach during the last two decades, it hasn't
completely lost ground. Especially in the research field of
_international_ news the idea of gatekeeping is still very
much alive. The concept of gatekeeping intuitively
corresponds to some basic empirical observations at the
micro level, i.e., the newsroom: foreign news is brought
into the newsroom, something is selected, rewritten, etc.
Furthermore, the most influential theoretical contribution
to the study of international news, Galtung & Ruge (1965),
is very much influenced by a selection and gatekeeper
perspective. For a critique of Galtung & Ruge (1965) see
Hjarvard (1993).
In the _fourth_ approach, macro level and selection
perspective, we finally find the news flow analyses.
Examples of these are Chapman (1992), Nnaemeka & Richstad
(1980), Stevenson & Shaw (1984), Unesco (1985), Varis &
Jokelin (1976).
The matrix in Table 1 is of course a crude
generalization; some of the studies of international news
are more tightly confined to a single approach than others.
Also news flow studies have frequently involved other
approaches and have for instance successfully been combined
with organizational studies (e.g., Wallis & Baran, 1990).
However, I find the matrix useful, because it provides a
framework for distinguishing between different
conceptualizations of the news process that predominantly
have been connected to specific kinds of research on
international news.
News flow analysis, including _TV_ news flow analysis,
has been conducted as a macro level analysis. The idea has
generally been that the more data you collect and summarize
(the more numbers of newspapers, TV channels, countries,
weeks that are taken into account), the more general
propositions you would be able to come up with about the
structure of international news. At best you would be able
to capture the structure of the world's news in a few key
propositions or data tables. There has been little interest
in looking for differences and specificities. More data
have been collected to produce more all-encompassing
statements; not to substantiate more detailed variations.
Generally the idea has been to locate and specify a few
general and pervasive characteristics of international news
at a global level, to map the global condition so to speak
(the flow is a one-way street, etc.). The recent Chapman
(1992) study carried this idea to an extreme; the study
rested on the expectation that the news content of all the
world's newscasts would display considerable uniformity even
at the individual story level.
News flow analysis has implicitly or explicitly
understood the news process to be a question about
selection, at least in a very general sense of the term; for
empirical analysis the point of departure has been a simple,
but important observation: international news and
television news pictures are transported around the globe
between countries and between social actors and the volume
and content of this flow is continuously subject to a kind
of selection process: something is added, removed or
changed from the flow depending on the countries and actors
involved.
The application of these metaphors of transportation
and selection to the understanding of news is not without
problems, but for now I will take a simple and positive
position: Yes, transportation and selection are useful
metaphors; TV news footage, for instance, is actually
transported around the globe every minute and during this
process the footage is constantly subject to selection.
TV news flow studies
In the following I will focus on the studies done on
the flow of international _television_ news. In particular
I will pay attention to the studies that have considered the
flow of pictorial material, i.e., video news footage in
either "raw", unedited form or finished form, i.e., edited
news items ready to be broadcast. If we use the
transportation/selection metaphor to inform our
understanding of the flow of international television news
we can distinguish between different steps or stages in the
flow of news. In the real world these steps are overlapping
and interdependent but for our analytical purpose we can
make a logical distinction between _four steps_:
1) The flow of news items between actors at the
whole-sale level, i.e., between news agencies
and other exchange mechanisms like Eurovision,
Asiavision and some similar organizations.
2) The flow of news items between actors at the
whole-sale level and actors at the
retail-level, i.e., the distribution of agency
material to the newsroom of national, regional
or international broadcasters and the
syndication by agencies of pictures that are
produced by broadcasters.
3) The flow of news items between actors at the
retail level, i.e., the exchange or sale of
news items between the broadcasters themselves.
4) The flow of news items from the broadcasters to
the audiences, i.e., the reception process of
international news.
The bulk of the research that is carried out within the
flow study tradition doesn't really examine any of these
four steps in any detail. The majority of studies consists
of comparative analyses of the output of broadcast news;
typically you find quantitative studies of content or
geographical origin that compare the foreign news of two or
more national broadcasters. These studies do of course
provide interesting and useful information about differences
between the output of national broadcasters. However, such
studies only _indirectly_ reveal information about the
actual volume and content of TV news flows between nations
and actors. They do not take into account the many
different steps in the process and the different actors and
factors involved that influence the final output. As a
consequence the process of news flow is left unexplained.
Without some elaborated theory or model of the news flow
process to inform the interpretation of data this kind of
data really doesn't say much about the flow of news pictures
between nations or actors. Such data may be interesting
from other perspectives but for the understanding of news
flow they are of limited value. It's really like trying to
understand the ecological system of the sea by counting the
number of fish you can catch from the shore.
A few studies have tried to analyze the content and
volume of the television news items that are actually
exchanged between actors at the wholesale level and between
wholesale level and retail level. In the case of Europe
there is a handful of studies, Ruby (1965), Varis & Jokelin
(1976), Golding & Elliot (1979), Melnik (1981), Gurevitch
(1992) and Hjarvard (1994a). In the case of so-called third
world continents you only find one or two studies per
continent: Arab world: Turkistani (1988), Asia: Lansipuro
(1987), Africa: None. These studies provide very useful
insights into the volume and content of the actual TV news
flow, especially when the analyses allow comparison between
flow to and from different kind of actors. Taken together
these few studies also reveal that few -- if any -- general
conclusions can be drawn about the character (volume,
direction, content, etc.) of TV news flow at the global
level. The studies seem to _indicate_ that stable or
uniform patterns of news flow are to be located at a lower
level, i.e. depending on the region, the historical period
and the specific actors (kind of whole-sale agencies, kind
of broadcasters, etc.) involved. For instance, the idea
that international TV news flow would be a "one-way
traffic", as suggested by Nordenstreng & Varis (1974) and
Unesco (1989:145) find only support in some of the studies
and are actually contradicted by some of the findings of the
newer studies.
The final step in the TV news flow, the consumption of
foreign TV news by audiences, has typically been completely
outside the scope of news flow analysis, theoretically as
well as empirically. The implicit assumption has been that
the structure of the broadcaster's supply of foreign news
somehow would be copied by the audience. Inequalities of
volume and content would be transferred directly to the
minds of audiences.[1] Developments in reception studies
have certainly challenged such assumptions but the tradition
of news flow studies has been rather slow to integrate such
knowledge. Some studies of foreign TV news reception are
now in the pipeline, for instance the "News of the
World"-project headed by Klaus Bruhn Jensen, University of
Copenhagen, and these will help to fill the gap concerning
the fourth step in the flow process.
Generally speaking there has been too little work done
on the news flow at the wholesale level. This is of course
not only a result of conceptual or methodological problems,
but also due to the practical and financial difficulties for
researchers to get access to the actors and feed-points at
the wholesale level. But whatever the reasons are, the
simple fact remains that our knowledge about the flow of
international television news at the whole-sale level is
very limited.
Correspondingly very little work has been done on the
organizational and editorial structure of commercial TV news
sellers. Some work has been done on the European public TV
news exchange system Eurovision (and Asiavision, Arabvision,
etc.; Hjarvard, 1994b), but knowledge about the activities
and structure of TV news agencies is very scarce. Some
books have been written about the agencies of printed news
but these studies hardly deal with the TV dimension.[2] The
television news agency dimension is a black box in the
understanding of international television news flow.
I have previously alluded to shortcomings in the
conceptual framework of news flow studies and I will specify
these a bit more. I see at least three major problems in
the ways earlier research has interpreted data.
_Firstly_, you often find a conceptual change when news
flow analyses move from the stage of empirical analysis to
the stage of interpretation and theoretical explanation. In
order to explain news flow patterns a shift often occurs
from selection to construction perspective. The news flow
patterns are often explained by concepts borrowed from
theories of media and cultural imperialism, political
economy or dependency theory. But little work has been done
to mediate between the selection-transportation perspective
of the empirical flow studies and the construction
perspective of the theoretical explanations. There are very
few attempts to explain how these macro social structures
actually determine or influence the shaping of news flow
patterns. How does media imperialism, for instance,
actually work at the level of social actors, for instance in
the newsroom of TV news agencies, whose actions at the micro
level together result in the observable news flow patterns?
Until now news flow analysis has either been rather
narrow empirical counting of news items or macro theoretical
explanation of these findings. What is missing is a
theoretical framework that can create a common ground
between general social structure and the social actors
actually involved in the micro social actions that together
create the discernable news flow patterns.
_Secondly_, I think it is fair to say -- and that it
must be said openly -- that often there have been drawn too
extensive conclusions on existing news flow data.
Especially moral and political interpretations and
conclusions have been drawn too early without a thorough
examination of evidence that could support other conclusions
or at least limit the reach of one's own propositions.
Take the case of international news agencies. During
the debate in the 1970s about the New World Information and
Communication Order much criticism was raised against the
activities of agencies -- and similarly many voices were
raised in defense of the agencies by western politicians,
the agencies themselves, etc. Both of these political
positions were supported by research findings. The
agencies, for instance, were criticized for providing news
of a very sensational nature and for providing a much too
biased coverage of events in third world countries. In the
case of television the agencies were criticized for
visualizing the third world countries on western terms and
not as the countries themselves would depict their internal
situation.
My own research on foreign TV news flow in Western
Europe _indicates_ that the agency material used by public
broadcasters in general is of a more narrow political -- and
serious -- nature than the material produced by the public
broadcasters themselves. The television agencies often rely
on material produced by other actors; actually, one of the
most frequent critiques raised by public broadcasters in
Western Europe against the agencies is that they produce too
little material themselves and rely too much on footage
produced by other broadcasters. So the footage depicting a
3rd world news event that is accused for giving a too
Eurocentric or American interpretation of the event may in
some cases have been shot by a local camera crew ('may',
because we don't really know about it in any detail).
Let me just add the following in order to prevent
misunderstandings. I am _not_ saying that all the
criticisms raised against the international news agencies or
others actors in the news business were or are altogether
wrong. Neither am I advocating a value-free, neutral and
naive social science on international news. Research
findings can -- and _must_ in some cases -- be used in the
political debate, and researchers should rather be conscious
and explicit about these political implications and use this
knowledge constructively in their work - than naively try to
avoid any normative 'infection'. However, what I am arguing
is that science should be very careful and explicit about
the kind of conclusions that can be drawn on its findings in
order to demarcate a clear line between what are
scientifically valid interpretations and what are
political/normative/moral beliefs.
_Thirdly_, and closely related to the second problem,
the interpretations of data have been guided by a
theoretical position that considered the international news
flow to be structured by a rather limited set of factors.
To put it more bluntly: both the realm of foreign news and
the outside social world have been considered to be much
more simple and homogeneous than is really the case. In
particular the connection between the operations of media
and external social forces has been considered to be a
rather simple one. Explanations of news flow patterns
seldom go into consideration of the more specific and to
some extent independent features of media institutions: the
editorial practices, journalistic education, the role of
technology, conventions of expression, etc. But an
understanding of news flow patterns needs -- ideally -- to
take all these different factors into account. In practice
you would of course have to limit the number of factors and
aspects that are dealt with in any one study, but what is
just as obvious is that a multi-disciplinary approach is
needed in order to explain news flow data. Especially it is
needed to bridge the gap between social science and human
science traditions: Foreign news is both a discursive-
symbolic and social practice and both dimensions must be
taken into account.
The study of international news flows will be even more
complicated in the future. Take the case of television news
flow. The volume of this flow expands rapidly almost all
over the world not least as a result of the proliferation of
satellite technology. At the same time the actors multiply
and change character. For instance the dividing line
between wholesale and retail level is getting blurred.
Agencies begin to deliver complete TV news programme
packages ready for broadcast and broadcasters set up
transnational services that both function as agencies and as
traditional broadcast services. The agencies also broaden
their activities and go, for instance, more directly into
public relation work, production of Video News Releases etc.
The genre of television news has ramified into several
sub-genres like business news, entertainment news, updates,
live-news, breakfast news, etc. This calls for more
sensitive analysis; collection of data, interpretations and
model building must have a more refined character in the
future.
An interaction perspective for middle range analysis
The following suggestions for a new approach to the
study of international news flow are not in any way meant to
be a prescription or handbook, a new theory or methodology
of news flow analysis. On the contrary what is needed is
not any (new) orthodoxy but a whole range of different kinds
of analyses of international news. What I want is rather to
plea for a general change in perspective and a shift in
analytical level in order to overcome some of the
shortcomings of earlier analyses, in particular the problems
related to the interpretation and explanation of news flow
patterns. The idea is to mediate between both axes in the
matrix presented in table 1. This is done by introducing a
new conceptualization of the news process called the
perspective of _interaction_ and insert the _middle range_
as the primary level of analysis. This new combination,
middle range and perspective of interaction, is presented in
Table 2.
By middle range I simply mean a level somewhere in
between micro and macro level. In view of the earlier
mentioned problems with all-encompassing interpretations of
news flow data, I consider the problem of finding the
appropriate level of generalization a very pertinent one.
The alternative to macro-level analysis and theory is
certainly not a postmodern celebration of differences,
endless variation or only local truths. The alternative is
rather a call for careful reflection about the level (in
relation to time/history, social space, type of actors
involved and other parameters) at which we can expect to
find systematic structures, i.e., stable patterns of
interaction. This cannot, of course, only be solved
theoretically but must also be examined through empirical
analysis. For instance, by examining existing studies of
television news flow it seems to me that at the _regional
level_, i.e. continent or sub-continent, you in some cases
find stable patterns of news flow, but such a specification
must of course be related to other factors.
==========================================================
Table 2
A new approach to the study of international news
| Perspective of interaction
----------------------------------------------------------
| Empirical studies:
| Time: Historical changes
| Space: Regional specificity
| Actor: News sources, journalists, agencies
| audiences etc.
Middle |
range | Theoretical studies:
| The development of more complex models that
| allow us to understand and explain news flow
| patterns as outcome of interaction between
| different factors: technical, aesthetic,
| journalistic institution, general societal
| development, etc.
|
----------------------------------------------------------
==========================================================
By perspective of interaction I mean an approach that
emphasizes the reciprocal, interdependent character of
social relations, i.e., the relation between different
social actors in the news business (e.g., agency editors vs.
subscribers, broadcasters vs. audiences etc.) or between
factors like journalistic beliefs, technological
possibilities and commercial pressures. The observable news
flow patterns are gross summaries of the outcome of
numerous (but not endless!) kinds of social interactions
that each have a different motivation and outcome. Actors
anticipate and monitor the action of others and
continuously adjust their own action according to that
knowledge. They do not only follow their own interests; but
in order to pursue these interests they accommodate to the
actual circumstances of the specific social interaction.
Thus the analysis cannot stop with an identification of the
different interests of involved actors but must go on and
consider the outcome as a result of an interaction, that
typically can be described as a negotiation or exchange
between the actors and their interests.
The perspective of selection took the news to be
initially given: news or news events are simply there and
the question is what happens to them afterwards. The
perspective of construction took the social institution to
be initially given: social structures are simply there and
the question is how these structures determine the volume
and content of news. According to the construction
perspective news is like a tabula rasa; it is solely a
product of the journalistic institution.
The selection and construction perspectives are rather
deterministic -- they cannot explain how news is both
institutionally organized and continuously open for change
and variation. The perspective of interaction, that is very
much inspired by the _structuration theory_ of Anthony
Giddens (e.g., Giddens, 1984), can overcome some of this
determinism, because it allows us to examine how the social
actors both are informed by general social structures and
accommodate/interpret these structures according to the
specific kind of social interaction they are engaged in and
this process of interpretation or accommodation is exactly
what allows for social change.
The proposed framework is very general and of course
applicable to other kinds of news and media studies.
However, I find it particularly useful for news flow studies
because it solves some of pertinent problems that have
caused the field to stagnate. The mid-life crisis of news
flow studies will hopefully not end in resignation or
despair; there is still an urgent need to document, analyze
and explain the patterns of international news flow. If
news flow analysis downgrades some of its more youthful
global pretensions and upgrades the theoretical work, the
mid-life crisis could be succeeded by an invigoration of the
field.
Endnotes
[1] Sepstrup (1990) has a similar critique of the
missing reception dimension in TV _programme_ flow studies.
[2] To illustrate the argument: Fenby's (1986) study
of international news agencies only spends 2 1/2 page on the
television dimension out of 248 pages. Hohne (1984) uses 5
1/2 page out of 425 pages, and Boyd-Barrett(1980) spends 4
of 252 pages on the agencies's television operations.
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-----------------------------------------------------------
Author Information: Stig Hjarvard
Department of Film & Media Studies
University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 80
2300 Copenhagen S
Denmark
stig@coco.ihi.ku.dk
-----------------------------------------------------------
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