A Linguistic Study of News Values in the Press of Iran

Introduction:

Every event which is reported in the news, has gone through some kind of “gatekeeping” process. How does a journalist or an editor decide what is newsworthy and what is not?

According to some media researchers, they refer to a set of so-called “News Values”. These are the criteria which enable them to determine whether a “News Story” is followed up in the first place and then whether it makes it in to the news, competing against all the other possible items.

News values are those professional codes used in the selection, construction and presentation of news stories in corporately produced mainstream press and broadcasting.

News values are a result of the productive needs of industrialized news corporations. It is clear that people who work for such corporations will display mixed ambitions, allegiances, politics and abilities as individuals. Within the corporation they are subjected to an extensive division of labor. Beyond the corporation there are its competitors, and the occupational ideology of the journalist and the broadcasting profession.

Within these contexts, news values operate to produce a standard product out of the contributions of all such people, practices and beliefs.

Language, as the main material of news, is the main subject of linguistics so it is obvious that linguists are eager to work on the process of broadcasting. Recentely many of the well-known linguists such as Noam Chomsky (1988), Roger Fowler (1991), Van Dijke (1998), Allan, Bell (1991), Norman Fairclough (1992, 1995, 2003), Guy Cook (1992), Michael Hoey (2001), Paul Chilton (2004) and Marina Sbisa (2005) … have been working on a so-called subject of “language of the News” and the term “News Values” is of great importance.

Edward S.Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) in their pioneer book of “Manufacturing Consent” have mentioned five news filters and they believe that these filters are now controlling all broadcasting process in the west. This research is going to introduce news values and especially twelve news factors, mentioned by Johan Galtung and Mary Ruge, which are the most famous list of news values around the world and to see if these factors are working in Iranian press.

Theoretical Discussion:

there is no suggestion, of course, that journalists and editors refer to a list pinned on the wall of the office, but, rather, that they unconsciously measure a potential news item against these criteria. Numerous attempts have been made over the years to pin down news values more specifically. But it is hard to collate these into a hard and fast list of values, because different studies have approached the whole idea from different standpoints, using different assumptions and terminology. One of the best known lists of news values is supplied by Johan Galtung and Marie Ruge. Any media analyst’s discussion of news values will always refer to their list, which was initially intended for the coverage of international events.

Johan Galtung is a Norwegian professor who is seen as the pioneer of ” peace and conflict research” and founded the PRIO-International Peace Research Institue in Oslo, Norway. He is also one of the authors of the influential article named “the structure of foreign news” Published in Journal of Peace Research in 1965. Roger Fowler (1991) believes that: “a widely accepted analysis of news values in the following list of criterial factors formulated by Galtung and Ruge; they are worth studying in detail and in particular. It is worth reflecting on the great extent to which the factors are “cultural” rather than “natural”. The values they identified are:

(F1) frequency

(F2) threshold

(F3) unambiguity

(F4) Meaningfulness

(F5) Consonance

(F6) unexpectedness

(F7) continuity

(F8) composition

(F9) reference to elite nations

(F10) reference to elite people

(F11) reference to persons

(F12) reference to something negative))

[Fowler, Language in the news, P:13]

Now, Let’s have a more detailed look to each of these factors:

(F1): Fowler writes: “F1 says that an event is more likely to be reported if its duration is close to the publication frequency of the news medium. Because newspapaers are generally published once a day, a single event is more like to be reported than a long process”, (Ibid).

In other words, frequency is the time-span of an event and the extent to which it fits the frequency of the newspaper’s or news broadcast’s schedule.

(F2) Threshold means how big an event should be to be reported. Is an event big enough to make it in to the news? That depends of course on news organ.

(F3) How clear is the meaning of an event? The mass media generally tend to go for closure, unlik literature, where the polysemy of events is exploited and explored. As Fowller says: “unambiguity is self-explanatory though it must be added that mysterious events, as well as clear ones, are newsworthy if they can be related to cultural stereotypes.”

(F4) By meaningfullness we mean how meaningful the event will appear to the receivers of the news.

(F5) consonance means if the event match the media’s expectations or not. Journalists have a pretty good idea of the “angle” they want to report an event from, even before they get there. It is said that if the media expect something to happen, then it will.

(F6) if an event is highly unpredictable, then it is likely to make it into the news. The unpredictability does, however, need to be within the confines of meaningfulness and unambiguity. Journalists say that “A man bites dog is news but a dog bites man is not”.

(F7) once an event has been covered, it is convenient to cover it some more-the running story. Apart from anything else, it allows media organizations they already put in place to cover the original event. This will depend very much on the nature of event.

(F8) composition is a matter of the balance of the news. It’s a matter of the editor’s judgement, more than anything else. If there’s a lot of foreign news around, some of it will be dropped in favour of more domestic news.

(F9) Reference to elite nations relates again to a cultural factor which is called “cultural proximity”. Those nations which are culturally closest to our own, will receive most attention and coverage. Some nations, formerly called super powers, are more important in terms of news coverage. In part, of course, this is conditioned by the fact that news organizations will have reporters already stationed in European countries and in the USA so that when a story arises, there’s someone there to cover it.

(F10) It is a rule that the media pay attention to important people. Anyone the media pay attention to, must be important.

(F11) personalization connects with unambiguity and meaningfulness. Events are seen as the actions of individuals.

(F12) Bad news is good news. Bad news has many of the other characteristics as well-it may be unexpected, unambiguous, … .