Although newsworthiness criteria are a useful way to define news, they do not reveal much about the cultural aspects of news. News is both a product and a process. It is both the morning paper or evening newscast and a set of subtle values and shifting rituals that have been adapted to historical and social circumstances, such as the partisan press values of the 1700s or the informational standards of the twentieth century.

For example, in 1841, Horace Greeley described the newly founded New York Tribune as “a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other.”⁹ Greeley feared that too much neutrality would make reporters into wimps who stood for nothing. Yet the neutrality Greeley warned against is today a major value of conventional journalism, with mainstream reporters assuming they are acting as detached and all-seeing observers of social experience.

Neutrality Boosts Credibility … and Sales

As former journalism professor and reporter David Eason notes: “Reporters … have no special method for determining the truth of a situation nor a special language for reporting their findings. They make sense of events by telling stories about them.”¹⁰

Even though journalists transform events into stories, they generally believe that they are—or should be—neutral observers who present facts without passing judgment on them. Conventions such as the inverted-pyramid news lead, the careful attribution of sources, the minimal use of adverbs and adjectives, and a detached third-person point of view all help reporters perform their work in an apparently neutral way.

Like lawyers, therapists, and other professionals, many modern journalists believe that their credibility derives from personal detachment. Yet the roots of this view reside in less noble territory. Jon Katz, media critic and former CBS News producer, discusses the history of the neutral pose:

The idea of respectable detachment wasn’t conceived as a moral principle so much as a marketing device. Once newspapers began to mass market themselves in the mid-1880s, … publishers ceased being working, opinionated journalists. They mutated instead into businessmen eager to reach the broadest number of readers and antagonize the fewest. … Objectivity works well for publishers, protecting the status quo and keeping journalism’s voice militantly moderate.¹¹

To reach as many people as possible across a wide spectrum, publishers and editors realized as early as the 1840s that softening their partisanship might boost sales.

Partisanship Trumps Neutrality … Especially Online and on Cable

Since the rise of cable and the Internet, today’s media marketplace offers a fragmented world where appealing to the widest audience no longer makes the best economic sense. More options than ever exist, with newspaper readers and TV viewers embracing cable news, social networks, blogs, and Twitter. The old “mass” audience has morphed into smaller niche audiences who embrace particular hobbies, storytelling, politics, and social networks. News media outlets that hope to survive no longer appeal to mass audiences but to interest groups—from sports fans and history buffs to conservatives or liberals. So, mimicking the news business of the eighteenth century, partisanship has become good business. For the news media today, muting political leanings to reach a mass audience makes no sense when such an audience no longer exists in the way it once did, especially as in the days when only three major TV networks offered evening news for one-half hour, once a day. Instead, news media now make money by targeting and catering to niche groups on a 24/7 news cycle.

In such a marketplace, we see the decline of a more neutral journalistic model that promoted fact-gathering, documents, and expertise, and that held up “objectivity” as the ideal for news practice. Rising in its place is a new era of partisan news—what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel call a “journalism of assertion”—marked partly by a return to journalism’s colonial roots and partly by the downsizing of the “journalism of verification” that kept watch over our central institutions.¹² This transition is symbolized by the rise of the cable news pundit on Fox News or MSNBC as a kind of “expert” with more standing than verified facts, authentic documents, and actual experts. Today, the new partisan fervor found in news, both online and on cable, has been a major catalyst for the nation’s intense political and ideological divide.

Other Cultural Values in Journalism

Even the neutral journalism model, which most reporters and editors still aspire to, remains a selective and uneven process. Reporters and editors turn some events into reports and discard many others. This process is governed by a deeper set of subjective beliefs that are not neutral. Sociologist Herbert Gans, who studied the newsroom cultures of CBS, NBC, Newsweek, and Time in the 1970s, generalized that several basic “enduring values” have been shared by most American reporters and editors. The most prominent of these values, which persist to this day, are ethnocentrism, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, and individualism.¹³

By ethnocentrism Gans means that, in most news reporting, especially foreign coverage, reporters judge other countries and cultures on the basis of how “they live up to or imitate American practices and values.” Critics outside the United States, for instance, point out that CNN’s international news channels portray world events and cultures primarily from an American point of view rather than through some neutral, global lens.

Gans also identified responsible capitalism as an underlying value, contending that journalists sometimes naïvely assume that businesspeople compete with one another not primarily to maximize profits but “to create increased prosperity for all.” Gans points out that although most reporters and editors condemn monopolies, “there is little implicit or explicit criticism of the oligopolistic nature of much of today’s economy.”¹⁴ In fact, during the major economic recession of 2008–09, many journalists did not fully understand the debt incurred by media oligopolies and other financial conditions that led to the bankruptcies and shutdowns of numerous newspapers during this difficult time.

Another value that Gans found was the romanticization of small-town pastoralism: favoring the small over the large and the rural over the urban. Many journalists equate small-town life with innocence and harbor suspicions of cities, their governments, and urban experiences. Consequently, stories about rustic communities with crime or drug problems have often been framed as if the purity of country life had been contaminated by “mean” big-city values.

Finally, individualism, according to Gans, remains the most prominent value underpinning daily journalism. Many idealistic reporters are attracted to this profession because it rewards the rugged tenacity needed to confront and expose corruption. Beyond this, individuals who overcome personal adversity are the subjects of many enterprising news stories.

Often, however, journalism that focuses on personal triumphs neglects to explain how large organizations and institutions work or fail. Many conventional reporters and editors are unwilling or unsure of how to tackle the problems raised by institutional decay. In addition, because they value their own individualism and are accustomed to working alone, many journalists dislike cooperating on team projects or participating in forums in which community members discuss their own interests and alternative definitions of news.¹⁵

Facts, Values, and Bias

Traditionally, reporters have aligned facts with an objective position and values with subjective feelings.¹⁶ Within this context, news reports offer readers and viewers details, data, and description. It then becomes the citizen’s responsibility to judge and take a stand about the social problems represented by the news. Given these assumptions, reporters are responsible only for adhering to the tradition of the trade—”getting the facts.” As a result, many reporters view themselves as neutral “channels” of information rather than selective storytellers or citizens actively involved in public life.

Still, most public surveys have shown that while journalists may work hard to stay neutral, the addition of partisan cable channels such as Fox News and MSNBC has undermined reporters who try to report fairly. So while conservatives tend to see the media as liberally biased, liberals tend to see the media as favoring conservative positions. (See “Case Study: Bias in the News”.) But political bias is complicated. During the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, many pundits on the political Right argued that Obama got much more favorable media coverage than did former president George W. Bush. But left-wing politicians and critics maintained that the right-wing media—especially news analysts associated with conservative talk radio and Fox’s cable channel—rarely reported evenhandedly on Obama, painting him as a “socialist” or as “anti-American.”

According to Evan Thomas of Newsweek magazine, “the suspicion of press bias” comes from two assumptions or beliefs that the public holds about news media: “The first is that reporters are out to get their subjects. The second is that the press is too close to its subjects.”¹⁷ Thomas argues that the “press’s real bias is for conflict.” He says that mainstream editors and reporters traditionally value scandals, “preferably sexual,” and “have a weakness for war, the ultimate conflict.” Thomas claims that in the end journalists “are looking for narratives that reveal something of character. It is the human drama that most compels our attention.”¹⁸