Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (Visions of the American Press) - Softcover

Gans, Herbert J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810122375 ISBN 13: 9780810122376

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2005

Synopsis

For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism. Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments. Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's ""Visions of the American Press"" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.

About this title

Review

"Neither burdened by jargon nor boosted by flashy style, the book renders the biases of the media with unusual authority." -Michael Schudson, Chicago Tribune
"Gans does a hell of a job in demolishing the myths of an anti-establishment press."
-Richard Reeves, The Washington Monthly
"Deciding What's News is a good study. It tells us that our colleagues who set much of the nation's agenda have solid, bourgeois, mildly reformist views, respect authority, want to be liked and probably see the unfamiliar as vaguely threatening. The result is that tomorrow's news is going to look very much like today's, even if the world does not."
-Frank Mankiewicz, New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Herbert J. Gans is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books including The Urban Villagers (Free Press, 1962), Popular Culture and High Culture (Basic Books, 1999), The Levittowners (Columbia University Press, 1982), and Democracy and the News (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0810122375
• ISBN 13: 9780810122376
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416