Gatekeeping is the process through which information is filtered for
dissemination, whether for publication, broadcasting, the Internet, or some
other mode of communication. The academic theory of gatekeeping is found
in multiple fields of study, including communication studies, journalism,
political science, and sociology. It was originally focused on the mass media
with its few-to-many dynamic but now gatekeeping theory also addresses
face-to-face communication and the many-to-many dynamic inherent in the
Internet. The theory was first instituted by social psychologist Kurt
Lewin in 1943. Gatekeeping occurs at all levels of the media structure — from a
reporter deciding which sources are chosen to include in a story to editors
deciding which stories are printed or covered, and includes media outlet
owners and even advertisers. Individuals can also act as gatekeepers, deciding
what information to include in an email or in a blog, for example.
Definition Gatekeeping is a process by which
information is filtered to the public by the media. According to Pamela Shoemaker
and Tim Vos, gatekeeping is the "process of culling and crafting countless bits
of information into the limited number of messages that reach people every day,
and it is the center of the media's role in modern public life. […] This process
determines not only which information is selected, but also what the content and
nature of the messages, such as news, will be."
In exercising its "surveillance" function, every news medium has a very
large number of stories brought to its attention daily by reporters, wire
services, and a variety of other sources.
Due to a number of practical considerations, only a limited amount of
time or space is available in any medium for its daily presentations of the news
to its audience. The remaining space must be devoted to advertising and other
content. Within any news organization there
exists a news perspective, a subculture that includes a complex set of criteria
for judging a particular news story - criteria based on economic needs of the
medium, organizational policy, definitions of newsworthiness,
conceptions of the nature of relevant audience, and beliefs about fourth
estate obligations of journalists. This news perspective and its complex
criteria are used by editors, news directors, and other personnel who
select a limited number of news stories for presentation to the public. They
then encode them in ways such that the requirements of the medium and the
tastes of the audience are met. Therefore, personnel in the news
organization become gatekeepers, letting some stories pass through the system but
keeping others out.This then limits, controls, and shapes the public's
knowledge of the totality of actual event occurring in reality."
History Gatekeeping as a news process was
identified in the literature as early as 1922, though not yet given a formal
theoretical name. In his book, The Immigrant Press, Park explains the
process, “out of all of the events that happen and are recorded every day by
correspondents, reporters, and the news agencies, the editor chooses certain
items for publication which he regards as more important or more interesting
than others. The remainder he condemns to oblivion and the wastebasket. There
is an enormous amount of news ‘killed’ every day”.
Formally, gatekeeping was identified in Lewin’s publication Forces Behind Food
Habits and Methods of Change. Working during World War II, Kurt Lewin
conducted field research initially among Midwestern housewives to determine how
to effectively change their families’ food consumption during this time of
war. Lewin recognized that for food to go from a store or a garden to the
dining table, there were various decision-making processes it had to pass
on the way there. At a time when men were thought to control all household
decisions, Lewin found that “food does not move by its own impetus. Entering or
not entering a channel and moving from one section of a channel to another is
affected by a ‘gatekeeper’”. The gatekeeper,in this case, was typically
the housewife, or sometimes a maid in more affluent households. Lewin’s
research demonstrated that not all members of a family have equal weight in
making household food decisions and that the wife, who typically shops for and
prepares the food controls the gates, based on a variety of considerations.
Lewin’s study published in 1943 became the impetus for another article in 1947
in which he introduces the idea of feedback in group decision making, which
complicates the role of the gatekeeper. Feedback acknowledges that the set of
considerations a gatekeeper uses in making decisions may vary depending on
considerations of the group. In 1950, Dr. David Manning White, a
journalism professor at Boston University, looked at the factors an
editor takes into consideration when deciding which news will make the paper
and which news will not; intending to examine how a "gate keeper" examines his
"gate" within a channel of mass communication. White contacted an
editor, a man in his mid-40s with 25 years of experience, whom he calls "Mr.
Gates." Mr. Gates was the wire editor of a morning newspaper in a mid-west city
of 100,000 that had a circulation of 30,000. During the case study, Mr. Gates
retained all copy that he rejected from the paper for a week. At the end of his
shift, he made notes on why that story was rejected, assuming he could still
remember the reason. At the end of the week that the study took place, White
found that nine-tenths of the wire copy got rejected and the process is made by
highly subjective decisions based on the editor’s own set of experiences,
attitudes and expectations. White found that in this particular study, the
majority of the rejections could be classified in two ways: 1) not worthy of
being reported or 2) there was another story on the same event. Pertaining to
the first reason, many of the explanations Mr. Gates gives are for
rejection are “highly-subjective value judgments." Examples of this are seen
when Mr. Gates writes "too Red" or "don't care for suicides". Pertaining to
the second reason of rejection, given for the majority of the rejections, Mr.
Gates made no “personal” rejections to the copy, but there was simply no space
available for it in the paper. The later the story came to Mr. Gates, the less of
a chance it had to take up any valuable space remaining. White examined Mr.
Gates’ performance for a specific day and put the data in tables which show
the amount and type of news which appeared on the front pages and the
total number of dispatches used. Mr. Gates admitted to preferring political
news to other types of news and explained that he tries to avoid
sensationalism and consistently leans more towards being “conservative” both
in political views and in writing style. Observed patterns throughout the week
also show that Mr. Gates leans away from stories filled with figures and
statistics and prefers stories that contain more of a narrative. His notes
and reasons for rejection can also show Mr. Gates’ writing standard, using “too
vague,” “not interesting," and “dull writing” on a number of occasions. A
question that White poses and says should be considered in this case study
is, “Does the category really enter into the choice?” He concludes that as Mr.
Gates is representing “gate keepers” and wire editors as a whole, there doesn't
seem to be a particular choice of news by categories. During the week the case
study took place, however, there was a strong emphasis on Human Interest
stories because there was a large appeal to a story regarding a Cardinal of the
Catholic Church. Mr. Gates also concludes that the gate keeper’s
standards and taste should refer back to the audience and that they are the ones
being served and pleased. His concluding remarks provide a great summary of the
purpose and findings of the study. “Through studying his overt reasons for
rejecting news stories from the press associations we see how highly
subjective, how based on the “gate keeper’s” own set of experiences,
attitudes and expectations the communication of “news” really is”.
The Gatekeeping Model Lewin identified several parts of the
gatekeeping process in his 1943 article: 1) Information moves step by step
through channels. The number of channels varies and the amount of time in each
channel can vary. 2) Information must pass a “gate” to
move from one channel to the next, such that...
3) Forces govern channels. There may be opposing psychological forces causing
conflict which creates resistance to movement through the channel. Further...
4) There may be several channels that lead to the same end result. And...
5) Different actors may control the channels and act as gatekeepers at
different times. Gatekeeping in the 21st century
More than fifty years after White’s Mr. Gates study, in 2001, Pamela Shoemaker,
Martin Eichholz, Eunyi Kim, and Brenda Wrigley studied the forces in news
gatekeeping in relation to coverage of Congressional bills. More specifically,
they were interested in two hypotheses: 1) the routine gatekeeping force of
assessing a bill’s newsworthiness will be related to how prominently a bill is
covered. And 2) the individual journalist forces will be related to how
prominently a bill is covered. They also predicted that the newsworthiness of a
bill would be more important than journalists’ personal characteristics.
Surveying both journalists and editors (for evaluating newsworthiness,
Shoemaker and her colleagues found that only newsworthiness had a significant
effect on the amount of coverage given to a bill, thus their first hypothesis
was supported as well as the idea that newsworthiness would be more important
than personal characteristics. While Shoemaker et al.’s study focused
on traditional news rooms, Singer has been interested in how gatekeeping
translates to how traditional newspapers use online tools. In both the 2000 and
2004 Presidential elections, she studied how the Internet was changing the
process for newspapers, contending that, “the power of gatekeepers seems to
diminish in a modern information society. The Internet defies the whole
notion of a ‘gate’ and challenges the idea that journalists can or should
limit what passes through it”. In the study of the 2004 coverage, Singer posed
the following research questions: 1) What did editors of Web sites affiliated
with major newspapers see as their goals and their most noteworthy achievements
in covering the 2004 political campaign and election? 2) To what extent did
these editors relinquish their gatekeeping role by providing
opportunities for users to provide or personalize content? And more broadly,
3) In what ways have the views of editors of Web sites affiliated with
major newspapers changed since 2000? Singer found that the content which
appears in online editions of newspapers mostly comes from content that appears
in the print versions. However, editors were also very proud of the interactive
tools on their websites that could not be in the paper. The goal of most
editors was after all to inform the public. Further, journalists were
beginning to take a step back from their traditional gatekeeping role such that
many websites had sections in which journalists provided baseline
information and users could manipulate according to their needs and interests
like interactive maps, Electoral College scenarios, and ballot building tools
based on zip codes. In 2000, editors were likely to boast about how quickly
they could publish returns on election night. In 2004, this was no longer the
case, as it was standard practice by then. Further, their stated goal for the
2008 election cycle was to let the audience guide the coverage.
Audience gatekeeping Along with Web 2.0 environment, users
have begun playing a greater role in producing anddistributing online news
items via online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Shoemaker and Vos
theorized such practice as "audience gatekeeping". According to them,
audience gatekeeping is the process in which users “pass along already
available news items and comment on them” based on the user’s own set of
criteria about the newsworthiness". Kwon et al. adapted the theory of audience
gatekeeping to explore what channels are mainly adopted for Twitter audiences to
filter and share news contents. The notion of audience gatekeeping consists
with Goode's discussion on metajournalism, whereby users' role in
reprocessing and rebroadcasting the existing online contents are as equally
emphasized as users' original creation in nurturing citizen journalism as
reshaping the existing hierarchy of journalism system. Kwon et al. also
found that re-processed news items by user-generated content websites, or
social media, are more frequently adopted by Twitter users than the direct
news times from traditional mass media organizations, confirming the empowering
role of ordinary online users in retelling and redistributing news
agendas to networked publics. Toward a theory of network gatekeeping
Karine Barzilai-Nahon has written a number of contemporary pieces on
gatekeeping theories between disciplines. In 2008, she proposed a new
way of looking at gatekeeping, merging the disciplines’ of communication,
information science, and management perspectives into a refined theory of
gatekeeping. Traditional mass communication gatekeeping theory has
focused on how we get news, however Barzilai-Nahon’s approach applies to all
information. Barzilai-Nahon also adds new terms and
redefines old terms in the framework Gate – “entrance to or exit from a
network or its sections.” Gatekeeping – “the process of
controlling information as it moves through a gate. Activities include among
others, selection, addition, withholding, display, channeling,
shaping, manipulation, repetition, timing, localization, integration,
disregard, and delection of information.”
Gated – “the entity subjected to gatekeeping”
Gatekeeping mechanism - “a tool, technology, or methodology used to carry
out the process of gatekeeping” Network gatekeeper – “an entity that has
the discretion to exercise gatekeeping through a gatekeeping mechanism in
networks and can choose the extent to which to exercise it contingent upon the
gated standing.” This updated look at gatekeeping also
poses a number of classifications including the bases for gatekeeping,
mechanisms used in network gatekeeping, and types of authority of network
gatekeepers. Additionally, Barzilai-Nahon introduces
a typology for the gated. According to her approach, the gated can have four
key attributes at different levels that determine how they can interact with the
gate. These are: Political power in relation to the
gatekeeper, Information production ability,
Relationship with the gatekeeper, And alternatives in the context of
gatekeeping. A typology of combinations of these
characteristics then allows for evaluation of potential interactions
between the gatekeeper and the gated based on the number and type of
attributes an individual has. Her discussion about "the gated" resonates
with audience gatekeeping in that both empowers the message recipients in the
process of gatekeeping. See also
Censorship Gatekeeper
Institutional memory Media bias
References External links
Gatekeeping: regulate the flow of information, University of Twente, the
Netherlands