ABSTRACT
Contemporary approaches to research on the production of news can be read as a reaction to those functionalist models of the mass media which were dominant in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in the U.S.A., but also in other societies that were then embracing aspects of a dominant American culture (Lemert 1993). Some current research has drawn its theories from political economy, others from symbolic interactionism – two traditions focusing respectively on the entire social system and on the interactions among and between individuals and institutions, what sociologists refer to as macro-and micro-theories. Still others have examined news as a cultural form with particular ideological implications. Despite their common rejection of structural functionalism, however, these traditions have yet to be integrated in a satisfactory fashion. There is some irony in this, because the functional models at least claimed to have integrated micro-and macro-analysis. This chapter takes stock of news production studies with reference
