ABSTRACT
One of the most enduring areas of research in media sociology is media gatekeeping-the process by which countless occurrences and ideas are reduced to the few messages we are offered in our news media. News work-the process of newsgathering, news writing, and disseminationhas come under scrutiny in no small part because people’s sense of reality is infl uenced by what gets into the news and what gets left out. Virtually all of news work involves gatekeeping. What will we write about? What will we include or leave out? How will the topic be shaped? But gatekeeping involves more than decisions about what to write or which images to capture. It begins when events, ideas, or people1 fi rst come to the attention of a news worker. From the news organization’s standpoint, gatekeeping ends with selecting events, shaping news items, and disseminating them. An entirely new gatekeeping process begins when audience members make their own decisions about which news items, if any, to view, listen to, or read. This chapter, however, confi nes itself to the gatekeeping process that ends with the transmission of the news items. Yet this is no small task. For one event to become a news item requires a series of activities-observations, decisions, serendipity, creativity, constraints and facilitators, and a good share of luck. This might seem to result in a diverse set of events covered by the news media. Yet, we know that the news from one day is similar to that of another (Shoemaker & Cohen, 2006), and so we assume that gatekeeping is not a random process. Rather, it involves a complex series of operations that extend throughout the news production and dissemination process. Gatekeeeping can be studied on many levels of analysis, with many different research methods.
