ABSTRACT
For at least the last half-century, scholars have understood that news in its modern forms, cloaked in authority and claims to privileged status, is a construction – can interpretive representation be produced in each instance, within a particular matrix of historical circumstances, cultural traditions, institutional imperatives and relationships, and professional practices? This fundamental quality of news has been described in various ways by writers from Schramm (1949) to Schudson (1995). The processes by which news is constructed were revealed in the 1970s in a series of famous studies (e.g. Altheide, 1976; Epstein, 1973; Fishman, 1980; Gans, 1979; Roscho, 1975; Tuchman, 1978), and they continue to be explored in more recent work (e.g. Hachten, 1998; Kaniss, 1991; Manoff & Schudson, 1986; Schudson, 1995).
