ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces three separate kinds of news events: Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals. These differ in the ways in which the purposes of some people function to get them across on the printed page and in the news-broadcast. The chapter provides some alternative imagery which insurgent scholars and citizens can use to see the social system in the news. News is the information which people receive secondhand about worlds which are not available to their own experience. The power of the media to create experience rests on 'objectivity assumption', to which almost everyone pledges allegiance. Sociologists in their work on power, on the media and in their methods of content analysis, usually do much the same thing. The chapter suggests the possibility of the sociologist as methodological promoter of accidents and scandals someone who does what can be done to upset routine news making, simultaneously contributing to social reconstruction and gathering data on the impediments to such reconstruction.
