ABSTRACT
Because Mr. Gates was the focus of the fi rst communication gatekeeping study (White, 1950), it is natural for people to think of gatekeeping as a process heavily infl uenced by individuals. Although Mr. Gates followed professional news values and his employer’s likes and dislikes, he also made decisions based on his own preferences. For example, he didn’t like the Catholic Pope and he didn’t like stories with too many fi gures and statistics. That individuals infl uence gatekeeping decisions is obvious. We pass along some information to those around us and change it in both unconscious and deliberate ways. When we write for scholarly journals, we make hundreds of decisions about which references to include, how much space to give them, and how to integrate them into our own ideas. Bloggers decide what they write about and in what way. We are all gatekeepers.
